I grew up in Spain amid a collective amnesia about Franco. It is time we faced up to our dark past | María Ramírez

This week marks 50 years of Spanish democracy, but the failure to talk more about the crimes of the dictatorship leaves us vulnerable

Like most Spaniards alive today, I was born after the death of Franco 50 years ago. Even for my parents’ generation, the dictatorship that lasted from 1939 until 20 November 1975 is today a distant bad dream. Growing up, the stories I heard were mostly about the post-Franco democratic transition, a time full of promise and energy as younger people set about rebuilding everything from scratch.

My mother, who was pregnant with me when she voted in the first free elections in 1977, talks about that time as the happiest of her life. International media reporting from that year described “a broad optimism” in a soon-to-be “healthy, modern, lively nation”.

María Ramírez is a journalist and deputy managing editor of elDiario.es, a news outlet in Spain