Mass Graves of Francoism. Archaeology, Anthropology and Memory
Andrea Moreno Martín
Antonio Vizcaíno Estevan
Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
2023
Museu de Prehistòria de València , 212 p.
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MASS
GRAVES OF
FRANCOISM
ARCHAEOLOGY,
ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEMORY
[page-n-5]
MASS GRAVES OF FRANCOISM.
ARCHAEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEMORY
De julio 2023 a abril 2024
DIPUTACIÓ DE VALÈNCIA
President
Antoni Francesc Gaspar Ramos
Delegate for the Area of Culture
Xavier Rius i Torres
Delegate for Historical Memory
Ramiro Rivera Gracia
DELEGATION FOR HISTORICAL MEMORY
Head of the Delegation for Historical Memory
Francisco Sanchis Moreno
Specialist in Historical Memory
Eva García Barambio
Picture archive
María Jesús Blasco Sales
VALENCIA PREHISTORY MUSEUM / ETNO
Director of the Valencia Prehistory Museum
María Jesús de Pedro Michó
Head of the Unit of Dissemination, Education and
Exhibitions at the Valencia Prehistory Museum
Santiago Grau Gadea
Director of ETNO. Valencia Ethnology Museum
Joan Seguí Seguí
Exhibition Production Unit, ETNO.
Valencia Ethnology Museum
Jose María Candela Guillén and Tono Herrero Giménez
Administrative management
Ana Beltrán Olmos and Manolo Bayona Gimeno
Image design for the project “The mass graves of Francoism.
Archaeology, Anthropology and Memory”
La Mina Estudio
Based on the art work of Dionisio Vacas, Grave 126, Paterna
Cemetery
Photograph of the art work
Chisco Ferrer
Restoration of materials
Restoration laboratory of the Valencia Prehistory Museum:
Trinidad Pasíes, Ramón Canal Roca and Janire Múgica
Mestanza. Con la colaboración del Institut Universitari
de Restauració del Patrimoni - Universitat Politécnica
de València: Mª Teresa Doménech Carbó, Jose Antonio
Madrid García, Pilar Bosch Roig, Sofía Vicente Palomino,
Mª Antonia Zalbidea Muñoz and del Departamento de
Química Analítica - Universitat de València: Antonio
Doménech Carbó
Restoration laboratory, ETNO: Isabel Álvarez Pérez and
Gemma Candel Rodríguez. Con la colaboración de: IVCR+i
Institut Valencià de Conservació, Restauració i Investigació:
Gemma Contreras Zamorano, Mercè Fernández and María
José Cordón
Restoration of textile materials: Carolina Mai Cervoraz,
Núria Gil Ortuño, Carlos Milla Mínguez and Albert Costa
Ramon. Control biológico y conservación preventiva:
l’Institut Universitari de Restauració del Patrimoni Universitat Politècnica de València: Pilar Bosch Roig
Programme of complementary activities
Begonya Soler Mayor, Yolanda Fons Grau, Tono Vizcaíno
Estevan and Andrea Moreno Martín, Francesc Cabañés
Martínez, Ana Sebastián Alberola, Rosa Martí Pérez,
Ivana Puig Núñez, Amparo Pons Cortell, Albert Costa
Ramon, Isabel Gadea Peiró, Mª José García Hernandorena,
Francisco Sanchis Moreno, Eva García Barambio
Production and installation of exterior graphics
Simbols
Printing of the poster and the programme of activities
Imprenta Diputació de València
PUBLICATION
Authors
Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Xurxo M. Ayán Vila, Zira Box Varela,
Isabel Gadea Peiró, María José García Hernandorena,
Baltasar Garzón Real, Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri, Aitzpea
Leizaola, María Laura Martín-Chiappe, Miguel Mezquida
Fernández, Andrea Moreno Martín, Carmen Pérez
González, Francisco Sanchis Moreno, Queralt Solé i Barjau,
Mauricio Valiente Ots, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
Scientific coordination
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
María José García Hernandorena, Isabel Gadea Peiró,
Francisco Sanchis Moreno
Technical coordination
Eva Ferraz García
Design and layout
La Mina Estudio
Translation and correction in Valencian and Spanish
Joaquín Abarca Pérez and Sarrià Masià. Serveis Lingüístics
Images and photographs
Eloy Ariza Jiménez-Asociación Científica
ArqueoAntro, Albert Costa Ramon. Colección
Memoria Democrática L’ETNO, Isabel Gadea Peiró,
María José García Hernadorena, Xurxo M. Ayán Vila,
[page-n-6]
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri, Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi,
Aitzpea Leizaola, María Laura Martín-Chiappe, Matías
Alonso, Bruno Rascão, Colección particular València,
Colección Familia Roig Tortosa, Familia Pastor, Familia
Chofre, Familia Gómez, Familia Coscollà, Familia Peiró,
Familia Pomares, Familia Gomar, Familia Llopis, Familia
Morató, Familia Alemany, Familia Miguel Cano and María
Navarrete, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte - Centro
Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Agencia EFE,
Biblioteca Nacional de España.
© de los textos: la autoría
© de las imágenes: la autoría, archivos y colecciones
© de la presente edición: Diputació de València, 2023
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A la Plataforma de Asociaciones de Familiares de Víctimas
del Franquismo de las Fosas Comunes de Paterna, a las
Asociaciones de Familiares de las fosas 21, 22, 81-82, 9192, 94, 95, 96, 100, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120, 126, 127, 128, los
nichos 43-44 and la Agrupación de familiares de Víctimas
del Franquismo de las Fosas Comunes del Cuadro II del
Cementerio Municipal de Paterna.
A Enrique Abad Aparicio, Llorenç Alapont, Dolores
Albuixech Domingo, Montserrat Alemany, Vicente Alemany
Morell, Magdalena Almiñana Solanes, Matías Alonso,
Pedro Luís Alonso, Mercedes and Jaime Amorós Gómez,
Maruja Badia, Amparo Belmonte Orts, Pepa Bonet, José
Calafat Ché, Paz Calduch, Lola Celda Lluesma, Rosana
Copoví, Amparo Cortelles Raga, Rosa Coscollá, Fernando
Cotino, Celia Chofre Rico,Rocío Díaz, Francisco De
Paula Rozalén Martínez, Mireia Doménech Alemany,
Aure Escrivá Ferrer, Joaquín Esparza Morell, Fina Ferre,
Nati Ferrero, María Frasquet, Palmira Flores Carreres,
Palmira Ros, Sara Ros and Geles Porta, Vicent Gabarda
Cebellán, Daniel Galán Valero, Iker García, Vicent García
Devís, José García Martínez, María Gómez, Salvador
Gomar Pons, Carmen Gómez Sales, Carlos and Amparo
Gregori Berenguer, Tina Guillem Cuesta, José Guirao
Giner, Juan Guirao Ortuño, Josefina Guzmán Navarro,
Vicenta Juan, Amèlia Hernández Monzó, Eva Mª Ibáñez
Cano, Mª Rosa Iborra Gimeno, Charo Laporta Pastor,
Gloria Lacruz León, José Ignacio Lorenzo, Concepción
Llin Garcia, Pilar Lloris Macián, Mercedes Llopis Escrivá,
Paqui Llopis, Teresa Llopis Guixot, Ernesto Manzanedo
Llorente, Aurora Máñez, Matilde Martí Avi, Sonia
Martínez, María Asunción Martínez, Carolina Martínez
Murcia, José Ramón Melodio, Rafael Micó, Silvia Mirasol
Fortea, Laura Mollá, Paco Monzó y Toni Monzó Ferrandis,
Josep Joan Moral Armengou, Maria Morató Torres, María
Morió Gómez, José Vicente Muñiz y Helena Aparicio,
María Navarro Giménez, Miguel Navarro, Óskar Navarro
Pechuán, Mª Ángeles Navarro Perucho, Vicente Olcina
Ferrándiz, Roser Orero, Eduardo Ortuño Cuallado, David
Pastor, Josefa Peiró, Pepita Peiró, Vicenta Pérez Martínez,
Conchín Pia Navarro, Carmen Picó Monzó, Juan Luis
Pomares Almiñana, Eduardo Ramos, Jordi Ramos, Raquel
Ripoll Giménez, Verónica Roig Llorens, María José y Charo
Romero Ortí, Andrea Rubio, Benjamín Ruiz Martí, Juan
José Ruíz, Carmen Sanchis Bauset, Mercedes Sanchis
Bonora, Mª Carmen Sancho Albiach, Pablo Sedeño Pacios,
Núria Serentill y Julio Morellà, Laura Simón, Saro Soriano
Llin, Pilar Taberner Balaguer, Laura Talens, Silvia Talens,
Sergi Tarín Galán, Dionisio Vacas Cosmo, Progreso Vañó
Puerto, Fernando Vegas.
