It was 1973 when they came for my brother. He was nineteen. A student at the Complutense University in Madrid. He wrote a leaflet denouncing police brutality during a factory strike. He wasn’t a terrorist. He wasn’t even a radical. He just believed in democracy.

We lived in a flat near Lavapiés. One morning, the Policía Armada knocked. No warrant. No explanation. They took him in broad daylight, in front of my mother. She screamed, and they hit her. I was twelve and watching from the kitchen doorway.

For weeks, we didn’t know where he was. My father bribed a clerk at the Ministry. That’s how we found out: La Dirección General de Seguridad — the dreaded DGS — had him in their basement. That place was infamous. They called it “the room with no windows.” A torture chamber where students were electroshocked and beaten. They didn’t ask questions. They extracted confessions.

By 1975, Franco was dying. But we didn’t know when he’d finally go. Every day, state television showed him waving stiffly from balconies, flanked by generals and bishops. He looked like a mummy. Yet still, the regime held.

Censorship had eased slightly — foreign music, a few imported books — but political dissent was a death sentence. ETA bombings were used as excuses to crack down even harder. You could be arrested for a joke, a mural, or a misplaced glance at a cop.

My brother came back in February 1975. He never smiled again. We had democracy within a year of Franco’s death, yes — but don’t mistake survival for freedom. We had learned to be quiet, to lie, to look away. And it takes generations to unlearn fear.

  • Karl Schumacher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons