Walls of Anxiety: The Iconography of Anti-NATO protests in Spain,1981–6

In 1981, a Spanish leaflet vigorously declared: ‘Come and paint peace with us. […] There is a space just for you, occupy it, take your brush, push them back, until they stay silent and, on the contrary, we can all express ourselves.’ ¹ Over 15 Madrid neighbourhood associations, along with some feminist and ecologist collectives, were involved in the initiative. It invited people to gather at Plaza Mayor, ‘to paint the demands of a pacifist city’. The practice of collectively creating pintadas, that is, mural paintings and graffiti on abandoned building walls in large cities, became one of the favourite repertoires of contention for Spanish anti-war movements.

This article addresses the protest culture of the Spanish anti-NATO movement from 1981, when Spain sought membership into the Atlantic Alliance and joined it a year later, until 1986 when the results of the referendum stipulated that the Iberian country would remain in NATO. As stated by cultural sociologist Murray Edelman, works of art in social movements generate ideas about leadership, bravery, cowardice, altruism, dangers, authority, and fantasies about the future. ² As a matter of fact, the visual realm is not only a pivotal battleground for contentious politics, but also an entangled universe of culturally shared meaning. ³ By acknowledging the multi-layered power of images in mobilisations, this contribution draws on an interdisciplinary strand of scholarship that delves into the visual expression of social movements and their reinterpretation of a pre-existing imagery to voice dissent, boost beliefs and ultimately form a collective actor. ⁴ Namely, it analyses the iconographic symbolism evoked by a selection of pintadas mostly on the walls of buildings in the outskirts of Madrid and Barcelona. ⁵

The sample for this visual analysis has been selected from the streets of the most densely populated Spanish urban centres where the grassroots artistic activism of both neighbourhood associations and anti-NATO committees grew up significantly during the different stages of the post-Franco transition to liberal democracy. For instance, on 15 November 1981, 400,000 people protested in Madrid against the entrance to NATO and on 23 February 1986, almost 750,000 citizens. ⁶ Furthermore, according to a Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Spanish Centre for Sociological Research – CIS) survey in 1983, Spanish public opinion gradually became more suspicious of NATO during the democratisation process. Whereas in June 1975, before Franco’s death, 57 per cent of Spaniards was in favour of the Spanish membership into NATO, in March 1983, only 13 per cent of respondents entirely agreed with the country’s prospect of integration into the alliance. ⁷

The focus will be on how and on the basis of which arguments protesters framed their anti-NATO and peace message during the last stage of the Cold War, through a deep description and analysis of distinctive images and symbols. Bringing together iconographic analysis, sociology of art and memory studies, the paper interprets murals as a grassroots medium through which anti-NATO movements imagined and constituted themselves in connection with domestic developments, local cultural idiosyncrasies and wider international events. ⁸ The semiotic and iconographic analysis of the contentious visual imagery of the pintadas is an effective tool to assess how activists chose ‘some aspects of a perceived reality in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation’. ⁹ For social movements to successfully challenge the status quo and disseminate the core of their demands, they depend on the lure of powerful ‘condensing symbols’. In line with the sociologists James M. Jasper and Jane D. Poulsen, these are ‘visual images that neatly capture both cognitively and emotionally a range on meanings and covey a frame or theme’. ¹⁰ Furthermore, visual frames follow a different logic than words: they do not appeal to rational arguments but to emotions and rely on a shared visual knowledge, both evoking associations in an audience and helping to create the same audience’s world. ¹¹ However, despite its analytical value current historiography on societal mobilisation has largely ignored the use of visual protest material as empirical data. ¹²

By tracing, describing and tackling several ‘condensing symbols’ in the aforementioned selection of murals, the article argues that the Spanish anti-NATO movement ‘imagined’ the global nuclear crisis of the first half of the 1980s through visual tropes that were distinctively different from other European movements against the deployment of nuclear missiles during the last stage of the Cold War. ¹³ Notably, the paper claims that, for sections of Spanish society, the pintadas mainly served as an emotional bottom-up counter-narrative to the hegemonic model of liberal democracy and security system offered by the Atlantic Alliance and the Western bloc.

One of the major reasons for this discrepancy lies in the Spanish political and social context. Spain was not among the five NATO members chosen for deployment of nuclear missiles in the wake of the ‘dual track’ decision. This refers to NATO’s collective resolution in 1979 to position 108 US Pershing II intermediate range ballistic missiles and 464 ground launched Cruise missiles in response to Soviet deployment of SS-20 weapons targeted at Western Europe. ¹⁴ Spain became a NATO member only in May 1982, seven years after the death of the military dictator Francisco Franco. The accession to the North Atlantic organisation and the overall question of Spain’s security orientation during the democratisation process divided citizens and parties and spearheaded a multi-faceted grassroots movement across the country. ¹⁵ This movement was anti-nuclear, but at the core of the protest was the demand to remove American bases from Spanish soil and endorse the anti-militarist cause and the spirit of neutrality. Moreover, due to the censorship under Franco, the Iberian country had almost failed to experience previous protest waves against nuclear weapons and testing. Nuclear fear was pertinent to the mobilisation of the peace movement but during the so-called crisis of the Euromissiles, the country was also coming to terms with an extremely violent Civil War and the social legacy of a long military dictatorship. Therefore, it was Spain’s specific political and social situation that largely defined the cultural trends within the Spanish peace movement. ¹⁶

Although a shared transnational circulation of anti-war symbols and anti-nuclear beliefs can clearly be identified, it was neither the anxiety about potential nuclear annihilation nor the worsening superpower relations that ultimately moved Spanish activists. Rather, Spain’s protest movement was driven by serious concerns and deep bewilderment regarding both the country’s international status and national security during the entangled transition from military dictatorship to democracy. It was further motivated by public anti-American sentiment, disillusionment with the democratisation pacts and a widespread aversion against Spain’s rapid westernisation.

