Javier Villamor
January 29, 2026
Darío Madrid
Courtesy of Darío Madrid
The UN’s special rapporteurs are all appointed by the Human Rights Council, and the people who are chosen are those whose main interest is to condemn the West, colonialism, and capitalism.
Darío Madrid is the online pseudonym of Gonzalo Fernández, a historian and solicitor. Specialising in criminal and labour law, he has written numerous articles on history relating to the Black Legend, the Inquisition and the conquest of America. Following his first book, La Inquisición española. Realidad y procedimiento del Santo Oficio (The Spanish Inquisition. Reality and Procedure of the Holy Office), he has just published Mentiras desveladas y víctimas inocentes de la Guerra Civil (Lies Unveiled and Innocent Victims of the Civil War).
I have always been interested in the subject, even though my family did not talk about it. However, when I went to university to study law, I saw the bullet holes in the medical school and discovered that the university campus had been practically destroyed in the war and that Madrid had been under siege for three years. When I asked my mother about it, I discovered that my grandfather had fought in the Republican Alpine Brigade, the Mixed 69, and had been imprisoned at the end of the war. Thanks to friends of his on the other side, he was released from prison and ended up working at the Bank of Spain. In contrast, my paternal grandfather was imprisoned by the Republicans in Hellín, and three of his brothers were shot by the Republicans in Alcázar de San Juan. So I wanted to write about this subject.
Yes, because they have reignited the hatred. After the war, many people suffered under the dictatorship, but the hatred was buried, and, as in my family, people who had been on different sides married each other. For political reasons, all of that has been revived, forgetting the innocent victims on one side and implying that the Republic was a wonderful regime and that those who were killed practically deserved it.
For example, the murder of the 23 Adoratrices nuns that took place in November 1936. Militiamen tortured and shot them in the Almudena Cemetery, almost in the same place where, after the war, the famous ’13 roses’ (left-wing militants) were shot. Now we must forget those 23 women and only remember the other 13. Some justify this by saying that during Franco’s time only the nuns were remembered, but it has been 50 years since Franco’s death! It is time to remember all the victims.
This is something that comes from the French Revolution, then repeats itself in the Russian Revolution, and in Spain—the clergy effectively become scapegoats; they are guilty of maintaining the Old Regime and defending reactionary ideas. When the military coup took place in July 1936, a revolution also took place that violated the republican order, and what happened in France and Russia was repeated. The result was some 8,000 religious figures killed.
Previously, during the Republic, several priests had been murdered, and in the socialist coup d’état of October 1934, which was only successful in Asturias, exactly the same thing happened because they were considered responsible for the failure to defeat the right wing. In 1933, when the Left refused to give women the right to vote, one of the reasons they gave was that women were easily influenced by priests.
A little-known case is that of Melquiades Álvarez, a Republican who had been president of the Congress of Deputies and dean of the Madrid Bar Association. He was assigned to defend the founder of the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and when the war broke out, he was imprisoned, supposedly to protect him from street mobs. In prison, militiamen held a sham trial and murdered him with a bayonet to the throat.
Another case is the murder of General López de Ochoa, who, in the name of the Republic, suppressed the coup d’état of 1934. He was arrested in Madrid and taken to a hospital, but they took him out to shoot him. They cut off his head and paraded it around Carabanchel for a while.
On the other side, I am struck by the execution of General Manuel Romerales, commander in Melilla, who stood up to the rebels to defend the republican government and was accused of treason and shot twenty days later. Whichever side they were on, all these victims must be remembered.
The fact is that nothing shown there actually happened. There was no such confrontation, because if there had been, it would have been reported in all the newspapers of the time the following day. The story that Unamuno uttered the phrase “you will win, but you will not convince” is actually a myth that originated in 1941 from an article by Luis Portillo in the British magazine Horizon. Portillo was not present at the event and wrote his text from exile, but it was taken up by some historians to present the event as an epic confrontation between intelligence and barbarism. Contemporary sources refute this myth.
Yes, and that’s more or less how the book begins. During the Second Republic, freedom of expression and freedom of the press were severely restricted by the ‘Law for the Defence of the Republic,’ which was enacted before the Republican Constitution was promulgated. When the Constitution was approved by Parliament, this law was added as an annex, effectively nullifying freedom of the press. And when the right wing won in 1933, they enacted the ‘public order law,’ which also censored the press.
Another example is the Alcázar of Toledo. The Republican press published five times that the fortress had fallen and that its occupants had come out with their hands up.
The biggest lie is the 1931 municipal elections that brought down the monarchy and gave victory to the Republicans. The reign of Alfonso XIII was a disaster, but we do not know the true result of those elections because the records do not exist. Republican victory was taken for granted, at least in the provincial capitals, but we cannot verify this. The same thing happened with the elections of February 1936, which gave victory to the Popular Front, because there is evidence of various instances of fraud in the official records.
Another falsehood is that the assassination of the right-wing opposition leader, Calvo Sotelo, is what triggered the Civil War. The truth is that the military coup had been in preparation since March by General Mola and others. What the assassination of Calvo Sotelo did cause was that military personnel who had been hesitant to revolt, such as General Franco, decided to do so.
The truth is that I haven’t, and I would have liked to have made it longer and included more victims. I don’t think there should be laws on historical memory, because memory is something private and personal. There is no reason to make a law on memory; it is historians who should deal with what happened. Why should we demand a particular interpretation of history? And in this case, favourable to one of the sides now referred to as “democratic,” when the PSOE (Socialist Party) of 1936 was anything but democratic. It is absurd to try to hide what the Socialists did with historical memory laws.
