When was spain a dictatorship

Emilio Silva, the president of the Association for the Recuperation of the Historical Memory, which campaigns for justice for the victims of repression during the Franco years, was a teenager at the time of the coup. Pazo de Meiras, a mansion in Galicia northwestern Spain, was the summer palace for Franco but after a long legal battle, the state clawed back ownership of the property from his descendants last year.

Javier Cercas, a Spanish author whose best selling non-fiction work "Anatomy of a Moment" dealt with the failed coup, said it was a defining moment for Spanish democracy. Search Search. Home United States U.

Africa 54 - November 11, VOA Africa Listen live. VOA Newscasts Latest program. VOA Newscasts. Previous Next. February 22, AM. Subsequent attempts to liberalise the Franco government founder on internal divisions. Spain makes transition from dictatorship to democracy, and withdraws from the Spanish Sahara, ending its colonial empire. Free education, an expanded welfare state and liberalisation of abortion laws are key policies. Spain joins Nato. Waterways feeding Europe's largest wildlife reserve, the Donana national park, are severely contaminated.

Announces new round of austerity measures to slash public spending by Vox becomes first far-right party to win seats since the death of Francisco Franco in Image source, Getty Images. Replicas of the ships of Christopher Columbus arrive in New York in to celebrate the th anniversary of his landing in the Americas.

Spanish Empire. Image source, Hulton Archive. In this view, Spain is cast as a victim of outside forces. This outrageously cynical reading of history ignores both the chaos and violence that Franco inflicted on Spain, and that whatever degree of peace Franco was able to bring to the country was purchased with the lives of close to 1 million people. Paradoxically, this very success undermined the salvation theory by blurring the memory of the Civil War and the misery of the postwar years.

The law declared the Franco government illegitimate; called for the removal from public view of public monuments honoring the Franco regime, save for those with historical significance; provided financial compensation to those victimized by the Franco regime; restored Spanish citizenship to the Republican exile community; and created a center for the study of the Civil War in the city of Salamanca. Propelling the law was a new generation of Spaniards curious about the Civil War and no longer traumatized by the memories of the past, including Zapatero, the grandson of a military captain executed by a Francoist brigade for refusing to join the rebellion against the Republican government.

The conservative opposition Popular Party, which fiercely opposed the Historical Memory Law, is in disarray, having been unceremoniously ousted from power in June after a no-confidence vote and fighting a challenge from the right by the Ciudadanos party. Their only disagreement is what to do with the remains. Most important, 56 percent of the public is in favor of the exhumation.

This signals how much further along the public is on the issue of the past than when the Historical Memory Law was enacted. This shift in public opinion reflects, in no small measure, the success of the memory law in breaking the taboo of legislating the memory of the Civil War and in making the public more aware about the human rights abuses of the old regime.

Omar G. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. Argument An expert's point of view on a current event. By Omar G.