Which visual imagery did the Spanish anti-NATO movement apply in pintadas to express their anxieties and feelings about the last stage of the Cold War and the country’s membership of the Western bloc? The analysis of the pintadas reveals four visual master frames: first, a distinctively anti-American tendency of a semi-peripheral society against the Western order; second, the intricate question of Spanish nationalism and national sovereignty; third, the bottom-up process of democratisation; and finally the challenges of modernisation within the Spanish society during the 1980s that abruptly altered gender relations and lifestyles.

As was the case in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution or in Chile during the struggle against Pinochet’s military regime, surfaces of abandoned buildings and marginalised urban spaces in Spain’s major cities were painted with murals and graffiti, celebrating the collective liberation of the Spanish people from the dictatorship’s cultural constraints. ¹⁷ These paintings represented a fleeting collective work and striking visual response at the grassroots level to the socio-political changes after Franco’s death. ¹⁸ Before the first democratic elections in 1977, a mural in Barcelona even went so far as to proclaim emphatically: “Don’t vote, paint!” ¹⁹

During the late-Franco period, Spain moved from underdevelopment to experiencing western capitalism, urbanisation and economic growth within in a very short lapse of time-frame. ²⁰ As a result, the political transition from an authoritarian regime to parliamentary democracy went hand in hand with the accelerated consolidation of a lifestyle based on mass consumption and Western modernity. However, it also coincided with two oil crises, inflation and a dramatic upward curve of unemployment. ²¹ As elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, in the immediate aftermath of the protests of 1968, the walls of buildings in Spanish cities turned into a low-cost medium to express the social impact of rapid modernisation, economic dislocation and at the same time desire for greater direct citizen involvement in neighbourhood management. ²² Notably, the painted walls mirrored local grievances about these unbalanced transformations, particularly in working-class neighbourhoods stripped from basic public services. Indeed, a number of urban neighbourhoods developed in a chaotic manner in the wake of a building spree during late-Francoism, caused by massive internal migration from the countryside. ²³ In contrast to historical accounts of civic apathy during the democratisation process, ²⁴ the Spanish neighbourhood movement became one of the most socially active urban configurations in Europe during the 1970s. ²⁵ Notably, the artistic protest of the Portugalete neighbourhood is particularly illustrative of the modalities and scope of the Spanish practice of collective creating pintadas.

In this Madrilenian suburban area, the local neighbourhood association painted over 50 murals in 1976 to protest against the local authorities’ lack of interest in the district’s urban planning problems. Over 500 square metres were painted during the patron saints’ days of San Pedro and San Pablo. The murals were planned and created by small gathering made up of about five people among the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and engaged local artists. They were the same citizens who carried together the buckets and bottle of paint, exchanging brushes and tools. Sometimes the neighbourhood associations had the permission of local authorities, sometimes they acted only through their local committees and ultimately risked fines or even imprisonment. ²⁶

As the Portugalete example helps to understand, the pintadas mainly expressed several material demands of the neighbourhood associations, but most importantly the call for green spaces, cultural services or the defence of a local area under environmental threat. In 1977, the art historian Aleixandre Cirici investigated several pintadas in Barcelona. ²⁷ He emphasised their use of a naïve and childlike style without any linear perspective as well as their richness of colour as a way to communicate vitality, pride of the democratisation process and a spontaneous artistic expression close to citizens. During the transition to democracy paintings on Spanish walls juxtaposed colourful objects and symbols against a neutral background: multitudes of citizens, childlike pictures of houses with curtains, trees and mountains with the sun optimistically peeking out. There was no trace of heroism and suffering that had been popular in the political iconography of Civil War posters ²⁸ or in Communist symbolism and socialist realism typical of the murals of the Carnation Revolution. ²⁹ Many of these wall paintings depicted Spain’s path towards freedom and democracy metaphorically as a Sunday trip, by train, by motorbike or by car. ³⁰ A frequently used trope was the allegorical association of democratic freedom with self-fulfilment and happiness of an ordinary family at a Sunday outing, hence the straightforward equation of democracy with the search for better material and individual living conditions.

The murals contributed to humanising local urban change, but also attempted to ward off the anxiety over Spain’s membership of the Western bloc. Notably, the distress generated by two domestic events drove the Spanish people to protest en masse against the Cold War order: the failed military coup on 23 February 1981 that threatened the consolidation of the fledgling democratic institutions, and the sudden acceleration of Spain’s NATO accession in the same year. The latter development broke for the first time the implicit pact of refraining from publicly discussing the country’s position within the Eastern and the Western bloc. Under the Franco regime Spain had not been allowed to join NATO due to its non-democratic status; however, it had already established a special economic and military relationship with the United States through the Pact of Madrid in 1953. ³¹ In exchange for economic and military aid, the USA set up the naval base Rota, three air bases at Torrejón, Zaragoza and Morón, over which they had almost total jurisdiction, as well as numerous other military facilities such as a 870km-long oil pipeline between Rota and Zaragoza. ³² As elsewhere in Europe, the US also kept some of its nuclear arsenals in Spain between 1958 and 1976 through a series of additional secret clauses to the Madrid bilateral agreement. ³³ Despite that, previous peace protests mostly focused on the right to conscientious objection, only reluctantly addressing the question of nuclear arsenals, an issue long concealed by censorship under Franco’s rule despite the Palomares nuclear accident in 1966. ³⁴

