The Silence of Others is an award-winning documentary that was released in 2018. This documentary, directed by Almudena Carracedo & Robert Bahar, is about the movement to repeal Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law AKA the “Argentine Lawsuit”. The film follows this lawsuit over the course of 6 years and tells the stories of many who were abused and mistreated under Franco’s 40 years of dictatorship. It isn’t an easy documentary to watch (I cried three times), but it is impactful and I sincerely hope it only adds fuel to the fire and that Spain concedes and finally acknowledges the war crimes of the Franco era and brings those responsible (those who can still be brought) to justice.
As the title of the film suggests, this lid over Spain’s violent history applies not only to Spain, but to other countries as well. There are pictures of Franco with various US Presidents (one being Nixon), French Presidents, and other leaders of countries. And just like Spain doesn’t teach their children about it in school, I never learned about Franco in any of my World History classes. The forced omission of this period for Spain is contagious. One of the people in the film said “justice has no boundaries”. And it’s that thinking that brought on the Argentine Lawsuit. These traumatized people had to seek justice from a country that isn’t their own.
To tie this to leadership, I could talk about Franco who very much led like Hitler and incited fear to control his groups. I could make an argument that he is a toxic charismatic based on the footage that they showed and the intense following he had in life and–unfortunately–continues to have in death. However, this film isn’t about Franco. It’s about the families and it’s about the horror and the tragedy. Franco enforced–and the loyalists carried out– permanent inequality. What started as something based on the “Eugenics of Spanishness” grew and spun into a cruel regime that abused anyone who wasn’t in the dominant group. People were taken as prisoners, tortured, and executed for the most minor forms of dissent, or even for nothing at all (wrong place, wrong time). A group of women in the film banded together to get justice for their babies who were stolen from them in hospitals (“We want out children back, dead or alive.”). Permanent inequality breeds a mindset that sees the outgroup as inhuman–that’s the only possible explanation that all the loyalists could behave this way, it’s the only mindset that would make anything about this situation easier to swallow.
(I watched this documentary at the 10/24, 7:30 showing in Jepson 118)
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