Repairing as struggle for narrative justice. The dam failure of Vega de Tera, Spain (1959-2019)

Around midnight of 9 January 1959, the Vega de Tera dam broke, releasing nearly 8 million cubic metres of water that destroyed the Spanish town of Ribadelago, killing 144 people. To this day, it remains the worst dam-related failure of the past two centuries of Spanish history. In this chapter we expand the time frame of the disaster, moving from a one-day narrative to focus on the processes of reparation during the disaster's aftermath. We interpret the silence imposed upon the survivors of Ribadelago as a form of narrative injustice, that is, as the ensemble of strategies aiming to normalize/silence environmental injustice while delegitimizing any alternative storytelling. Our case shows how, in the aftermath of the disaster, the efforts of the Francoist dictatorship prioritized anticipating similar disasters and avoiding their repetition, rather than identifying the responsibilities or repairing the victims. In this context, memory emerges as a strategic tool for reclaiming the individual and collective agency of the survivors, as part of a wider process to achieve social repair. By analyzing the long-term recovery process, we argue that the survivors fought to achieve both judicial and narrative reparation.