At first glance, the rapidly growing mobilisation for nuclear disarmament at the beginning of the 1980s seems to be an anomaly considering the indifference of the majority of Spanish people towards foreign and defence politics. ³⁵ The reason for the increasingly successful protests was related to the specific social fabric of Spanish society. Sections of Spaniards reactivated strong emotional anti-Franco resentments against NATO membership as a tangible threat to the democratic consolidation and material wellbeing of local communities. ³⁶ Protests initially were purely at grassroots level, revitalising the networks of the neighbourhood associations, young challengers and their protest repertoires during the transition period. Only later did left-wing political parties strategically tap into the mobilisation of protests. ³⁷

Following the first march to the US air base at Torrejón on 25 January 1981, numerous local Comités anti-OTAN (anti-NATO committees) were founded, initially in Madrid and Barcelona neighbourhoods and factories and subsequently throughout Spain. ³⁸ In 1983, Zona Cero, the journal of the Madrid’s anti-NATO Commission, confirmed that painting murals was one of the main activities of the 25 committees it represented. ³⁹ Furthermore, in a letter from 1983, Bill Cutler, a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) peace activist who travelled through Spain, noted that: “(…) Whilst graffiti with slogans such as ‘No NATO’ and ‘Yankee go home’ are in abundance, what is much more impressive, is the large works of art against war, painted on walls, (…) done by, or with the consent, of the local authority.” ⁴⁰ A heterogeneous array of leftist social actors took part in these committees: members of grassroots Catholic, environmental, feminist and conscientious objection associations, local militants of the Communist and Socialist Left, independent activists, youths of the New Left and Anarchists who, feeling in several cases disenchanted with liberal democracy, sought new causes to pursue. It is possible to identify two major umbrella organizations that coordinated peace activists and anti-NATO groups in Spain. From 1983 onwards, the Coordinadora Estatal de Organizaciones Pacifistas (National Coordinating Organization of the Spanish Peace Groups – CEOP), united anti-NATO grassroots groups. In contrast, the pro-Communist Comisión de Acción por la Paz y el Desarme (Action Commission for Peace and Disarmament in Madrid – CAPD) emerged from the social base of the parliamentary left. ⁴¹ These political activists came predominantly from sections of Spanish society that felt excluded from political and power arrangements of the democratisation process. Notably, they experienced a strong dissatisfaction with the available modes and means of communication of majoritarian political parties and with their corporatist arrangements and technocratic approach to national politics. Primarily, they blamed the evolution of the new Spanish parliamentary democracy and its inability to purge the main political and military elites of the dictatorship and radically break with the dictatorial regime. ⁴²

The contents of the pintadas thus amalgamated the core values and social claims of these different and sometimes conflicting cultural and political milieus, generating a sense of identification and resistance in local communities as well as a compelling visualisation of self-representation and pride. Spanish murals, as art historian Muñoz Asensio asserts, are comparable to paintings ceiling of a Baroque church, given their use of rhetorical visual tropes that places special emphasis on persuasion and convincing of outsiders. ⁴³ These thought-provoking visuals expressed the aim of anti-war activists to counter the support for Spain’s accession to NATO in the Spanish population. Their purpose was to offer a simple and emotional counter-narrative to the pervasive government story that saw the membership in the Atlantic Alliance as the only way to guarantee the country’s security and the consolidation of parliamentary democracy in the face of the worsening international situation and the undemocratic tendencies of Spanish armed forces. Indeed, the pro-NATO supporters, that is, mainly government elites, several centre-right and centre-left political milieus, interpreted NATO as the major tool to quell the Spanish army’s inclination to stage a coup and to drive the country apart from its international isolation and technological backwardness. ⁴⁴

Mushroom clouds in burning skies, gory skulls, and thousands of people confined in atomic shelters like insects: the final decade of the Cold War brought a global proliferation of visual expressions representing the anxiety of nuclear annihilation within mainstream culture. ⁴⁵ In the late 1970s, thanks to the extensive diffusion of popular movies and songs on radioactive fallout, the perception of the devastating effects of a nuclear war directly entered the homes of ordinary people for the first time. ⁴⁶ Even Spanish mass culture embraced such an apocalyptic imagery. For instance, the song by Ana Belén Pánico en Torrejón 1984 (Panic at Torrejón) or the ironic El bayón de la OTAN 1983 (NATO’s dance) by the Catalan group La Trinca echoed the same fears of a nuclear disaster in the vicinity of a US military base. ⁴⁷ The television film The Day After was widely circulated in Spain and triggered lengthy debates. ⁴⁸ Nevertheless, the imagination of the activists was fuelled by the relationship between Spain and the United States and its impact on the complicated process of democratisation and domestic security rather than by the anxiety over an imminent nuclear war. As a result, numerous doomsday scenarios common within Spanish nuclear culture were distinctively embedded in the intense revitalization of anti-American clichés that had previously circulated among the anti-Franco opposition.