A ARFO-Asociación de Represaliados/das por el
Franquismo de Oliva, Ateneo Republicano de Paterna,
Museo de Cerámica de Paterna, Asociación Científica
ArqueoAntro, ATICS, PaleoLab, Museu Virtual de Quart de
Poblet, Cementerio Municipal de Paterna.
IN MEMORY OF ALL THE VICTIMS OF THE
FRANCOIST REPRESSION
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VALENCIA PREHISTORY MUSEUM
Director
María Jesús de Pedro Michó
Head of the Unit of Dissemination, Education and Exhibitions
Santiago Grau Gadea
Exhibition: The Archaeology of Memory. The mass graves
of Paterna
Exhibition curators
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan, Eloy Ariza
Jiménez and Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Coordination
Eva Ferraz García and Santiago Grau Gadea
Museum project
Rosa Bou Soler and Kumi Furió Yamano. LimoEstudio
Scientific advisers
Associación Científica ArqueoAntro
Display coordination
Rosa Bou Soler, Kumi Furió Yamano, Eva Ferraz García, Laura
Fortea Cervera e Isabel Carbó Dolz
Registration and presentation of exhibits
Begonya Soler Mayor and Ramón Canal Roca
Teaching programme
Arantxa Jansen, Laura Fortea Cervera and Eva Ripollés Adelantado
Dissemination and social media
Begonya Soler Mayor, Lucrecia Centelles Fullana, Vanessa
Extrem Medrano and Francisco Pavón Tudela
Reporting and news
Gala Font de Mora Martí
Exhibition image design
Rosa Bou Soler and Kumi Furió Yamano. LimoEstudio
Translation and correction of display texts in Valencian and
Spanish
Sarrià Masià. Serveis Lingüístics
Translation of display texts into English
Michael Maudsley
Translation of display texts into Italian
Centro G. Leopardi
Translation of display texts into French
Christine Comiti
Families and institutions that loaned exhumed items
Colección Memoria Democrática - L’ETNO and las
asociaciones de familiares de las fosas 21, 22, 81-82, 91-92, 94,
96, 100, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120, 126, 128, los nichos 43-44 y la
fosa 2 del segundo cuadrante.
Colecciones particulares de Enrique Abad Lahoz, Manuel Amorós
Aracil y María Sánchez Gomariz, Manuel Bauset Tamarit,
Juan Bautista Solanes, Miguel Cano and María Navarrete,
Daniel Galán Valero, Regino García Culebras, Manuel Baltasar
Hernández Sáez and Gracia Espí Roca, Pepita Iborra, Lacruz,
Salvador Lloris Épila, Manuel Lluesma Masia, Gregori Migoya,
Vicente Muñiz Campos, Mª Ángeles Navarro Perucho, José
Orts Alberto and Asunción Granell Martí, José Peiró Calabuig,
Conchín Pía Navarro, César Sancho de la Pasión, Carlos Talens
and de las familias Carreres Duato, Ché Soler, Gómez Sales,
Monzó Cruz, Morell Pérez, Murcia-Ródenas, Ortí-Fita, Picó
Monzó, Roig Tortosa, Taberner Giner and Vañó Puerto.
