Spain undergoes wrenching awakening from 'amnesia'
Spain is stirring the ghosts of its past with a proposed law that will declare illegitimate Franco's military courts, expand reparations to victims of the civil war and increase funding for exhuming mass graves.
For people like Marcos Ana, a renowned poet who was the longest-serving political prisoner of the Franco era, the law does not go far enough.
Ana, 87, does not remember everything about his 23 years in jail during Francisco Franco's dictatorship.
But he does remember the electric shocks and brutal whippings; the hunger that compelled him to eat grass sprouting between the stones of the prison courtyard; his mother, clinging to the shins of a prison guard, begging for mercy for her bleeding son.
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
For people like Marcos Ana, a renowned poet who was the longest-serving political prisoner of the Franco era, the law does not go far enough.
Ana, 87, does not remember everything about his 23 years in jail during Francisco Franco's dictatorship.
But he does remember the electric shocks and brutal whippings; the hunger that compelled him to eat grass sprouting between the stones of the prison courtyard; his mother, clinging to the shins of a prison guard, begging for mercy for her bleeding son.