In contrast, the Soviet Union was partially absent in the pintadas: in the late 1970s, many Spanish left-wing activists supported the Eurocommunist current that sought to minimise the influence of the USSR on Spanish Communists. ⁴⁹ Moreover, protesters from the New Left had already embraced an unorthodox Marxism that distanced itself from the Soviet one. Many anti-NATO activists considered the Soviet Union too far away to pose a threat to Spanish security. ⁵⁰ Consequently, there are few murals in the Salvador Segui Foundation collection of pintadas that denounced the Soviet Union. For instance, in an anonymous mural on a overpass wall the anti-war activists did not depict the USSR as a human or living character but rather portrayed it abstractly as a red arrow opposing a stars and stripes arrow, symbolising the US. In another unidentified mural, a chessboard and a pawn with the colour of the Spanish flag show up. A stars and stripes hand moves this chess piece. On the side of the mural there is a huge red and black writing stating ‘No to the politics of the blocs’. Again, there is not any tangible representation of the USSR and notably who was moving the pawn was the US hand, not the opposing superpower. The USSR was still a rather difficult topic to depict for Spanish anti-nuclear activists who seemed not to directly cooperate with peace and human rights movements in Eastern Europe during the same period. Interestingly, this critical attitude towards US policy was reflected in public opinion polls conducted during the transition. For instance, in December 1986, according to a CIS survey, 30 per cent of Spaniards perceived the US as the major threat to Spanish peace, compared to 13 per cent who identified the Soviet Union as the main culprit of Cold War tensions. ⁵¹

The Spanish anti-NATO movement strongly reactivated anti-American sentiment of anti-Franco and left-wing milieus supporters that had arisen during the late period of the authoritarian regime. The movement hence capitalised on the perception that the United States had abandoned Spain during the long struggle for democracy. ⁵² In the imagery of those who had resisted the dictatorship, the defence agreements with the US in the aftermath of the Second World War dashed any hopes of a possible defeat of Franco and a return to democracy. Consequently, in their view the Americans overlapped with the Pentagon military, who had decisively contributed to the international legitimation of Franco’s military dictatorship. Spanish neighbourhood walls were full of images of US soldiers and marines armed with big long-barrelled rifles. In several paintings, American soldiers were even symbolically overlapped with Francoist soldiers, such as in another anonymous mural where three soldiers with US helmets, all dressed in black as Francoist soldiers, penetrate through a door wielding a black death flag. ⁵³

Pintadas almost never contained symbols of peace during the Cold War, with the notable exception of several murals featuring Picasso’s peace dove or the CND logo. The simplistic dichotomous watchword ‘Peace – yes, NATO – no’ provided the major reference to the concept of peace in Spanish murals. The visual representation of brutality and lack of morality revolved around the perceived ‘enemy’, that is to say the US and, as an extension, NATO. Activists exclusively blamed the US for the world’s arms race and used moral shocking visual tropes of many propaganda posters of the two world wars. ⁵⁴ In doing so, they nurtured anti-American sentiment as a way to disseminate their claims within the Spanish society.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Mural made by PCE – Foundation Salvador Segui, Madrid, Collection Antimilitarism-Transition, Box 4, 1981.

The depiction of the US as a culprit is evident in a mural painted by the Partido Comunista de España (Spanish Communist Party – PCE) in 1981 (Figure 1). Communist militants were among the front-runners of local anti-NATO groups and, given the party’s electoral crisis, strategically assimilated the aesthetics of new social movements with the aim of increasing their appeal to society. ⁵⁵ As a matter of fact, in this pintada, the Communist Party logo is deliberately small with the aim of distracting the attention of passers-by from the partisan dimension of the protest. The name of the neighbourhood association often replaced the political party’s logo in order to signify the advocated depoliticisation of the anti-NATO movement. Two-thirds of the surface are covered by a parody of a key detail of Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgment, ‘the Creation of Adam’, the very moment in which God gives life to the first man. God is depicted as the United States, portrayed in the well-known American military recruitment icon of Uncle Sam. ⁵⁶ In juxtaposition, the first man, Adam, is portrayed as the Spanish prime minister of the centre-right Unión de Centro Democrático government (Union of the Democratic Centre – UCD), Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who accelerated the process of entry into NATO after the failed military coup. He is almost touching God’s index finger to receive the breath of life. The mural reflected the concern of the activists over the country’s accession to NATO and how it may turn Spain into a cheap imitation of the US in the dawn of a new democratic era. The president wears a green outfit like the superhero of the American comic Green Lantern, a fictional member of a sort of intergalactic conservative police force that through the colour green is assimilated to the allegedly conservationist UCD policies. ⁵⁷ According to the protesters, both – the external (USA) and the internal (UCD government) enemy – epitomised the two core threats to Spanish peace. Besides anti-Americanism, a challenging anti-government rhetoric deeply charged all Spanish murals. From 1982, this anti-establishment anger was directed against Felipe González, prime minister of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español government (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – PSOE), especially after his U-turn towards a more pro-Atlantic stance. ⁵⁸ Indeed, from 1983 to 1986, many anti-NATO posters portrayed caricatures of the Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González, along with the neo-liberal US President Ronald Reagan or the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, riding giant nuclear missiles. ⁵⁹

Unlike the gravity and realism of war posters, an ironic and sarcastic tone often pervaded anti-NATO murals. They tapped into the bitter black humour of movies such as Dr Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1964) ⁶⁰ and the global circulation of post-1968 counterculture spirit. ⁶¹ The playful aesthetics of pop art and cartoons as well as the extensive use of naïve images showed both the strong aversion against professional politics, indirect critiques on technocratic models of society and the quest of exhibiting authenticity among anti-NATO activists. ⁶² In a mural of the Moviment de Joventuts Comunistes de Catalunya (youth section of the Communist Movement of Catalonia – MJCC), for instance, the French comic book character Obelix carries a large missile on his back, while Asterix shouts against him in anger. In another one, an activist lowers his stars and stripes panties in the act of defecation: in addition to anxiety and anger, pleasure and mirth were part and parcel of the repertoire of emotions stirred up by murals. Fun could easily familiarise concerns about a nuclear war among citizens. ⁶³ Furthermore, dealing with complicated topics such as the possibility of a nuclear war through a sarcastic approach was more bearable along with the use of techniques from mass media and pop art that were had already been on display in Spanish art works on the Vietnam War during Late-Francoism. ⁶⁴

