“SPANIARDS, Franco has died,” came the announcement 50 years ago on Spanish TV. If there was any truth to the widely held story that Barcelona immediately ran out of cava, the corks would have been popping behind closed doors.

Most Spaniards held their breath on November 20 1975, fearful of what might happen next.

After nearly four decades of brutal dictatorship, reactionary forces dominated the country’s institutions and the generalisimo himself had boasted that everything was being left “well tied up.”

Confounding expectations, however, King Juan Carlos appointed a government that steered Spain towards free elections in 1977, the first since the Spanish Republic.

In 1981 he helped face down a botched coup attempt by die-hard army and civil guard units, who briefly seized the Cortes, the Spanish parliament.

In the following year the PSOE (Workers Socialist Party of Spain) — the dominant party in the Republic’s Popular Front government — won the general election.

Today Juan Carlos, who abdicated in favour of son Filipe in 2014, is again at the centre of controversy. His autobiography praises Franco’s “intelligence and political sense.” But it says nothing in 500 pages about the victims of Franco, nor the scars that the Spanish civil war have left on Spanish society.

Publication of the memoir comes at a time of heightened political tensions in Spain. The far-right Vox party is surging in the polls. In half-a-dozen autonomous regions the party props up right-wing administrations fronted by the more mainstream Popular Party (PP) — which is itself a haven for Franco apologists.

The approaching anniversary of the dictator’s death has also seen anti-immigrant fascist groups on the streets of Madrid giving Nazi salutes, singing Francoist anthems and waving SS-inspired flags.

Though many have applauded Juan Carlos’s role in Spain’s transition to democracy, they often overlook the tide of popular agitation that was also forcing his hand.

Hailed as a triumph of peaceful top-down politics, the transicion was far from bloodless. Hundreds died in political violence, including terrorist attacks by a shadowy far-left group, Grapo — (Grupo de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre / First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups), that is now known to have been heavily penetrated by Francoist secret police.

Among the worst atrocities was the assassination in 1977 of five communist lawyers by fascist gunmen in Madrid’s Atocha Street. More than 100,000 people attended their funeral – one of the first mass demonstrations since the Caudillo’s death. This was followed by strikes and displays of solidarity across the country. A few weeks later the PCE communist party was legalised.

The blood on Franco’s hands never dried. After launching the military uprising that sparked the country’s civil war in 1936, he climbed to power over the dead bodies of more than 150,000 summarily executed Republicans, leftists and trade unionists. Their toll easily outnumbered the victims of revenge attacks against supporters of the coup.

Victory in 1939 was secured courtesy of troops, aircraft and weapons sent by Hitler and Mussolini. When their planes mercilessly bombed Guernica, Barcelona and Madrid, the world was shocked. But in characteristic “Perfidious Albion” fashion, the British government chose to appease the fascist dictators by covertly favouring Franco with an arms embargo on the Republic – all under the guise of “non-intervention.”

Even when the war ended, the systematic torture and killings continued in Franco’s vast network of penal camps. In 1940 in Madrid alone there were 30 prisons housing 100,000 Republican prisoners, a quarter of them on death row.

And so it went on, year after year, with the terminally ill Franco signing the last five death warrants as he was about to climb into his death-bed.

In Britain, veterans of the International Brigades, who had fought so bravely during the civil war, kept up their struggle in other ways.

The International Brigade Association helped organise frequent protests and embassy pickets. The IBA worked with socialist lawyers to send observers to trials of political prisoners along with food for their families.

Others went further. Dublin-born Brigader Bob Doyle, for example, used family trips to Spain to take money to the the anti-Franco underground and on one occasion scattered leaflets on a Madrid bus and among football crowds before making a swift getaway.

There had been a glimmer of hope at the end of WWII that Franco’s regime, by then an international pariah, might be toppled. But the US cavalry rode to the rescue, finding in Franco a dependable anti-communist stooge during the cold war. Generous long-term loans began in 1950 and three years later the US was handed air and naval bases in exchange for more economic and military aid.

Spain today is a vibrant, open society, though one with all the familiar social problems of advanced Western liberal democracies. Scratch the surface, however, and historic divisions open up and old attitudes forged by 40 years of censorship and dictatorship lies re-emerge.

It wasn’t until the start of this century — a full quarter century after Franco’s death — that the unofficial pact of silence that accompanied the return to democracy was broken.

Younger people began asking what had happened to their grandparents during the war, why they didn’t have a grave and why no-one dared speak about it. Soon they found out the awful truth that Spain is a country covered with mass graves of Republicans. There were — and still are — thousands of them — including ones with remains of International Brigaders whose bodies were dug up and dumped after Franco won the war.

The man who initiated the first exhumation was Emilio Silva. He was trying to find the remains of his grandfather in the village of Priaranza del Bierzo in north-west Spain. But in the process he launched a social movement of Spaniards demanding to know the truth about the past.

“What I wanted was to bury him with my grandmother and go back to my life as a journalist,” Silva recalled in a recent interview. “I thought I was going to return to how things were before finding the mass grave, but everything became unstoppable.”

Many thousands of murdered Republicans have since been given proper burials, though it is estimated that the remains of more than 100,000 of Spain’s “disappeared” still lie unidentified in the Spanish soil.  

Propelled by this mass movement for the recovery of historical memory, the PSOE-led governments of Jose Luis Zapatero and current prime minister Pedro Sanchez have made worthy efforts to help Spain come to terms with the crimes of Francoism.

Memory laws have acknowledged old injustices and addressed the issue of mass graves. Streets glorifying fascists have been renamed. Franco’s body was removed from the grotesque mausoleum he built for himself with Republican slave labour north -west of Madrid. Exiles, International Brigaders and their descendants have been welcomed as Spanish citizens.

Unsurprisingly Vox and the PP have resisted all these moves, with regional authorities led by them rolling back memory laws and refusing to identify and protect mass graves. Yet, as one historian has pointed out, Spain is the only country in western Europe where it is possible to randomly dig a hole in the ground and run the risk of unearthing human remains. Meanwhile those who call for an end to this scandal are accused of stirring up old hatreds.

Bill Alexander, former commander of the British Battalion in Spain, noted proudly after the country’s return to democracy that anti-Francoists in Britain had ensured that Franco and his underlings were never accepted by the British people.

Their campaigning had “remembered the heroic struggles of the Spanish people and recognised that only the end of Francoism could bring freedom.” Sadly, the toxic legacy left by Franco has still not been properly expunged and Alexander’s words remain true to this day.

Jim Jump is the chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust.