Ainhoa Arteta and the 51 years separating her from Francoism

Arteta, the Okendo theft and the arithmetic of Francoism

How many years do you have to have lived under a dictatorship to be able to say you suffered under it? The question has been hanging over Ainhoa Arteta for days, ever since the soprano publicly reported the assault on her car in the paid car park on Okendo street in San Sebastián and the theft of a handbag containing a large amount of personal documents. To the incident she added a phrase that has peine a recurring debate: «I suffered the revolutionary tax and I refused to move to tax havens». And into the public conversation, inevitably, crept Francoism. It takes only a subtraction to light the fuse.

The subtraction nobody disputes

Franco died in 1975. It is 2026. That makes 51 years. Arteta is 61. When the dictator died, she was ten. The calculation, of an almost offensive simplicity, is the one that stings most: the person who today claims to have suffered under the dictatorship was of playground age while the teacher broke the news in class. It is not a new argument, but every time a public figure of that generation brushes up against the register of historical memory, the same counter comes back out. And it never fails.

Some draw a direct line between the desire not to pay taxes in tax havens and having endured ETA's extortion. Others respond that resisting the pressure of an armed group is one thing, and quite another to claim the status of victim of Francoism with barely a tenth of the dictatorship behind you.

The outstretched arm and the memory of primary school

The second front is school. One camp holds that in the final years of Francoism pupils were still being drilled with the outstretched arm and sang Cara al Sol. Another, carrying the same age, flatly denies it and describes something different: the line with a hand resting on the shoulder of the classmate in front, a manoeuvre for lining up, not a salute. A third account places that drill well into democracy, in the 1979/80 school year, when education had not yet been devolved to Spain's autonomous regions. The conclusion that emerges is not that some are lying: the Francoist school was a mosaic, dependent on the teacher of the day, on the school —state-run or run by priests— and on whether the town was a provincial capital or a village in the middle of nowhere.

From the car park to the full list of grievances

As is so often the case, the theft was only the trigger. Within hours the affair had absorbed everything else: Arteta's support for Plácido Domingo when the tenor was in the eye of the storm, the alleged side effects of vaccination —a claim circulating without any verification— and, of course, immigration. Some try to shift a car park theft onto the terrain of the perpetrators' origins, without a single piece of evidence to back it up.

And then there is the equation that grates on the other side. Calling what peine to Arteta a «revolutionary tax» has a historical problem: for decades that euphemism denoted the extortion racket through which ETA financed its machinery, an extortion that did not always stop at a stolen handbag. Equating one with the other requires, at the very least, a remarkable exercise in stretching.

So in the end it comes down to this: a soprano reports a theft in a car park and we end up debating whether she was ten or nine years old when Franco died and whether her teacher's outstretched arm was aimed at Hitler or merely intended to form a straight line. The thief from Okendo, without meaning to, has turned a burglary into a seminar on 1965 pedagogy.