In a complete subversion of biblical iconography, in the above-mentioned PCE’s mural God/Uncle Sam is not surrounded by angels but by six black missiles, even though Spain had not been selected as a deployment site for nuclear missiles. Similarly, a plethora of Spanish anti-NATO murals suggested the idea of a looming war through the dark images of killing machines such as rockets, bombers, tanks and even an old cannon. ⁶⁵ Notably, this painting visually contrasts the coldness and painfulness of an inanimate technology with the colourful playfulness of both cartoons. Moreover, the two depicted characters rest on some clouds that are, at a closer look, the head of a giant nuclear mushroom. ⁶⁶ The atomic mushroom became the inspiration for the first logo of the Madrid anti-NATO Commission that also contained the main dichotomous slogan of the movement ‘NO NATO-BASES OUT’. Indeed, according to anti-war activists, Spain’s NATO membership implied the high possibility of new nuclear missiles being installed in the Iberian country and the transformation of the country in a military target. As a result, the extensive depiction of atomic mushrooms, along with NATO missiles, had the function of disclosing the protesters’ assumption that the immediate unilateral distancing from the Western bloc and the restoration of previous neutrality was needed urgently to prevent an alleged nuclear disaster on Spanish soil.

Furthermore, as the PCE’s mural well illustrated (Figure 1), scenarios of devastation contributed to spark moral outrage among ordinary members of the anti-Euromissiles movement. Particularly the widespread depiction of black rubble, human figures wrapped in orange flames and glowing spheres suggested a strong feeling of insecurity and forsakenness among the Spanish vis-a-vis the US. For instance, in another mural three almost-naked men run in different directions in panic. The sky is a bright red, while the hair of one of the men catches fire. The ground is covered with ashes, while a full speed missile with the word NATO is coming from a corner. The recurrent representation of an incandescent sphere symbolised divine power and consequently the perception of the US as an overwhelming, omnipotent and all controlling force. ⁶⁷

Most importantly, the vast number of images depicting destruction primarily evoked terrible memories of the aerial bombings of civilians and the bloodbath of the Civil War. ⁶⁸ During the democratisation process, Spanish institutions preferred to silence these memories in order to facilitate a transition based on reconciliation among the different groups of Spanish society. However, traumas and fears caused by the fratricidal struggle still impacted society, affecting both the older and the younger generation, among them the protagonists of the transition to democracy and the anti-NATO movement. ⁶⁹ The alliance with the US reminded many of the bloody rise of the Francoist dictatorship and its peculiar idea of peace, that is to say, the Francoist propagandistic discourse that saw in dictator Franco the only one capable of bringing a durable peace to Spain after a long period of instability, coups and Republican violence.

As a result, metaphorical references to the upsetting legacies of Civil War and Francoist dictatorship largely percolated the visual codes of the pintadas through the images of foreign aerial bombings and destroyed buildings. For instance, a mural displayed the silhouette of a city from the visual angle of a fighter-bomber shedding its deadly load. Another one showed the ruins of a city that looked similar to the photographs of the old Spanish town of Belchite, destroyed by a bombing raid of the Civil War. ⁷⁰ Moreover, the frequent use of details from Picasso’s Guernica painting, completed in 1937, tapped into that violent war experience and the difficult coming to terms with the memory of the dictatorship and the clandestine anti-fascist opposition. ⁷¹ Like the portrayal of Nazi-victims in visualisations by German peace groups, the victims of the Guernica bombing became a recurring topic for the emotive urging of activists to protest. ⁷² The activists perceived themselves as martyrs of a long lasting injustice and projected the traumatic memory of the Civil War and the hardship of the dictatorship onto the United States.

In addition, according to anti-NATO protesters, the alliance between the USA and Spain could not be considered democratically legitimate since it had been crafted and maintained during the dictatorship. In their opinion, it was impossible to trust a state that continued to support military dictatorships in Latin America. The toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, a personality much loved by the Spanish Left, and the support for the subsequent dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet was seen as a suitable example of America’s lack of morality. The condor of the Andes – symbol of Chile – appeared in several murals alongside the US bald eagle to suggest that after the attempted military coup in 1981 the Spanish saw the threat to end up like Chile, in other words, to return into amilitary dictatorship with US support. ⁷³

The activists were furthermore outraged by the perceived lack of support showed for the Spanish democratisation process by the US. For instance, in 1981, Alexander Haig, US Secretary of State, dismissed the failed military coup of that year as a Spanish ‘internal matter’. Such statements further discredited the US in the eyes of the activists. Some even believed that the American indifference after the coup – which was in stark contrast to many European countries supporting the Spanish democratisation process – might suggest a looming intervention by the United States. ⁷⁴ The activists feared that the US could indirectly interfere as they had done in Central America with the military support of the so-called Contras rightwing rebel groups in their struggle against the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. ⁷⁵ Similarly, the activists’ scare of moving back in a dictatorship with the US occult approval and NATO military mediation is noticeable in an anonymous pintada: it portrayed an undefined and moustachioed Spanish general as an American puppet or a robot controlled by the Americans. Connected to the US flag by electrodes, he points his finger to recruit new soldiers (Figure 2).

Several murals depicted the Americans as deceitful and sanctimonious characters. In one pintada we see the recurrent icon of Uncle Sam with an angelic but false smile, inviting death to enter the door, while the doormat bears the words ‘peace’. Referring to the popular film Bienvenido Mister Marshall by Luis García Berlanga (Welcome Mr Marshall) 1953, ⁷⁶ another mural shows the USA as the three wise men. Yet instead of bringing precious gifts to the people, they carry bags filled with unemployment andmisery, repression andmilitarism, nuclear power stations andmilitary bases – the core grievances of Spanish protesters over the country’s alliance to the US.

