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For Teofila Gonzalez, it had been a perfectly pleasant day until the friendly lawyer paid a visit to her retirement home, sat her down on a bench and told her that DNA tests had concluded that one of the 11 bodies found at the bottom of a dirt-filled pit in a quarry on the edge of town was her brother's.

She nodded, pursed her lips and looked to the ground. Her brother, Severiano, two years older, had been her childhood idol and her teenage inspiration. A handsome boy with a mess of curly hair, he would scorn the clothes she neatly laid out for him and defiantly dress in peasant garb, much to their father's dismay. Then one day, when things got confusing and violent in their village, Severiano was captured, held at the village church, then dragged away in a cart, never to be seen again.

For Ms. Gonzalez's mother, there had been years of sleepless nights, days filled with tragic reminders of the vanished and unmentionable son.

As for Ms. Gonzalez herself, she prefers not to remember her own feelings.

After all, it happened in 1936, when she was 18 and he was 20. Ms. Gonzalez, now 90, never thought she would have to think about Severiano again. For years, it had been unacceptable to do so: When he disappeared, he had been declared a member of the left-wing Republicans, even if his involvement had been brief and clumsy; when Generalissimo Francisco Franco's fascist Falangist party seized power, his fate became a matter the family absolutely had to keep concealed if they were to survive in Spain through Gen. Franco's 40-year dictatorship.

Now, 72 years after she sealed him away in a distant compartment of her memory, she finds that she has to plan his funeral. The lawyer and his assistant let her know her options: His remains will be taken from the quarry, which produced the stones for the village church, and buried wherever she pleases.

She shakes her head. They call it “closure,” she says, but she feels as if a door has been opened into a room she never wanted to see again.

“We always knew that he had been murdered,” she says. “They led him away, tied up, so we knew where it would end. He had only joined up on the spur of the moment. What a pity – it ended everything. I lost him forever and my life was never the same. My poor mother – so many awful nights for her.”

For the lawyer, a placid but resolute 57-year-old man named Fernando Magan, this somewhat unwelcome visit to Ms. Gonzalez is another daily step in an almost spontaneous, grassroots mission to put his country's history back in order.

It started as an unconnected group of neighbourhood, volunteer-based projects around eight years ago, when local activists and small-town lawyers such as Mr. Magan started looking into Spain's darkest secrets, inquiring into the mass graves that were open secrets in every town. Soon, it escalated. Last year, it spurred the passing of the Historical Memory Law, which bans fascist memorials, offers compensation for Gen. Franco's victims and requires all towns to exhume, rebury and list the bodies in their mass graves.

This summer, Mr. Magan, now the leader of a ballooning national movement, presented a Madrid judge with a list of 133,708 names of people who had disappeared and were suspected of having been murdered by the Franco regime.

“In these villages, the facts are still quite strong in people's memories – it is something that is still shared between the victims and the victimizers,” he says.

“It is not something that is in the past for them – it's still very much alive between them.”

It's a dilemma shared by many countries that have joined the worldwide mood of reconciliation: The public effort to heal the wounds of the past can end up slicing open major arteries, driving neighbours against each other and endangering fragile national compromises that have made peace possible.

In Spain, and in many other countries, there are many people who would rather leave things unsaid.

Spain today is a very modern, liberal and tolerant country, not a place where you would expect this kind of exhumation to become a national obsession. But for the past two months, the country has been convulsed with bitterness and debate over the effort by Mr. Magan and a group of legislators and judges to account for the people who likely were summarily executed during the Franco era.

Three decades after that dictatorship ended – with Gen. Franco's death and an agreement by the fascists to shift to democracy on the understanding that they would not be punished – there is suddenly a mass desire among some Spaniards to atone for that past in explicit detail, one that is angrily resisted by others.

“The new generation is ready to deal with this matter, because all countries need a founding story,” says Juan Antonio Barrio de Penagos, the Socialist member of Parliament who launched the legislation that made the past a matter of investigation.

“We need to condemn the Franco dictatorship and the fascist period, but we haven't. Germany had this, with the destruction of the Nazi party, but that was because Hitler died dramatically and there was a complete break. But because Gen. Franco died in bed, we still need to confront it and deal with it, because it is the foundational fact of modern Spain.”

International trend

After 30 years of calculated silence, Spain is joining the surprisingly large group of nations that have decided to dig up long-forgotten graveyards and expose the shame-tinted secrets of the past.

Those countries include Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology last year for the appalling and sometimes deadly treatment of natives at residential schools is best seen as part of an international wave of reconciliation that links us to many other nations and communities – South Africa, Germany, Northern Ireland, Chile – that have terrible secrets hidden in shallow graves.

In Britain and the United States, it involves a collective effort to record and atone for slavery and racism. In former fascist and communist countries – including a majority of the European Union's 27 member states – it is far trickier, involving abuses and betrayals committed by people who are often still alive, against people who often still live next door.

A lot gets said about national pride, but it turns out that it is equally important, maybe even more so, to have a strong and well-developed sense of national shame. Without a collective acknowledgment of grave national wrongs, without the uniting force of shame, a country is nothing more than a bad advertising slogan with an exclamation point on the end. With pride and guilt in equal measure, you can really begin saying something.

On the other hand, in many countries, there is a feeling that this global reckoning has come along at exactly the wrong moment. In Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, after communism ended in 1989, there was a tacit acceptance that the crimes of the secret police were to be left unpunished. After all, when those crimes involved as much as a third of the entire population, the pain and division that would be created by any effort to expose them could prevent any new society from forming.

Today, there is a movement to expose every act of betrayal, and it is indeed proving divisive: When the well-loved Czech dissident novelist Milan Kundera was accused last month of being a one-time informant, there was a widespread sense that things had gone too far.

It's hard to tell where to place Spain on this spectrum. On the face of it, this is a country that had made peace with its past: The 1977 Amnesty Law, enacted two years after Gen. Franco's death, pardoned the political crimes of both the fascist regime and its communist opponents and made possible a peaceful transition to democracy. So impressive was that accomplishment – the world's first real velvet revolution – that many Spaniards do not want to ruin the magic by putting dirty truths in the way.

But look closer and there is a sense that Spain is still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like many other countries that have never really experienced a moment of national shame – Serbia, Russia, China and Italy come to mind – there are things that have not been properly put in the grave.

This becomes vividly apparent if you drive an hour north of Madrid to the Valley of the Fallen, the enormous science-fiction cathedral tunnelled into the side of a mountain, its central chamber larger than St. Peter's Basilica, its dais containing monuments to just two people: Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the ultraright Falangist party, and Francisco Franco, who turned that party into a four-decade dictatorship.

The tomb, a gaudy behemoth of totalitarian architecture, has been stripped of the eagles and other fascist symbols by the 2007 law. But its meaning remains unambiguous: It was built by 20,000 communist and anarchist political prisoners after the Civil War, and its centrepiece, Gen. Franco's grave, is constantly covered in flowers, dropped by the hundreds of Spaniards who come here each week to pay tribute. There is no shame, no guilt, no sense among many people that this was a wrong never to be repeated.

“The transition to democracy after Gen. Franco's death in 1975 saw a national reconciliation, but a very asymmetrical one,” historian Antonio Elorza says. “Circumstances made it necessary to overlook the long-continued crimes of the Franco regime, if the hard-line heirs of that regime were to peacefully hand over power to a democratically elected government.”

So when the “crusader judge” Baltasar Garzón, famous for having pressed charges against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from beyond Chile's borders, set out this year to instill a proper sense of national shame in the Spanish, it was bound to be a divisive move.

More so because Mr. Garzón had the backing of a left-wing government – to be sure, not the left of the Republicans (who worked with Moscow's support), but a moderate social-democratic left. However, that fact, and the fact that the opposition Popular Party has among its shadow cabinet a former Franco deputy, has turned this reconciliation into an overtly political event, reigniting disputes that have lain dormant for a generation.

In a 68-page ruling released last year, Mr. Garzón attempted to argue that the Spaniards who “disappeared” during the years after the war were victims of a “crime against humanity.” The crime in question is something like a genocide, but the target, instead of being an identifiable race or culture or language group, was the entire political left in Spain. As a crime against humanity, this ideological extermination would not fall under the 1977 amnesty, so punishment of the guilty becomes possible again.

While historians tend to agree that Gen. Franco engaged in retribution killings on a large scale (many say 100,000 is plausible), expanding the definition of genocide into the realm of politics creates new legal difficulties.

It also has infuriated many Spaniards who feel that national unity will be destroyed by such forensic adventures. Mr. Garzón's former colleague, the High Court's chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, requested that the court put a stop to the investigations. Yesterday, a panel of judges ordered that the exhumation of graves be suspended while it analyzes the legal basis of Mr. Garzón's project; meanwhile, the UN Commission on Human Rights has called on Spain to abolish the 1977 amnesty law.

Among many Spaniards, weary of the collective blackout, there is a sense of urgency. “Ever since the transition from fascism, there's been this fear to talk, this fear to deal with it and confront it – that has delayed this process for a generation,” says Mr. Barrio. “But that doesn't mean that we have to forget, because this is not to do with penalizing people. It is to do with resolving things. Things like missing family members, compensating people who fought in those days. It is things that have to be resolved, whose resolution is demanded by civil society. There has been no institution to do this.”

Profound ambiguity

But another problem with reconciliation – a potentially deadly one – is that it tends to assign the people of a nation into one of two slots, “victimizer” or “victim.” As people quickly learn, things are far more complicated, and an attempt at atonement can simply create more guilt.

Teofila Gonzalez's desire to leave her beloved brother in the ground springs in part from her own sense of ambiguity. Hers was a right-wing family in a Republican town, her brother a teenaged rebel who joined the local cause. His Republicans had marched into town one day and killed the village priest. “He was a good man, there was no reason to kill him,” she says.

After the war, Ms. Gonzalez married a boyfriend who had quietly joined Gen. Franco's party, in what she describes as an act of self-preservation. Her life has been a knot of co-operation and resistance, impossible to untangle.

There is a sense, talking to her in the courtyard of the retirement home, that her ambiguity is Spain's: It could be possible, you suspect, that almost everyone is one step removed from guilt here – as in so many places – and there is a collective terror of falling into an abyss of self-examination.

“I don't care any more,” she says with an Iberian shrug. “It's been too long. I just want this to end – the number of years they've taken away from us, and they're still taking them. I just want it all to be over now.”

Doug Saunders is a London-based member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.