Just two years after the Second World War, in June 1947, Evita Perón, first lady of the then-opulent Argentine Republic, visited one of the most internationally isolated countries: Franco's Spain. Peronism was perhaps the most perfect form of populism; the magnetic personality of General Perón's wife took care of the rest. Upon landing in Madrid, she declared her intention to have direct contact with the local descamisados (the Argentine middle class, on the other hand, often used the racist term cabecitas negras). She was able to witness the misery of the enormous shantytowns, but she also praised the housing policy that the dictatorship was implementing.

"Suspense can be synonymous with hope," reflects Basque writer Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981). The reader who delves into the pages of her new novel, Internal Service (La Segona Perifèria/Tusquets), translated from Basque to Catalan by Pau Joan Hernández, knows perfectly well that the story does not end well, but the four protagonists trust until the very last moment in a good ending. They are Bittori Etxeberria, Delia Lauroba, Itziar Mujika, and Tere Verdes, who risked everything to help imprisoned comrades, support the Basque Government in exile, and stand up to Francoism. Together with other agents, they wove one of the most effective espionage and evasion structures in the north of the Iberian Peninsula: the Álaba network. They did so in a context of terror, because by mid-1937, the Basque Country had been massacred from the air, the coup plotters had occupied it, and the government of Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre had gone into exile.

The Barcelona City Council demanded this Friday that the manager of the Horta Velodrome prevent the participation in one of the 7-a-side football leagues held there of a team that promotes Francoism. The city's Sports Councilor, David Escudé, has sent a letter requesting the expulsion of the team Mingorrubio Balompié —alluding to the cemetery where the dictator is buried—, which, as reported by SER, has among its members two Vox officials in Barcelona and displayed Francoist symbology on its crest.

In 1945, Franco traveled to the future. It was the most decisive journey of the dictatorship. The master of it all landed in Extremadura. There was a promise: to redeem the poorest land in Spain. Franco changed the future, but also the past.

“We want our first words to be a remembrance-homage to the workers murdered, imprisoned, and repressed by fascism, for their struggle for union freedom, democratic and national freedoms, for our rights and class interests”. On July 11, 1976, one week after the fall of Carlos Arias Navarro's government, more than 600 workers from all over Spain gathered at the Sant Medir church in Barcelona to celebrate what was the last clandestine national assembly of the Workers' Commissions (CCOO). A church was chosen as the meeting point because it was the only place where the right to assemble was permitted.

After fifty years of state, autonomous, and municipal governments of all political stripes, there are still educational centers with names of Francoist leaders and from the dictatorship (1923-1930) of Miguel Primo de Rivera. It is not just a matter of slowness, but also controversy. This Monday, the newspaper El País reported that in Alcántara (Cáceres) controversy has erupted because the educational community has been fighting for a year to remove the name of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera from the facade of the public school. The school has encountered threats from the far-right, insults to teachers, and obstruction from the City Council (PP) and the Junta de Extremadura (PP-Vox). The argument of the popular mayor, Mónica Granados, for not proceeding with the name change is to preserve "social peace".

The current CAP Passeig de Maragall, in the Sant Martí district of Barcelona, still appears today –half a century after Franco's death– in the name of the Spanish Falange (FET y de las JONS). Despite the Generalitat managing the center and assuming all maintenance costs, the registered ownership remains in the hands of the dictatorship's political apparatus. This is the most disconcerting finding of the research by historian Neus Moran, who documents how the State protected health heritage from Francoist plunder before the transfer of powers.

In an article titled “Close this building, President”, published on Monday in El País, Professor Rafael Argullol asked Pedro Sánchez to close the building of the Superior Headquarters of the National Police, on Via Laietana in Barcelona. Argullol, who was detained and interrogated there, recalls that it was a place of torture during the Franco dictatorship and suggests that it should end up being a library or a memorial.

A few days ago, the German newspaper Die Zeit made available to its readers an online search engine that allows you to find out in a matter of seconds if there is any Nazi in your family. In Spain, we are a long way from being able to do anything similar. For years, different researchers, historians, and relatives of victims of Francoism have made requests and complaints because the Ministry of the Interior has become an insurmountable wall for accessing documentation. Some have even thrown in the towel and had to set aside their doctoral thesis.

The last time I saw Jordi Pujol we talked about the Big Ben. Rac, rac, rac. The president searches his infinite folder system. Here. This. And we return to the disco with his words. That and that. And he enters here and leaves there. He was also there. He also lived it.

For Sant Jordi, you can also buy history books. In fact, it is advisable to do so: to buy and read good history books, now that revisionisms, denials, and pseudo-historians are once again occupying platforms and spaces in the media, in addition to flooding social networks. History is one of the most decisive areas of knowledge in the construction of societies and civilizations: without knowing where we come from, we cannot know where we are or who we are, and we are more exposed to lying, self-serving, and – these indeed – indoctrination narratives, which some are interested in spreading to seize control of power.Two excellent books have recently arrived in bookstores to understand what Francoism and Nazism were, and to comprehend the danger posed by the rise of new fascisms and far-right movements. These are the volume El franquisme, by Josep Fontana, published by Eumo, and the essay Els irresponsables, by Johann Chapoutot, published by Angle with translation by Andreu Gomila.Edited by the historian —and Fontana's disciple— Jaume Claret, El franquisme brings together conferences and other texts by one of the most outstanding Catalan historians of the second half of the 20th century, and one of those who analyzed the Francoist regime most penetratingly and incisively, as was Josep Fontana. Reading this book, which combines rigor with the good writing that was its hallmark, disproves and invalidates the relativistic, nostalgic, and amiable views of the forty years of dictatorship that are disseminated by parties like Vox or even the PP, and by their intellectual and media circles. Fontana precisely describes several fundamental aspects of the regime, from the creation and aggrandizement of the figure of the Caudillo to the ideas that Francoism applied in economics, through the involvement of the Spanish Church in the regime's governance, otherwise known as national-catholicism. An agile, yet in-depth, look at black Spain, and, of course, furiously anti-Catalan, which the current nationalist right wants to return to power. A Spain that, contrary to what is often made to believe, is not at all distant in time.The irresponsibles have an explanatory subtitle (Who brought Hitler to power?). Its author, Johann Chapoutot, Professor of Contemporary History at the Sorbonne University, explains how Hitler's rise to power through elections was not a matter of chance, but the result of a series of powers (economic, business, financial, media) who were convinced that a government of the national socialist party would be useful to their interests. These prominent figures of German society were also sure that they would easily control an individual like Hitler and prevent him from losing control and committing excesses. We already know how it all ended, and the parallels with all those who seek to whitewash and normalize Trumps, Netanyahus, Mileis, or Melonis with the argument that they have been voted for are so clear that they do not need to be emphasized.