Death is one of most frequent topics of the pintadas, often depicted through the image of grinning skulls or skeletons wearing US uniforms. ⁷⁷ In their pintadas, Spanish anti-war activists compared the dreaded US approach to Latin America with the violent legacies of the US war in Vietnam. Consequently, in their iconographic politics, they adopted the view of America as a dangerous and bringer of violent death from previous global protests against the Indo-China War. ⁷⁸ Furthermore, according to this anti-American sentiment, the bipolar global order would have been fatally undermined if Spain entered NATO. The Mediterranean balance would destabilise, generating new potential and hazardous foes against Spain, particularly in the turbulent areas of North Africa. Therefore, for the activists, the US did neither guarantee Spanish security nor was it a role model for democracy. On the contrary, they argued America contributed to Spain’s internal and external destabilisation.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

“For the next nuclear war, join the ranks of NATO” – Anonymous Mural - Foundation Salvador Segui, Madrid, Collection Antimilitarism-Transition, Box 4, 1981–2.

Alongside NATO membership, the ongoing negotiations on the issue of the American bases in 1976, 1981–2 and then in 1986–8 further exacerbated Spanish anxieties of an undue submission to America. ⁷⁹ The negotiating process reflected demands for greater fairness, and both, the Spanish mainstream press and democratic bargaining political authorities criticised the total dependency from the US that Franco’s foreign policy had caused during the dictatorship. On the one hand, Spanish negotiators intended to modernise bilateral relations and make them more transparent, which is why they disclosed in detail weaknesses of the 1953 agreements between Spain and the USA. On the other hand, the Spanish press often disseminated a negative image of the US during the final stage of the Cold War to put pressure on the negotiations and win the support of public opinion. ⁸⁰

Moreover, Spanish officials argued that the 1953 agreements between Spain and the USA did not constitute a mutual defence commitment: the USA never intervened in support of Spain in its diplomatic frictions with Morocco or Gibraltar. To add insult to injury, the US bases on Spanish territory had been activated on several occasions without prior Spanish consent, most recently during the Yom Kippur war in 1973, even though Spain had then declared its neutrality. ⁸¹ The unbalanced military relationship came to light in 1979 when the secret provisions on activating the US bases on Spanish soil in the event of an armed conflict became public. These previously additional secret clauses to the Pact of Madrid revealed that US military forces had enjoyed a generous freedom of movement in the past, which reinforced the image of Spanish victimhood. ⁸² Furthermore, during the transition several local disputes about criminal jurisdiction in regard to American military personnel in Spain arose. After stabbing a young Spanish woman to death in Zaragoza in 1978, a sergeant of the US Air Force was court-martialled by American authorities rather than tried by a Spanish court. ⁸³

As a result of these revelations during the first half of the decade, a number of citizens criticised the erosion of national sovereignty. According to anti-war activists, the USA represented a concrete threat to Spain’s survival as a sovereign nation, its national identity and self-esteem during an alleged delicate period of rebuilding the Spanish democratic system. A new wave of nationalism began to emerge, and symbols of the Spanish nation overran the pintadas through stylized geographical maps of Spain, well known characters of Spanish culture such as Don Quixote and the extensive use of red and yellow as colours of the national flag. ⁸⁴ This nationalist framework clearly characterises a mural of the local association Puente de la Carlota in the Madrid working-class neighbourhood of Vallecas (Figure 3). It features the battle between the romantic anti-hero Don Quixote, the protagonist of the eponymous novel by Cervantes, and the technological threat of NATO nuclear missiles, which rise into the blue skies of the arid Castilian land like the windmills in the novel. Don Quixote has the appearance of the popular cartoon character successfully created by Spanish national television between 1979 and 1980. ⁸⁵

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Mural made by “Puente de la Carlota” neighbourhood association in Vallecas (Madrid) – Foundation Salvador Segui, Madrid Collection Antimilitarism Transition, Box 4 1984–7.

Choosing a cherished national symbol such as Don Quixote offered the means of identification to all Spanish people, particularly to liberal and progressive citizens. Notably, radical citizens could compare their compromise with the democratisation process and their alleged revolutionary nature with the idealist knight who was optimistically capable of overcoming all adversities. ⁸⁶ The local anti-NATO committees also used Don Quixote as a symbol for popular sovereignty to disseminate their traits of irony and represent their strong belief in fighting for a just cause against state privileges and secrets. Local committees were convinced that it was possible to defeat military violence by means of culture and a dose of thoughtless idealism. In the depiction of the Puente de la Carlota neighbourhood’s mural, on the back of his smiling white horse Don Quixote advances fast towards the West only armed with a spear. The missiles aim eastwards, while the raven, which in the TVE cartoon had the appearance of the Walt Disney character Jim Crow (1941), also flies eastwards. What is striking is the opposition between the US flag both on the missiles and on the wings of the raven as a sort of shifty friend and the colours red and yellow of the fledgling Spanish democracy on Don Quixote’s shield. The symbol of the raven is ambiguous: it stands for loss and bed omen associated with the threat of NATO missiles but, the raven, as a talking bird, represents as well the capability of insight and self-discovery by activists.

