MikeLigalig.com

MADRID, Oct. 27 — Marcos Ana does not remember everything about his 23 years in prison during Franco’s dictatorship.

But the 87-year-old poet remembers the electric shocks and brutal whippings that left his body covered in sores; the hunger that compelled him to eat grass sprouting between the stones of the prison patio; his crumpled mother, clinging to the shins of a prison guard, begging mercy for her bloodied and beaten son.

He remembers reading by moonlight the verses of Pablo Neruda, the left-wing Chilean poet, smuggled on single pages to his solitary cell, and memorizing his own compositions until he could scrounge a scrap of paper on which to write them.

Forty-six years after Mr. Ana was released from prison, he says he believes the time is ripe for Spain to commemorate and offer justice to the thousands who suffered during the country’s cruel 1936-39 civil war and the four decades of right-wing dictatorship that followed.

“We’re not looking to blame anyone, but we want to be recognized,” said Mr. Ana, a sinewy man with a fixed gaze and a papery complexion. Last month he published his memoir, “Tell Me What a Tree Is Like,” which tells the story of how, as an 19-year-old leader of the Socialist Youth, he was arrested, tortured and later condemned to death.

Mr. Ana, who won international renown for the poems he wrote in prison, was spared two death sentences and was released from prison in 1961. “Amnesty is one thing, but amnesia is another,” he said.

Mr. Ana’s wish may be realized, at least partly, on Wednesday when Parliament debates a law aimed at honoring victims of the civil war and of Franco’s repressive rule. The “law of historical memory” would declare illegitimate the military tribunals that condemned people like Mr. Ana and would create state funds to finance the process of exhuming mass graves that contain thousands of victims from both sides.

It would ban public symbols that commemorate Franco and his allies and turn the Valley of the Fallen, a massive mausoleum where the former dictator is buried, into a monument to all the war dead.

The law is a flagship piece of legislation for the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose grandfather was shot to death by pro-Franco troops. But it has proved fiercely controversial in a country where people remain bitterly divided about whether to stir the bones of the past.

Spain’s remarkably smooth transition to democracy is often attributed to the fact that — amid the dread of fresh civil conflict — people on both sides of the political spectrum were prepared to close the door on the horrors of the civil war and the dictatorship that followed. There were no truth and reconciliation commissions or war-crimes trials, and many of Franco’s military and political allies remained in positions of power.

“We had the generosity to say, ‘O.K., let’s close that chapter,’” Mr. Ana said. “But 40 years later we’re still walking around cities with streets named after the caudillo,” he said, referring to Franco.

Many conservatives and some liberals who were closely involved in mapping the transition say that the law will open old wounds. Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative opposition Popular Party, said the law would bring “problems and divisions without helping anyone.” However, the Popular Party approved in parliamentary commission about one-third of the articles in the law, including those relating to reparations and the Valley of the Fallen.

In an editorial this month, El País, the liberal newspaper whose founders and senior staff members are closely identified with the transition, said many of the law’s objectives could be achieved through other means. The government did not need a law to assume responsibility for exhumations and order new compensation for victims, the newspaper said.

Diego López Garrido, the Socialist Party’s parliamentary spokesman, said the law did not break with the transition.

“This is all part of a slow process,” Mr. Garrido said in an interview. “The transition had a very specific purpose — democracy. And democracy is incompatible with the continued existence of symbols that celebrate a dictatorship.”

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