From Invisibility to Power: Spanish Victims and the Manipulation of their Symbolic Capital

Abstract This paper will explore the historical construction and negotiation of Spanish political victimhood, particularly the victims of the Francoist repression framed by the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, the victims of the Basque terrorist organisation ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) and those who died in the attacks perpetrated by Islamic terrorists on 11 March 2004 in Madrid. At the time of their victimisation, personal and social ‘logics’ were constructed to explain the events that culminated in the death of members of the social body, as the logic of the everyday was subverted by acts of extreme violence. Today, the victims, whose voices were silenced by death, have acquired the capacity to speak from a privileged space of integration and national ‘reconciliation’ premised on their inclusion, after having been ‘othered’ by extreme fanaticisms of religious and/or political creed. As the relatives of the deceased — themselves victims — and diverse political organisations vie for the representation of the victims and of the meanings that they embody, they engage in an exercise in memory and power amid a society still divided along lines reminiscent of those that led to the eruption of the civil war 70 years ago.