Individuals and institutions that loaned
documents and photographs
Archivo ABC; Archivo Vicaría de la Solidaridad. Museo de la
Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Chile; Arxiu General i
Fotogràfic de la Diputació de València; Auschwitz- Birkenau
Memorial; Agencia EFE; Biblioteca Historicomèdica «Vicent
Peset Llorca» - Universitat de València; Biblioteca Nacional de
España; Biblioteca Valenciana Nicolau Primitiu. Fons Finezas;
Buchenwald Memorial Collection; Col·lecció particular Matías
Alonso; Colección particular Rosario Martínez Bernal; CRAI
Biblioteca Pavelló de la República - Universitat de Barcelona;
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site; Fundación
Sancho el Sabio Fundazioa (Vitoria-Gasteiz). Fondo Sociedad
de Amigos de Laguardia; Fundación Biblioteca Manuel
Ruiz Luque. FBMRL; GrupoPaleolab® and UNDERBOX;
Mauthausen Memorial; Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte.
Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica; Ministerio de
Defensa. Archivo General e Histórico de Defensa; Museo Sitio
de Memoria ESMA, Argentina; Museu Virtual de Quart de
Poblet; US National Archives at College Park. National Archives
and Records Administration.
Photographers
Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Paco Grau, Paloma Brinkmann, J. Cabrelles
Sigüenza, Santi Donaire, David Fernández, Maysun Visual
Artist, Bernhard Mühleder, Ahmed Jallanzo, Hermes Pato,
Joaquín Sanchis Serrano «Finezas», Pawel Sawicki and Nathalie
Valanchon.
© Stefan Müller-Naumann, Peter Hansen, Gervasio Sánchez,
Vicente Ballester, Wila, VEGAP. València. 2023
Illustrators
Flavita Banana, Manel Fontdevila, Eneko las Heras Leizaola,
Gema López «Kuroneko», José López «Lope», Ana Penyas,
Bernardo Vergara and Frente Viñetista. Asociación de
humoristas gráficos.
© Andrés Rábago «El Roto», VEGAP. València. 2023
Audiovisual resources
Genocidios y arqueología forense (audiovisual)
Script: Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Andrea Moreno Martín
and Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
Editing: Alicia Alcantud and Pablo Vigil
Paterna, la memoria de la represión y de los crímenes de
postguerra (audiovisual)
Script: Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Andrea Moreno Martín
and Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
Illustrations: Gema López «Kuroneko»
Photography and video: Eloy Ariza Jiménez
Editing: Alicia Alcantud and Pablo Vigil
Los sonidos de una exhumación (paisaje sonoro)
Script: Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Andrea Moreno Martín
and Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
[page-n-8]
Recordings: Eloy Ariza Jiménez
Editing: Marcos Bodi
Translation of display texts into English
Robin Loxley
Las voces de las familias (audio)
Script and editing: Santi Donaire
Families and institutions that loaned exhumed items
Colección Memoria Democrática - L’ETNO, Familia de Juan
Ferrer Vázquez, Familia de Miguel Galán Domingo, Familia
de Salvador Gomar Noguera, Familia de Vicente Gómez Marí,
Familia de Blas Llopis Sendra, Familia de Salvador Llopis
Sendra, Familia de Vicente Martí Ruiz, Familia de Vicente Mollá
Pascual, Familia de José Morató Sendra, Familia de José Orts
Alberto, Familia Peiró Roger, Familia de Juan Luis Pomares
Bernabeu, Familia de Federico Rico Cabrera, Familia de Germán
Sanz Esteve, Familia de Basiliso Serrano Valero, Familia de
Mariana Torres Esquer, Familia de Vicente Guna Carbonell,
Familia de Joaquín Revert Gilabert, Familia de Daniel Simó
Biosca, Familia de Luis Ocaña Navarro, Familia de Vicente Mollá
Galiana.
Resiliencia al olvido (motion graphics)
Pieza artística: Guillem Casasús Xercavins
and Gerard Mallandrich Miret
Motion: Àlex Palazzi Corella
Editing: Joan Campà San José
Production and installation
Rótulos Gallego & Burns S.L.