At peace and anti-NATO protests activists often carried the flag of the Second Republic (1931–9). ⁸⁷ However, the murals also frequently show the colours of the flag of the new Spanish monarchy. Only few pintadas associated the red and yellow flag negatively with Francoist nationalism. Many murals use the less compromising geographic map of Spain to display national pride with the aim of avoiding potentially misunderstandable references to Spanish nationalism. ⁸⁸ Furthermore, the depiction of the Spanish map with a “for sale” sign, occupied by weaponry or soldiers, as a theatre of a tug-of-war or crushed by a military boot, showed the anxiety of a foreign invasion on national soil. This fear explains the reproduction of Goya’s painting Los fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo (The Third of May 1808) in several anti-NATO posters and specifically in PCE placards. It depicts a scene around the guerrilla fighters of the Peninsula War or Guerra de la Independencia against the Napoleonic Empire (1808–14). ⁸⁹ The use of such a nationalist iconographic reference was intended to stress the courage of Spanish insurgents who had been able to rise up, resist, and ultimately help turn the tide of the French occupation in a bottom-up manner and trigger a war of independence. ⁹⁰ The Spanish people should have acted in a similar way towards NATO and US military bases, enabling a full-fledged democratic regeneration. Moreover, according to Spanish left-wing anti-Americanism, the US acted like a colonial power, treating its NATO allies as inferior with the aim of increasing its economic power without any respect for developing or peripheral countries, such as – allegedly – Spain. The perception of the US as a settler colonial state is mirrored in the murals by frequent depictions of white Americans trying to sell dangerous weapons to native Indian Americans. ⁹¹

The representation of national symbols expressed the protesters’ belief in the power of national independence and how the exit from NATO would protect the country’s vital national interests. For the activists, NATO membership constrained rather than protected Spain. The vitality of the nationalist framing is even more striking given the intense resurgence of regionalist sentiments as occurred during the Spanish period of democratisation. The revival of a strong nationalist sentiment coexisted with the local regionalism of small neighbourhoods and emerging local autonomies in the anti-NATO movement. OPEN IN VIEWER

A blurred mass of human faces is looking towards the observer: the mural entitled ‘No NATO, no military bases, no Yankees’ celebrated the emergence of grassroots demands in the Spanish public arena (Figure 4). The undistinguished faces harked back to the idea of an anonymous and inclusive crowd as portrayed in the murals of the neighbourhood associations during the democratisation process. Other visuals of the anti-NATO movement depicted well-defined faces of men and women of all ages and every social background from the community of activists, who doggedly stood up to Spain’s internal and external enemies both within and outside. The pictures do not show heroic figures nor the emaciated faces of Communist neorealism, but rather a crowd of ordinary citizens who dealt with the ‘cold’ technological concept of war, conversely creating a human-made barrier against the penetration of inanimate military warheads or nuclear missiles. For instance, the CEOP’s logo portrayed a crowd who is knocking down the letters A and T in the word NATO, turning it into a giant NO with the American flag in the background. The logo took on the aesthetics of the German poster “Pershing II –Cruise Missiles. NO!” (1983). In this poster a group of protesters was kicking and punching an oversized nuclear warhead. The missile had been pushed to the extreme right edge and was about to topple over. ⁹²

Similarly, on a sticker for the Madrid demonstration ‘For peace and disarmament’ (1981), women, men and children atop a stonewall rose to their feet with an air of defiance on a wall of stone to cast out Uncle Sam who, accompanied by a toy missile, looked at them grimly from head to toe. ⁹³ In the picture of this sticker, as in many other anti-NATO visuals, power relations appear as turned upside down. The activists now hold the upper hand to the detriment of the US. As in the expressive codes of the protest culture of other European peace movements, the mass of activists metaphorically depicted the energy and collective agency integral to the movement. Furthermore, the representation of the crowds significantly shifted from traditional socialist iconography that predominantly featured workers and peasants ⁹⁴ to ordinary citizens regardless of their social classes, age and gender. Indeed, depictions of the modern political crowd typically show masses of people marching in scattered form as a sort of civil counterpart or response to the straightforward movements of armies. ⁹⁵

Disillusionment with the newly installed liberal democracy played a prominent role in the visuals of the anti-NATO committees. A large part of the activists expressed their desencanto (disenchantment) with the transition to democracy based on political pacts that were perceived as non-transparent and little interested in common people’s feelings. ⁹⁶ In their opinion it was necessary to shed light on the marginalisation of a substantial part of Spanish society from this alleged elite driven process of democratisation. Activists demanded further transparency and more participation in public life, expressing for instance the urgency to hold a referendum regarding the intended NATO membership. As a result, the recurrent depiction of protesting masses in the murals expressed a strong desire to strengthen Spanish democracy in a participative manner. This particularly applied to the direct participation of those who had been excluded from the transition process, primarily women. ⁹⁷ In the visual codes of the peace murals women appeared in the front line of the protest, just as was happening in the daily life of the peace committees that absorbed numerous activists from female associations in their ranks.

More generally, the murals promoted different values and habits from the perceived standardisation of Spanish democracy to western customs and consumerism. In particular, they displayed the concerns of the activists about the cultural influence of the US at a time of great social transformations and economic restructuring. ⁹⁸ A detail of a PCE pintada portrayed, for instance, an atomic mushroom grotesquely associated with the hat of the ‘Calavera Catrina’ (Catrina skull), a popular icon of Mexican murals. According to Mexican popular traditions, Catrina ironically portrayed native Mexicans who pretended to be European by wearing unaffordable hats and clothes, renouncing their traditions and hiding their true economic condition. ⁹⁹ Moreover, several pintadas mirrored widespread anxiety of job loss in a period of high unemployment while, in line with the activists’ argument, the government spent its limited resources on Spain’s military arsenals in order to become a NATO member. For instance, a mural showed a man with a sad face and an untidy beard sitting in the street doing nothing. The mural’s caption demanded: “NATO’s money to create jobs”.

