EP 03 - Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War

- Episode 03 -

Raising Spain’s dead

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Spanish Civil War

Saturday 14 August 2021

29 people buried in 3 pits in the local cemetery, in the northern town of Angüés, Huesca (Aragon)

Raising Spain’s dead

In the wake of Franciso Franco’s death in 1975, parties on both sides of Spanish politics agreed to a pacto de olvido – a pact of forgetting. They would put the bloody past of Civil War and totalitarian oppression behind them and move on. It became law in the so called 1977 ‘Amnesty Law.’

But the imprisonment, rape and execution of many tens of thousands on political grounds is not so easily forgotten, and not only because the Amnesty Law has been declared invalid by the United Nations. There can, after all, be no amnesty for crimes against humanity. Inevitably, right-wing parties continue their campaign to supress the history of Franco’s regime. But in one sense at least it is a losing battle. In 2004 a socialist Government passed the Law of Historical Memory, which established the principal that everyone has a right to know where their loved ones are buried. Slowly, and now with increasing urgency, mass graves across Spain from the 1930s and 1940s are being opened and their stories uncovered.

The remains of Francesca Esperidón have recently been discovered in the cemetery of Pinos Genil, just east of Granada. She was one of six men and six women killed and buried there by Francoists. Arriving in the village, they had found many of the young men in the village had left to fight in the socialist army. So they announced that ‘since the sons are away, we’ll kill the mothers.’ Francesca Esperidón was a grandmother, and was 70.

Across Andalucia, in Zufre, sixteen women were reported in 1937 to be members of socialist groups. They were seized, tortured, raped, paraded through the streets and shot. They had probably had no political affiliations, but were simply denounced by locals who had grudges to settle. The same was true in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Reich. Now in the teeth of opposition from local far-right activists, the women’s remains are at last being exhumed.

The remains of so many farmers, still in their distinctive boots, have been discovered In Fuentes de Leon, Extremadura, that the mass grave has become known as la fosa de las botas con tachuelas – the grave of the studded boots. Among the 93 buried there are 15 women, including one who was pregnant. Among over 2200 bodies found in Paterna, Valencia, is that of Francisco Sanz, identified by a letter to his wife still astonishingly preserved in his front pocket.

In Spain it is a crime to dig anywhere except on farmland you own, for fear of disturbing the dead. But everywhere you go someone will tell you that their grandfather, or their great aunt was ‘shot over there’ and buried somewhere nearby. Slowly, permission and funding for archeological excavation is spreading. The diggers are mostly volunteers. But the generation that remembers the Civil War and the early, blood-soaked years of Franco, is now passing on. The responsibility for understanding and remembering, which is just beginning, has been handed to historians and archeologists. It is an enormous responsibility.

Thanks to Barnaby Bouchard’s article for The Olive Press, 15 April 2021.

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