Arrested, tortured, and exiled: remembering Francoist repression 50 years later

“The best way of preventing what happened under Franco from happening again is to know the past,” Carles Vallejo contends. As the president of the Barcelona-based Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism, Vallejo is well placed to understand the weight of that statement.  

Vallejo was only in his mid-twenties and had already been living in exile for a few years when Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died an old man in his bed on November 20, 1975.