An interview with Lucía Palacios and Dietmar Post (by Alex Alvarez Taylor for Jacobin ) One of the three hundred settlements founded by Franco's regime, the village of Llanos del Caudillo is still today named in homage to the dictator. Villagers' nostalgia for his regime reflects Spain's failure to reckon with its past — and the ongoing struggle to gain recognition for fascism's victims. The village of Llanos del Caudillo, in Spain’s Castilla La Mancha region, is one of three hundred “colonies,” or settlements, christened by the Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the decades after the Civil War. Its historic link to his regime is still today visible in its name: Llanos — “plains” — del Caudillo — “of the leader.” Established in the 1950s by the agriculture ministry’s National Colonization Institute, the settlements reflected the Franco regime’s disastrous policy of economic “self-sufficiency,” beginning with the drive to repopulate or “recolonize” devastated rural