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EIGHT DECADES AFTER THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, IS SPAIN’S SLOW
EXHUMATION OF ITS TRAUMATIC PAST A SIGNAL THAT IT IS READY TO BUILD
“A CULTURE OF MEMORY?  
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María José Carmona
April 15, 2024
Equal Times
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_ “The aim of an exhumation is not only to recover the victims in
physical terms, to recover their bodies, but also to recover their
lives, their biographies, to reconstruct who they were.” _

In this photo, a mass grave in the Víznar ravine, Granada, February
2024. The search for persons disappeared during the Spanish Civil War
has resulted in the exhumation of just 800 mass graves over the last
two decades, out of a total of around 3,500.,

 

Three people work in silence over a hole in the ground. They are
hunched over, on their knees. One of them lays down to make it easier
to manoeuvre. In front of them is a collection of bones: arms, pelvis,
ribs emerging from deep in the ground; skulls too, several of them. At
least five can be seen from above. Below, there are at least five
more.

We are in the Víznar ravine, in the province of Granada, Andalusia,
Spain. Between September and November 1936, at the start of the
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), at least 173 people were killed here
and thrown into mass graves. Earlier, in July and August – just
after the military coup d’état that triggered the war – there had
been more, including the assassination of the poet Federico García
Lorca, but no record was left of them.

Since 2021, a team led by Paco Carrión
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made up of archaeologists, geophysicists, anthropologists, forensic
experts and historians – has been tasked with finding as many of
them as possible. They have located 16 mass graves and recovered 116
bodies so far. Thirty-four women, the rest men, all from the
Republican side, all civilians, ordinary people – peasants, workers,
teachers, weavers – all killed and buried, no one knew quite where.
This is why georadar equipment, metal detectors and electrical
tomography are being used to locate the graves, technology that is
combined with more rudimentary tools – a fine paintbrush, a vacuum
cleaner – to bring the bodies to light. It is slow, painstaking
work.

“It can take a month or so, about three weeks for each mass grave,
from the moment we start the excavation to when we exhume the bodies,
document them and photograph them. It depends on the number of people.
In this one, for example, there are ten, but the terrain tells us that
there may be more underneath,” Félix Bizarro, one of the
archaeologists, tells _Equal Times_. And this is only the beginning.
They then have to extract, sift and analyse not only the bones but
also the personal effects – earrings, rings, trouser buckles –
essential to identifying, together with the DNA samples, each body,
and giving them back their name. This is the real purpose of the whole
process: to identify them and hand them over to their families, who
have been waiting for more than 80 years. The length of this wait
illustrates the dilemma of Spain and its memory, so difficult to dig
up.

The search for the disappeared, backed by the United Nations and
overshadowed by political debate and its vicissitudes, has only led to
the total or partial exhumation of 800 mass graves
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the last two decades, out of a total of around 3,500. It is a fragile
victory, with constant advances and reversals, periods of support and
periods of total abandonment. Today, work is underway in graves such
as the one in Víznar, but there is no guarantee that it will not be
stalled once again.

The first exhumations

There is no certainty over how many people were killed in the Spanish
Civil War. The figure usually used as a reference, by the Hispanist
Paul Preston for example, is 150,000, some 100,000 of whom died at the
hands of the insurgents led by General Francisco Franco and just under
50,000 at the hands of the Republicans. They were all victims, but
they did not all receive the same treatment.

“The first memory policies were made only for the dead on one side.
During the dictatorship, orders were issued to exhume those executed
or disappeared at the hands of the Republicans – around 33,000 were
moved to the Valley of the Fallen, which was built as a gigantic
memorial. But the same policies did not apply to all: the exhumation
of those executed by Franco’s troops was not permitted,” says
Matilde Eiroa San Francisco, doctor of contemporary history at the
Carlos III University in Madrid.

The violence did not, moreover, end with the war. The repression
subsequently exercised by the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) kept
adding to the number of disappeared. The exact figure remains unknown
to this day. The only document that states a figure is a 2008 ruling
by a National Court judge at the time, Baltasar Garzón, who, based on
the testimony of family members, quantified the number at 114,266
people
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although this is not a definitive figure either.

