José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero Board of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, a Berlin-based organization. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (; born 4 August 1960) is a Spanish politician and member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE). He was the Prime Minister of Spain being elected for two terms, in the 2004 and 2008 general elections. On 2 April 2011 he announced he would not stand for re-election in the 2011 general election and left office on 20 December 2011. Among the main actions taken by the Zapatero administration were the withdrawal of Spanish troops from the Iraq war, the increase
Pact of forgetting 1936. There have also been some notable references to the Civil War in the arts in recent years (for example, Javier Cercas' novel "Soldiers of Salamis"). In 2006, two-thirds of Spaniards favored a "fresh investigation into the war." The pact was given a legal basis in the Spanish 1977 Amnesty Law. The pact was challenged by the socialist government elected in 2004, which under prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero passed the Historical Memory Law. Among other measures, the Historical Memory Law rejected the legitimacy of laws passed and trials conducted by the Francoist regime. The Law repealed some Francoist