Carpintería paramentos: Sergio Carrero Melián
Pintura paramentos: Sebastián López
Suelo técnico: Pinazo Decoraciones
Framing
Marc-Imatge
Transport
Tti International Art Services
Image and sound
Sonoidea
Insurance
Allianz
Organization and production
Diputació de València - Museu de Prehistòria de València
ETNO-VALENCIA ETHNOLOGY MUSEUM
Director
Joan Seguí Seguí
Exhibition Production Unit
Jose María Candela Guillén and Tono Herrero Giménez
Exhibition: 2238 Paterna. A place of perpetration
and memory
Exhibition curators
Albert Costa Ramon, Isabel Gadea Peiró and María José García
Hernandorena
Museographic project
Estudio Eusebio López
Display coordination
Jose María Candela Guillén, Albert Costa Ramon and Tono
Herrero Giménez
Teaching programme
Sarah Juchnowicz Perlin and Sílvia Prades Moliner (Exdukere S.L)
Dissemination and social media
Francesc Cabañés Martínez, Ana Sebastián Alberola, Rosa Martí
Pérez, Ivana Puig Núñez, Francisco Alba Ros, Sandra Sancho Ruiz
Image design
Estudio Eusebio López
Translation and correction of display texts in Valencian
and Spanish
Jose María Candela Guillén and Carles Penya-roja Martínez
Audiovisuals
Mujeres Rapadas
Script: Isabel Gadea and Peiró, Mª José García Hernandorena
Photography: Archivo Art al Quadrat, Archivo Pura Peiró
Voice: Teresa Llopis
Editing: Pau Monteagudo Aguilar
Homenajes políticos
Photography and video: Archivo Pep Pacheco, Archivo Sergi
Tarín and Óskar Navarro
Editing: Pau Monteagudo Aguilar
Primeras exhumaciones científicoforenses
Fragmento vídeo: “Dones de Novembre. Les fosses clandestines
del franquisme”
Script and direction: Óskar Navarro, Sergi Tarín
Photography: Antonio Arnau Iborra, Esther Albert Navarro
Music: Jorge Agut Barreda
Movimiento asociativo y nuevos rituales
Images: Raúl Pérez López
Editing: Pau Monteagudo Aguilar
Creation of sound in the cemetery of Paterna
Edu Comelles Allué
Art work Patio 3
Anaïs Florin, Judith Martínez Estrada
Tiles production
Aacerámicas (Almàssera)
Production and installation
Art i Clar, Sebastián López Valero
Technical support
Collections and Restoration Unit
Jorge Cruz Orozco, Miguel Hernández Oleaque
and Pilar Payá Ferrando
Insurance
Allianz
Organization and production
Diputació de València – L’ETNO
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ARCHAEOLOGY
17
35
Beyond exhumation:
Building Memory
through Archaeology and
Museums
The archaeology of
memory: the application
of forensic archaeology to
the graves of the Civil War
and the postwar period
Andrea Moreno Martín,
Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez
& Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
53
69
The forgotten bodies
of the war
This archaeology will be
the tomb of fascism, or it
will be nothing. The role of
community archaeology in
uncovering the common
graves of Francoism
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
ANTHROPOLOGY
91
113
Where does
memory live?
Objects and memories:
the material dimension
of the mass graves
Maria-José García Hernandorena
& Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Zira Box Varela
[page-n-10]
127
145
The past, present and
future of the objects in the
mass graves
A look at Paterna to
revisit the contemporary
exhumation process:
possibilities and tensions
in the fight for memory(ies)
Aitzpea Leizaola
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
DEMOCRATIC MEMORY
165
175
Graves and
Democratic Memory
The right to truth with
regard to the human rights
violations during the
Franco regime
Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
Mauricio Valiente Ots
189
201
First and foremost, the
victims. Principle of Justice
International Law,
Reparation and
Democratic Memory:
The Case of Spain
Baltasar Garzón Real
Carmen Pérez González
[page-n-11]
[page-n-12]
11
Toni Gaspar
PRESIDENT OF THE PROVINCIAL COUNCIL OF VALENCIA
La historia que no se escribe, prescribe: roughly translated, “the history
that is not recorded is lost”. The sentence in Spanish, with the rhyme
of “escribe, prescribe”, may sound like an advertising jingle, but I think
it actually has a political intent: to reflect the collective principle of a
people, the moral obligation of any free society. Reclaiming what was
concealed, talking about what was silenced, bringing to light what
was suppressed: this, in a nutshell, is historical memory.
