Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System by Elliott Young (review)

Abstract

separatists organized a referendum on independence that Spain’s Constitutional Tribunal had already declared illegal. In response to the illegal referendum, the conservative administration of Mariano Rajoy rescinded Catalonia’s home rule charter. Sánchez inherited the crisis from Rajoy, whose heavy-handed approach only served to exacerbate the crisis, and skillfully used Franco’s exhumation to signal a new, conciliatory tone in the relations between Madrid and the Catalans. By exploring the work of organizations such as ARMH and unpacking the politics of Franco’s exhumation, Iturriaga and Faber have made a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain. Taken together, these works highlight the titanic role of human rights organizations and activists in pressing politicians to take action on so many issues related to the past that were conveniently swept under the rug during the democratic transition. Spain’s democratic transformation, often described by democratization scholars as “a miracle,”7 is owed in no small measure to the willingness of victims of political violence to put their demands for recognition on hold until democratic institutions and practices were fully consolidated. But the books by Iturriaga and Faber also contribute valuable insights into the global politics of coming to terms with the past that often go unnoticed or ignored. Above all, perhaps, they reveal the national peculiarities of reckoning with a dark and difficult history. Despite attempts by the human rights community to depict the process of coming to terms with the past as a universal experience primarily intended to seek justice and accountability, the reality on the ground often looks strikingly different. For a whole host of reasons—including Franco’s cynical manipulation of history for partisan purposes and the deliberate repression of the memory of the past during the democratic transition—coming to terms with the past in Spain is less about seeking justice and accountability than it is about recovering and reconstructing history. This peculiarity about Spain does not make the country’s coming to terms with the past any less interesting or worthwhile.