Everybody hurts

In early 1967 – the year that 'Sgt. Pep­per's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was re­leased in the UK – Span­ish po­lice ar­rested the Madrid stu­dent Rafael Gui­jarro and tor­tured him to death down at the sta­tion. (They later imag­i­na­tively claimed he had died by fling­ing him­self out of a win­dow in an at­tempt to es­cape). Gui­jarro was one of over 20 po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers who died at the hands of the forces of law and order in Spain be­tween 1960 and 1978. Hun­dreds upon hun­dreds more were cru­elly mis­treated when in cus­tody. To re­mind us that the last years of the Franco regime and the first of the soi dis­ant Tran­si­tion to Democ­racy were no rose gar­den, Barcelona's Born Cen­tre of Cul­ture and Mem­ory has opened a free ex­hi­bi­tion, tucked away at the back of its splen­did premises. I would bet good money that this dis­play of eye­wit­ness de­scrip­tions, pho­tos, videos and draw­ings of tor­ture po­si­tions didn't bring tears to my eyes only. In Barcelona, the worst atroc­i­ties were com­mit­ted in the po­lice sta­tion at num­ber 43, Via Lai­etana. Forced to stand for hours on end or hand­cuffed in un­com­fort­able po­si­tions, de­tainees were re­peat­edly beaten and tor­tured. Trinidad Her­rero was ar­rested in Barcelona and told by po­lice that they were going to stick a pis­tol in her vagina and kick her in such a way that she'd never “func­tion as a woman again”. Maria Teresa Feliu was forced to run a gaunt­let of po­lice­men hold­ing lit cig­a­rettes with which they burned dif­fer­ent spots on her body as she passed. Joan Sala had nee­dles shoved into his fin­ger and toe nails, as well as being badly beaten. José An­to­nio Vidal was burnt with cig­a­rettes, wa­ter­boarded, then beaten until he uri­nated blood. Most of these peo­ple, along with the oth­ers quoted in the ex­hi­bi­tion, were tor­tured when in their late teens or early twen­ties. But surely, I pre­tend to hear you say, all this was par for the course in a Fas­cist state, and be­sides, things are very dif­fer­ent now. In­deed they are, but these end-of-regime crimes con­tinue to leave a nasty taste in the mouth for the sim­ple rea­son that no­body has ever been called to ac­count for them: the 1977 Amnesty Law ef­fec­tively ki­boshed any at­tempt to bring vi­o­lent or mur­der­ous state func­tionar­ies to jus­tice, grant­ing as it did (with a lit­tle help from many of Spain's judges) total im­punity to the en­tire gang. As the ex­hi­bi­tion points out, this way of sweep­ing the crimes of a dic­ta­to­r­ial past under the car­pet means that the wounds caused by such crimes have never ceased to fes­ter, mak­ing it im­pos­si­ble for its vic­tims to be rec­on­ciled to the pre­sent, as they largely have been in, say, South Africa or Ar­gentina. It might have helped, for ex­am­ple, if num­ber 43, Via Lai­etana, had been turned into a mu­seum chron­i­cling the crimes that took place there and else­where in Cat­alo­nia and Spain. As it hap­pens, it's still a po­lice sta­tion.