The silence imposed by the dictatorship, as well as during the early
decades of democracy, in the name of supposed national
‘reconciliation’, prevented the victims’ families from
reclaiming their remains. Some searched for them on their own, in
secret. It is known that between 1978 and 1979 – after the death of
the dictator – several children of the disappeared clandestinely
opened mass graves, with their own hands. But people did not start to
speak out freely until the next generation came along.

“The visibility of memory is founded on the mobilisation of the
grandchildren’s generation,” says Eiroa. “It was a historic
breaking of the silence. Social media played a key role, helping them
to unite and to form a community.”

The year 2000, 60 years after the end of the Civil War, saw the first
exhumation of a mass grave using scientific methods. Thirteen men were
recovered in the municipality of Priaranza del Bierzo (León)
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One of them was Emilio Silva’s grandfather. “If it hadn’t been
for the families and the grandchildren, it would have passed on in
silence, just as it was after Franco’s death. We, the grandchildren,
were not part of the plan, we were not on the roadmap,” says the
current president of ARMH [[link removed]], the
main historical memory association in Spain.

2007: an incomplete law

In 2009, Paco Carrión went from studying fossils from four or five
thousand years ago to looking for victims of the civil war. He was one
of the first. “I think it was a debt that our country had
pending,” the archaeologist and geophysicist from the University of
Granada tells _Equal Times_. The early days were not easy. Those who
were looking into the more recent past were not seen in the best
light, and they worked on their own. Now, by contrast, Paco Carrión
has a multidisciplinary team of professionals working not only in
Víznar but also in Cordoba, on other mass graves spread over two
sites.

Carrión was able to work on these exhumations thanks to the impetus
provided by the 2007 Historical Memory Law
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of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialist government which, for
the first time, included recognition of all the victims of the war and
the dictatorship, and established the commitment to support the search
for the disappeared with public funding. The law was criticised by
conservative sectors, fearful of ‘reopening old wounds’, but was
also censured by the families and the UN for not going far enough, as
although the state helped to finance the search, it did not take
‘responsibility’ for it, leaving it in the hands of the families.

Some time later, UN special rapporteur Pablo de Greiff
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the “privatisation of exhumations”, with all responsibility and
even the hiring of archaeologists being left to the victims
themselves.

The UN-established right to truth, justice and reparation was not
sufficiently protected, so when Mariano Rajoy of the conservative PP
came to power in 2011, he did not repeal the law but he did remove the
funding for it. Dozens of projects came to a standstill. Family
members had to pay out of their own pockets for procedures they were
entitled to. A few regional governments continued to provide funding,
but still it was not enough to pay the teams. Despite being a
signatory to the International Convention on Enforced Disappearances,
Spain once again turned its back on its disappeared.

A new law and a new threat

The soil in the ravine of Víznar has managed to preserve the bones
remarkably well. This is a great help, especially for forensic
anthropologists such as Laura Gutiérrez. Her task is to identify the
sex and age of the victims – most of them here are between 25 and 35
years old – the perimortem injuries and the type of violence
suffered. “Almost all of them were executed with a pistol, close to
or touching the skull. They usually have more than one gunshot wound:
two, three, four, up to six in the skull alone,” she explains. This
is also what exhumations are for: to find out what happened.

The project in the ravine, which is in its fourth and final phase, is
now funded by two administrations – the state and the regional
government – and is being conducted under the new Democratic Memory
Law [[link removed]], passed in
2022 to replace the old law, following the coming to power of a new
socialist government, that of Pedro Sánchez. His term of office began
with a declaration of intent: the exhumation of the tomb of the
dictator Francisco Franco in the Valley of the Fallen and its
relocation to a private burial place. This was followed by the
reinstatement of funding for exhumations and the new law.

The difference with the previous law, notes Professor Matilde Eiroa,
“is that the state now takes responsibility, takes on the costs, and
accepts that it is also part of its responsibilities to provide a
solution”. This means that the search has become a public
undertaking, the administrations – including local and regional
authorities – take the initiative, and the funds are allocated every
four years under a four-year plan. “We now have significant funds
that enable us to have a professional team and a wider timeframe in
which to work,” says Carrión.

