This article examines the figure of the desaparecido as a transnational symbol, focusing on the 'success' this figure has had in the contemporary debate about memory in Spain. Taken from the repressive context of the dictatorships of the 1970s in South America, the disappeared have travelled to the Spain of the twenty-first century, where they are progressively replacing the former 'fusilados y paseados' of the Franco Regime. After charting the ways in which the term has been used in the public debate, we analyse the figure of the disappeared in the novel, El vano ayer, by the Spanish writer Isaac Rosa.'My grandfather was also a desaparecido' is the title of an article published in a newspaper in 2000. It is Emilio Silva, grandson of a fusilado (one who has been shot) in the Spanish Civil War, who makes this statement. The article, published in La crónica de León 1 tells of how Silva decided to find the remains of his grandfather, shot in 1936, exhume them from the mass grave to which they had been condemned by the Franco regime, and bury them in a cemetery with a plaque commemorating his memory. The use of the term desaparecido from the very title itself illustrates how the figure of the disappeared, an emblematic figure of Latin America and strongly associated with Argentina, has been claimed for the last decade in Spain to refer to the fusilados of Francoism. The transnationalisation of the figure of the disappeared, or the 'desaparecido transnacional' 2 is an illustrative process of the transnational exchanges, crossroads, decontextualisations and recontextualisations that are characteristic of transnational memory; likewise, of a debate marked by ambiguity, which the title condenses in an exemplary manner. What does the term 'also' mean in 'My grandfather was "also" a desaparecido'? Does it mean that Silva's grandfather is

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