'We are also victims': the struggles for justice and the recognition of the victims of Franco in the Argentine Complaint

Abstract

This text analyzes the struggles and claims that different groups of victims of Franco show with the aim of being recognized as victims by the Spanish State. These claims are made, paradoxically, through their involvement and support for an international criminal proceeding against the Franco dictatorship. In this sense, since its beginning, the Argentine Complaint against the crimes of Franco was designed and used by the complainant groups also as a tool to pressure and challenge the Spanish state institutions. An ethnographic analysis of the practices and discourses of these groups shows the ways in which this specific demand for “justice” is closely related to a more general demand for “recognition” towards the Spanish State. These demands for justice and recognition are constructed discursively through different processes: on the one hand, the use of humanitarian rhetoric; on the other, of the implementation of comparative grievances with other Spanish victims of political violence that are socially and institutionally recognized. At the same time, these two processes harbor a melting pot of positions and meanings that show a much more complex and heterogeneous group than that conceived at first sight.