In the first two years since the new law came into effect, 4,500
bodies
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been recovered. In the whole period between 2000 and 2019, only 9,700
were exhumed. The pace is certainly picking up, but for some it is
still not enough.

“We are quite critical because the model has not changed with the
law, it continues to be that of subsidising the search for the
disappeared,” says Silva. “What they should have done was to
create an office that does not depend on the political colour of the
government. When the government changes, we don’t debate whether the
rights of the victims of terrorism are in danger; the same should be
true for the victims of Francoism.”

This way, he argues, the fear of the future would be avoided. The fear
is the repeal of the law, as threatened by conservatives on the right
and the extreme right. This threat has already been acted on in
regions such as Cantabria, which is governed by a PP and Vox
coalition.

While it is true that other conservative governments such as that of
the PP in Andalusia are maintaining the support for projects such as
Víznar, for now, it seems clear that the exhumations are on shaky
ground. “Of course we are afraid of a reversal,” says Carrión.
“This should be kept out of politics. What we are doing is
humanitarian.” As reported in _El País
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the current UN rapporteur, Fabián Salvioli, agrees: “These are not
matters that a state can be selective about. They are legal
obligations that derive from international commitments.”

How, then, can the political polarisation be taken out of this issue?
According to Silva, the answer is to build “a culture of memory”
and this can only be achieved by “bringing all the political forces
on board. We have to invite them to acts of remembrance, open the door
to them. They should all go to an exhumation.”

“Bury him by my side”

“The aim of an exhumation is not only to recover the victims in
physical terms, to recover their bodies, but also to recover their
lives, their biographies, to reconstruct who they were.” These are
the words of sociologist Fran Carrión. His work on the graves in
Víznar is almost as delicate as sifting through the soil. He is the
liaison with the relatives. “This is a group of people who have been
seriously neglected for decades. They’ve had to put up with being
ignored for years, with no acknowledgement of their pain. The
interaction with them is very moving.”

He provides them with daily updates on the progress of the exhumation,
through a WhatsApp group, answers their questions and gives them as
much support as possible. There are more than 100 of them: a few of
the children are left, but they are mostly the grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. “A war is not over until there is peace in our
hearts,” says María. She is 67 years old and the granddaughter of a
disappeared person. Her grandfather Francisco is one of the 173 people
that, according to historical documentation, are in the ravine. He was
a cultivated peasant, linked to trade union movements, born in Fuente
Vaqueros, like Lorca, and was killed a month after him.

“I knew from a very young age that my grandfather was killed in the
war, but my mother didn’t talk about it, she was afraid all her
life. When I was older, I found out he was here,” says María. “I
think about him a lot. I haven’t met him, but it’s as if he were
within me. He’s part of me, because I have part of his blood in
me.”

María, like 40 other relatives, has provided samples of her DNA to be
checked against the bones that are found, to try and find a desired
match. Those that are identified will be returned to their families,
those that are not will be buried with dignity in a memorial. Still,
the hopes are managed with caution. Only one in three bodies – at
best – is usually identified by DNA, with genetic chains altering
with each generation. Memory has no worse enemy than the passage of
time. If one body turns up, we will all cry,” says María, “And we
will all go to that burial because it will be part of our
grandfather.”

The DNA results will still take time, they will require a little more
patience, but nothing compared to how long they have already had to
wait. “My grandfather’s place has been kept in the cemetery, to
the right of my mother,” says María. Before she died, she told me:
if you find him, bury him by my side, even if it’s just one bone. I
am doing this for both of them. For him and for her.”

This article has been translated from Spanish by Louise Durkin

_ María José Carmona is a Journalist specialising in social and
human rights. She currently contributes to various digital media
outlets, including Planeta Futuro (El País), eldiario.es, El
Confidencial and Público._

_Equal Times is a trilingual news and opinion website focusing on
labour, human rights, culture, development, the environment, politics
and the economy from a social justice perspective._

* Spanish Civil War
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* dictatorship
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* Human Rights
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