Another mural subverted the traditional order of power hierarchies: an American general is portrayed as a spoilt child who is crying because he wants a new toy he has seen on TV, a supersonic B1 bomber (Figure 5). The Spanish peace movement used this image to suggest an alternative to the patriarchal and militarised masculinity of the Franco dictatorship as well as to the rampant neoliberal economic model of the Reagan presidency. In fact, the rhetoric of the weak and the strong changed to the opposite in the imagery of the activists: the general overtly manifests his emotions and faintness through his crying and effeminate childishness against the traditional masculinity model of Cold War politics based on military values and competitive aggressiveness. ¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, television turned into a window that displayed the objects of desire in an increasingly individualistic society highly focused on economic exploitation. The activists feared that their communities – at times portrayed as idyllic villages in green areas – were jeopardised by both nuclear missiles and the perceived inhuman rationale of Western capitalist modernity and technologies. Thus, for Spanish activists peace was not only the absence of war and violence but above all the ‘practice of social justice’ in the Western liberal market economy. ¹⁰¹

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

“NATO NO, Military Bases OUT” Anonymous Mural- Foundation Salvador Segui, Madrid, Collection Antimilitarism-Transition, Box 4 (1984–7).

The anti-NATO groups perceived themselves as a sort of human experiment within a rapidly changing society. Notably, in one pintada, a citizen turns into a human guinea pig that a handful of surgeons are operating on. One of them has the face of the fictional character Joker, a sadistic psychopath criminal who was driven insane by an accident with toxic chemicals. There is a bottle of oil and a piece of bread in the middle of the picture, two traditional Spanish foods. In this pintada, the nuclear threat is directly associated with the mass poisoning of over 20,000 Spanish people with toxic cooking oil in the spring of 1981, the most devastating food poisoning in modern European history. ¹⁰² Over 1,100 citizens died from poisoning. Peace activists suggested that NATO membership, merely benefiting the military industry, would irreparably poison Spanish society just as the toxic oil that greedy Spanish entrepreneurs had allowed to circulate had intoxicated thousands of Spanish people.

It is practically impossible to measure the direct impact that these Spanish murals had on ordinary citizens. Similarly, it is difficult to speculate about the extent to which the pintadas affected the political and media agenda of the time. Nevertheless, the inability of the Spanish anti-NATO movement to influence the outcome of the country’s security policy does not negate the importance of this movement in disseminating alternative values, concepts and cultures. Notably, this article sets out to demonstrate how the aesthetics of anti-NATO and peace pintadas provide a valuable empirical insight into the transformation of the political and social imageries of sections of Spaniards within the overlapping contexts of the last stage of the Cold War and the domestic process of democratic consolidation after a long military dictatorship. In line with the visual historian Mirzoeff’s claim of how the ‘right to look’ strongly interfaced with the ‘right to be seen’, Spanish murals of the local committees against NATO acted as poly-semic cues of an emotional counter-visuality. They offered a set of complex condensing symbols asserting an alternative to the authority’s narrow construction of post-Franco foreign policy and new parliamentary democracy. ¹⁰³ The anti-NATO movement’s iconographic politics displayed an intricate emotional window into the extent to which the Spanish domestic experience of the Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship and the subsequent democratisation process were internalised and negotiated through Cold War lenses and bottom-up conceptualisations of peace and collective security. The pintadas fostered at times contradictory emotions: on the one hand they depict fun and playfulness, on the other hand fear and anguish over the future. They reactivated at once both the neighbourhood associations’ excitement of directly participating in Spanish political life for the first time during the democratisation process and their dismay at Spanish rapid social change.

Spanish activists interpreted the Euromissiles crisis mainly in domestic terms, while also coming into contact with a transnational wave of protests. As a result, anti-NATO murals embedded many transnational anti-war and anti-nuclear icons (for example the mushroom cloud, scenarios of devastations and challenging crowds) but they intertwined these images with powerful domestic symbols (for example details of the Anti-Franco Picasso’s Guernica, Spain maps or Goya’s paintings). The anti-NATO pintadas basically defined the desired Spain’s democratic identity in juxtaposition to the threatening image of the perceived “enemy”, namely the USA. Differently then other European peace movements, it is striking that there was not a single iconographic reference to Europe in the pintadas, even though Spain was on its road to EEC membership. The walls reflect how Spanish grassroots activists put the national interest first, believing their country was endangered to a greater extent by the USA. Consequently, activists transcended the harsh confrontation between East and West and put the blame for the arms race one-sidedly on the USA. Notably, Spanish anti-war pintadas recast the anti-American sentiment of the Anti-Franco left and considered the US the key cause of the survival of Franco’s dictatorship after the Second World War and of all the insecurities and disappointments of a democratisation process that allegedly failed to break the power of the main military and political elites. Thus, the anti-NATO murals used popular anti-American clichés in abundance linking directly American soldiers both with the Francoist military or the political violence in Latin America.

Icons and scenarios of peace were often omitted in the pintadas. The activists preferred to depict themselves as martyrs of a long-lasting period of injustice and projected their terrible memories of the Civil War onto the United States with the aim of facilitating this process of victimising among citizens. Their anti-Americanism provided a defence mechanism for the Spanish people to psychologically come to terms with the Spanish past and the challenges posed by economic hardship and allegedly broken promises of the newly established parliamentary democracy. As a result, the anti-NATO protesters visualised themselves as the anti-hero Don Quixote, stressing their identification with the idealistic, bizarre and revolutionary knight or with Goya’s proud Spanish insurgents against the French occupation. As the philosopher Fernando Buey has stated, the pintadas of the Spanish peace movement of the 1980s were ‘on the other side of the current transition’. ¹⁰⁴ Ultimately, the characteristic openness of the pintadas can help us to comprehend not only the impact of international relations on domestic political and social debates, but to gain a better understanding of the role of civil society in the consolidation of Spanish democracy and the impact of the accelerated cultural transformations that the country experienced after a long dictatorship.