José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero On 12 October 2003, during the Fiesta Nacional de España military parade held in Madrid, then opposition leader and presidential candidate Zapatero remained seated as a U.S. Marine Corps honour guard carrying the American flag walked past Zapatero and other VIPs. Everybody else stood as with the rest of the foreign guest armies representations. He declared afterwards that his action was a protest against the war and certainly not intended as an insult to the American people. Later on, during an official visit to Tunisia shortly after Zapatero was elected, he asked all of the countries with troops in Iraq
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 The Law repealed some Francoist