concord expectations

The planned repeal of the pre-constitutional Law of Official Secrets, if its parliamentary procedure prospers, may suppose a cardinal turning point, in a democratic key, in the collective and symbolic imaginary of our country.

It is convenient to remember the origin of that norm, the situation in which it was enacted and then glimpse the present and its projection on the political and cultural horizon of Spanish society.

From 1964 to 1968, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, future Minister Secretary General of the Movement, Vice President of the Francoist Government and later maker of the regulatory artifice that legalized the formal transition from dictatorship to democracy, was the co-rapporteur of the preliminary draft of the pre-constitutional regulation.

His was the tautological and certainly misleading phrase "from law to law."

Everything indicated that the upper echelons of the dictatorial regime, of which Fernández Miranda was an intimate part, foresaw the inexorability of an economic and sociopolitical change in Spain upon the death of Franco, who was then 75 years old.

The 1959 Stabilization Plan, which put an end to post-war autarchy, was a precedent that heralded changes.

For this reason, the high authorities of the regime prepared to clamp down on the scenario of the predictable unfolding of events in an authoritarian key and through secrecy.

And they held it with that legal device that sealed and silenced the most important quotas of state activity and, in fact, of contemporary political —and diplomatic— history in Spain.

Objectively, the law officially suppressed the factual basis that allowed the Francoist State to be held responsible for its punitive and criminal conduct against all political, trade union and cultural opposition during the prolonged post-war period, which lasted 29 years at the time.

To the surprise of legislators from around the world, the law did not provide time limits for the declassification of state secrets.

Even,

As an added specificity, the Law on Official Secrets completed its regulatory development with a provision according to which each ministerial department of the Government had to have its own office to collect matters considered secret.

The collector and guarantor of all the secret information collected by each of the government ministries would be the second chief of the Army General Staff, further evidence of military tutelage over the main state tasks of the Franco regime, which maintained the full militarization of services secrets, police officers and Civil Guard.

The regulatory norm of State secrets arose in full challenge against the regime from the factories, the classrooms and the neighborhoods —the intense strike processes of the miners of Asturias dated from 1962—, while progressing

the inflaming of the university and citizen protest against the dictatorship.

The political protest in the street, coming from the labor movement and the student movement, both guided by the Communist Party of Spain, complemented the challenge undertaken intramural by socialist, Christian Democrat, nationalist, liberal and monarchist sectors.

Already in 1962, six years before the promulgation of the Official Secrets Law in 1968, these sectors had proposed an outline of a generic and alternative program to the Franco regime subscribed by the exiled opposition and inside the regime almost in its entirety, gathered for the first time after the end of the Civil War, in the German city of Munich.

Only the communists were excluded from that appointment, which the Franco regime punished with deportations and fines.

But the state law on secrecy was also enacted immediately after the Press and Printing Law, called the

in force since 1966, which had abolished prior censorship of the press.

Despite the broad sanctioning power that it still had, the regime feared that the gate thus opened would entail risks, which the Official Secrets Law would make it possible to tackle.

Likewise, the norm came to the fore of the important divergences incubated in the Franco regime around the African colony of Spain in Equatorial Guinea.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose head was the Catholic propagandist Fernando María Castiella, advocated its immediate decolonization, against the almighty admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the dictator's right-hand man, who, in a calculated maneuver, had urged to turn the colonies in Africa into Spanish provinces to avoid the unstoppable decolonization process that the United Nations urged everywhere.

The international decolonizing pressure was very intense.

The solution to the deep internal political dispute would lead in 1971 to the declaration of reserved matter of everything concerning the African country, including the opaque historical-patrimonial relationship maintained by the Crown with the colony, whose interests were managed there by the Navy, of the which Admiral Carrero was the main political exponent.

In our present, the Official Secrets Law, briefly reformed in 1978, has in fact fostered the growth of the existing gap around memory, through the silencing imposed on our common history.

Such bankruptcy has given arguments to those who air the dichotomy of the two Spains, spurred on by the survival of inquisitorial habits that have not been eradicated.

This premeditated cancellation of the possibility of a full social self-awareness regarding the past and, likewise, the present, can hardly be separated from a perverse intentionality that, in fact, was intended to keep Spanish society in a limbo of ignorance and irresponsibility. .

There is no doubt that there is an instrumental utility of secrecy linked to state security, which deserves and demands to be legally regulated.

But the extensive and uncontrolled expansion of secrecy to areas as wide as those included in this law, today fortunately in a derogatory phase and that, in fact, canceled reality itself, was a symptom of the totalizing condition for some, totalitarian for others, that characterized him.

Every State, for the sake of the need for self-legitimation, tends to show itself as a guarantor of public and private interests and a promoter of social cohesion, while proclaiming that its conduct adheres to the observance of the law and morality.

However, many State practices, notably those of dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, violate the principles that the State proclaims and resort to secrecy to hide their transgressions.

Such was what happened here and what the law set out to silence.

Having inertially and premeditatedly maintained, for 83 years, the slab of forced ignorance over enormous areas of the collective, informative, ideopolitical and historical-cultural heritage of the Spanish, far from dampening internal conflicts, has fueled them.

And it has done so by degrading the Spanish coexistence scene and, therefore, social cohesion.

Obvious manifestations of the ignorance induced by state secrets can be seen daily in certain benches of Parliament.

Forgetfulness erodes coexistence.

The declassification of State secrets is a democratic right of developed societies to access the collective conscience and the free interpretation of the past and present.

For this reason, its regulation by means of a new law such as the one envisaged, once the disclosure deadlines have been agreed between the political forces, will certainly herald a reflection that will allow numerous unknowns to be cleared up and many open wounds due to ignorance and forgetfulness to be healed.

And, without a doubt, after establishing knowledge about ourselves and broadening civic and democratic culture, it will open the way to a series of expectations of harmony in Spain, today more necessary than ever.

Rafael Fraguas

is a journalist and doctor in Sociology from the UCM with a doctoral thesis on the Secret of State

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber