Before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation, there was the Spanish consenso. The idea of negotiated and peaceful consensus it embodied, as a way to overcome violent pasts after the end of dictatorship, was forged in the work of Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and human rights organisations both internationally and in Spain from the late 1950s onwards. Following the death of Franco and Spain’s successful democratization from the late 1970s, it would then become an influential approach that travelled internationally for two decades. This article highlights the role of left politicians and organisations such as the Socialist International in the deradicalization of visions of post-dictatorial justice and in the circulation of this paradigm across Latin America and Eastern Europe. It concludes by tracing the way in which, in the twenty-first century, consenso-type settlements have been attacked for, variously, their acceptance of impunity; avoidance of questions of economic and structural justice; and incapacity to effect a revolutionary break sufficient to protect societies from corruption, inequality and a return to authoritarianism.