Impact case study database

The passionate and frequently acrimonious public debate about rear-guard executions during the Spanish Civil War goes to the heart of how Spain remembers its recent past and thinks about itself today. Ruiz’s work on the ‘Red Terror’ [3.3, 3.4] established him in Spanish public consciousness as a significant authority on that war. This contributed in turn to substantial public interest in Ruiz’s book on the Paracuellos atrocity of November 1936. It has become the most controversial mass killing of the Civil War, due to the involvement of Santiago Carrillo: the Communist leader who played a crucial role in the peaceful transition to democracy in the 1970s. Carrillo died at the age of 97 in September 2012 without accepting any responsibility for the atrocity, and subsequent media coverage of his long political career revealed that many of the myths surrounding the massacres remained firmly in place – in particular the supposed dominant role played by Soviet advisors.

Publication of Paracuellos was marked by El Mundo, Spain’s second largest daily newspaper [14,908,000 unique users across all platforms], with an extended article by Ruiz on the atrocity, headlined ‘Carrillo was the ‘facilitator’ of Paracuellos’. This attracted nearly 200 comments in which contributors debated whether or not, as “Fernando_0” put it, ‘it would be better TO MOVE ON’. An accompanying article, by the journalist Julio Martín Alarcón, described the execution site [5.1].

Broad subsequent dissemination throughout Spain was achieved over the following days and weeks via television, radio and print interviews. Television appearances included the popular news and discussion programme El gato al agua. Radio contributions included a discussion on Spain’s third-largest radio network Onda cero [average audience: 2,500,000]. Ruiz also gave an interview to the national daily La Razón, alongside a syndicated interview for the regional press: Norte de Castilla, Ideal de Granada and Diario de León. The public awareness thus generated was reflected in a second printing of the book, ordered little more than two weeks after initial publication [5.2].

Two popular history magazines carried reviews of the book: Historia de Iberia Vieja and Historia y Vida. The online newspaper Libertad Digital hosted a discussion dedicated to it, which has since been viewed 19,217 times and has attracted 232 comments. A common theme among informed observers was that a highly controversial issue had at last been definitively settled. Historia y Vida described the book as a ‘fair approach’, going beyond the classic right-left visions in Spanish historiography [5.3].

A reviewer in El País [56,600,000 unique users per month] said:

‘[We have waited] Nearly 80 years for a definitive account of part of our history, and now that enormous collection of unfortunate histories we know by the name of Paracuellos can sleep the sleep of the just… Thanks to Ruiz we can today say that Paracuellos was an atrocity committed by Republican leaders, or better put, those on the Republican side who violated the very legal order that they were defending’ [5.4].

A piece in Revista de Libros, an influential prize-winning literary magazine, confirmed this view:

‘Ruiz establishes definitively that the crimes [of Paracuellos] were committed by Spaniards and that it is absurd to minimise their responsibility by blaming the Soviets. Also, he ends in establishing – let’s hope forever – that we cannot consider the removal of prisoners and the executions in the Jarama Riverbank as an isolated event. [This] is for the moment the most truthful, rigorous and ordered account of those events, which can be read by the whole world’ [5.5].

Ruiz’s work has since become a reference point in contemporary news stories linked to the civil war, and in historical fiction set in this most contentious of eras. Examples include an article in El Mundo in January 2016, reporting the news that Melchor Rodríguez García, the anarchist leader who strove to end the Paracuellos massacres, was going to have a Madrid street named after him [5.6]. Ruiz’s work has been cited as a source in Ignacio Martínez de Pisón’s novel Filek: El estafador que engañó a Franco (2018): part of a genre that reaches a wide audience in contemporary Spain, where a novelist examines the life of a controversial historical figure – in this case a scientist who tricked Franco [5.7]. Finally, a November 2019 feature piece in ABC (one of Spain’s leading daily newspapers), timed to coincide with the 83^rd anniversary of the killings, was based entirely on Ruiz’s research [5.8].