Joan Vinyes Miralpeix (Anglès, 1918 - Barcelona, 2009) could not long resist the hypocrisy of priestly life, the total submission of the Church to Francoism, nor the celibacy (only apparent) that his condition as a priest imposed on him. All these contradictions, and some more, converged in his last mass, on Sunday, October 1, 1950, when from the pulpit of the church of l'Escala he announced to his astonished parishioners that he was ceasing to be a priest. It was the first case of apostasy in Francoist Girona, which tried by all means to bring him back into the fold of the Church, even through institutional conspiracies to make him appear mad and lock him up in a mental asylum. "In the time of national-Catholicism, it was an act of total rebellion and they could not tolerate it, which is why they considered that he could only be mad," explains Josep Maria Vinyes i Vilà, who has taken care of the memoirs written by his father.

For the reformist sectors of the Franco regime, the monarchy established by General Franco was a red line that could not be crossed. Regardless of popular will, the king was an indisputable institution, guaranteeing the continuity of the system and its servants, and also allowing for a controlled transition. A referendum on the form of government was impossible, but not only that: everything that represented the image, value, and symbol of the Republic, such as the tricolor flag, was persecuted for several years. The struggle continued beyond the approval of the 1978 Constitution, beyond the years of institutional and political transition.

This novel was born during a conversation among friends after a meal, inspired by the testimony of one of their mothers. It's an unknown, harsh, and anonymous story that portrays the inner workings of families who "lived well" under the Franco regime in Girona. It also marks the debut in the genre of lawyer Benet Salellas, former CUP deputy and currently leading the defense of Santos Cerdánand a finalist for the 45th Justo M. Casero Short Novel Prize. "I think we all tend to write what we like to read," he explains about the project's genesis. "I love fiction; I studied Greek philology before studying law. I've always had a bit of a cultured side, and I was challenged to try to write a novel. I wanted it to be anonymous, so if it's validated, I'll feel more empowered in some way."

A All Battles (Column), lawyer Magda Oranich (Barcelona, 1945) records her tireless fight for human rights and, more particularly, for women's rights, after six decades of activism.

While thousands of people fled as best they could toward the French border, on February 4, 1939, at the Can Pol farmhouse in Montfullà, Bescanó, where the Generalitat (Catalan government) had stored works of art from Tarragona to protect them from the war, a woman and her children awaited the arrival of Franco's troops. The woman in question was Rosa Sendrós Carbonella, the wife of Pere Rius, the curator of the Reus Museum, and she had the delicate task of handing over the keys to the storage facility to the rebel soldiers. This anecdote perfectly illustrates the story the exhibition aims to tell. Recovered from the enemy. Francoist caches at the MNACwhich can be seen at the National Art Museum of Catalonia until June 28. In the first room, there is another document that demonstrates this commitment by Catalan institutions to safeguarding heritage: a sketch made by the archivist Agustí Duran i Sanpere showing all the collections distributed throughout Catalonia, to facilitate the work of the victors.

Now that Vox has revived the Francoist spirit and made it blatant, it's worth explaining exactly what the dictatorship was. Let's be blunt: it was a savage act and a complete disaster. Mediocrity in power for forty years. Who better than an authoritative voice like that of the historian Josep Fontana (1931-2018) to provide a summary? His perspective is as informed as it is relentless. FrancoismJoaquim Albareda and Jaume Claret have compiled for the Eumo publishing house a devastating selection of Fontana's texts on the period. It was not his main subject of study, but it was an obsession, a self-imposed professional, historical, and civic-political duty.

Bruce Springsteen has composed a song in response to police killings in the United States that is reminiscent of the protest songs of the bloody final years of the Franco dictatorship.Streets of Minneapolisdialogues in time with What do those people want?, Death bells, Let's say no either In MargalidaTo name a few, because, unfortunately, more had to be written than we would have liked.

Spain remains at a crossroads when debating the Civil War. Arturo Pérez-Reverte has organized a series of debates in Seville with the less-than-ideal title 1936: The war we all lost (In the end, they put the slogan in question marks to soften the blow of criticism.) The writer David Uclés, who had committed to attending, withdrew upon learning that José María Aznar and Iván Espinosa de los Monteros would be participating. And the inevitable backlash on social media, including threats of boycott, precipitated the cancellation of the conference. Pérez-Reverte lamented the lost opportunity for the "reconciliation" of Spaniards. But the best way to come to terms with the past is to accept it, and accepting the Civil War means admitting that there were victors and vanquished, and that the victors behaved as such long after the guns fell silent.

Looking back This is an ARA podcast that explores the silences, struggles, and wounds of the Franco regime to understand how this past continues to shape the present.