Spain experienced an unprecedented level of political violence in the first quarter of the 20th century, which led to the Spanish Civil War, often wrongly labeled as fratricidal, and then to the most durable European totalitarian regime of the last century. In this context, Francoism developed a State Violence that gave rise to mass violence by summarily judging and executing opponents of the Francoist regime.
Far from creating an opportunity for memory work and a tabula rasa policy, Franco's death gave birth to a shaky democracy trapped in a "pact of forgetting" between yesterday's victors and those of the new democracy.
This work will explore the reasons of the development of field anthropology in Spain. In other words, we are going to explain how the troubled genesis of the so-called Ley de Memoria Histórica, was the reason that the Civil Society had to learn, instead of the official bodies, how to take care of the victims including the families of those who disappeared during the Francoist regime. The extraordinary situation of official omerta gradually gave birth to an actual anthropological savoir faire. The "Spanish Forensic Science" has been able, through the years, to establish itself in the long term against and despite the national politics, totally trapped in their past decisions.