The Valencia Provincial Council is proud to have established itself
in recent years as an institutional reference point in the recovery of
memories, testimonies, and remains of people who were hunted
down and shot for their convictions, or simply for not being part of
an undemocratic and repressive regime.
Thirty-five mass graves have been opened, more than 1,200
victims have been exhumed, and more than eight million euros has
been assigned to groups, associations and town halls over the past
six years. The Historical Memory section of the Valencia Provincial
Council has led the way in ensuring that the memory and dignity of
hundreds of families from the region is not forgotten.
The way to silence the ideology of oblivion is to develop projects
and allocate funding for institutions and associations engaged in
the recovery of memory, a mission that is so important for achieving
historical justice for a people.
I would like to thank all the experts from different disciplines
who have helped us in this task of recovering and identifying several
hundreds of the people who disappeared during the Franco dictatorship. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Provincial Council of
Valencia for their dedication to the project. We will continue our task
of recovering this memory, in the absolute conviction that to live life
we must look forward to the future, but that, to understand it, we
must look back to the past.
[page-n-13]
ARCHAE
[page-n-14]
13
EOLOGY
17
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through
Archaeology and Museums
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan, Eloy Ariza Jiménez
& Miguel Mezquida Fernández
35
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic
archaeology to the graves of the Civil War and the postwar
period
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
53
The forgotten bodies of the war
Queralt Solé i Barjau
69
This archaeology will be the tomb of fascism, or it will be
nothing. The role of community archaeology in uncovering
the common graves of Francoism
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
[page-n-15]
14
The front and back of a photograph with a farewell message
Vicente Mollá Galiana, Grave 94, Paterna
Mollà Galiana family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-16]
15
[page-n-17]
Clay dominoes
Salvador Lloris Épila, Grave 21. Paterna
Salvador Lloris Épila family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-18]
17
Beyond exhumation:
Building Memory through
Archaeology and Museums
Andrea Moreno Martín,
Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez
& Miguel Mezquida Fernández
CURATORIAL TEAM, “THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEMORY: THE MASS GRAVES OF PATERNA”
[page-n-19]
18
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
“With a steady hand and a clear conscience, I am writing my last words
because in a few hours I will have ceased to exist. I am going to be executed”.
Bautista Vañó Sirera, 15 July 1939.
On 15 July, 1939, Bautista Vañó Sirera was shot in front of the wall
known as the Mur del Terrer, in Paterna. The Franco regime accused
him of rebellion and, after a very short trial in which he had no legal
defence, a military court sentenced him to death. Bautista, born in
1898 in Bocairent and a weaver by trade, was married and the father
of four children. According to his descendants, he was devoted to the
culture and politics of his town and his times: under the pseudonym
of “Progreso” he published articles on social and political issues,
participated in the Sociedad Amanecer and was part of the Bocairent
Popular Executive Committee during the Civil War. His affiliation to
the anarchist groups the CNT and the FAI, and his campaigning for a
fairer, freer world, provided the dictatorship with more than enough
reasons for murdering him.
Bautista’s story is by no means unique. Like him, thousands of
men and women were victims of the structural and systematic violence perpetrated by the Franco regime.1 In Paterna alone, at least
2,237 people2 were shot between 1939 and 1956. Their bodies were
thrown indiscriminately into mass graves, of which there are thousands all over Spain. These murders sought the physical annihilation
of dissent and imposed a State policy to silence and erase the lives of
these people after their deaths, as well as the ideals they defended.
Even today, many of these bodies remain under the ground. The
stark reality is that many of the graves in Spain are still to be located
and exhumed. In fact, some will never be excavated because they
have been destroyed or because other structures have been built on
top of them.
Opening up the earth is a radical act of great symbolism, triggering a complex but necessary process that recovers bodies and
memories, breaks down silences, addresses traumas, and generates
conflicts. Above all, it represents an opportunity to do justice, and to
create a context for individual and collective reparation. In this process, archaeology plays a vital role: it makes it possible to locate, exhume, identify, analyse and interpret the material remains preserved
in the graves in a truly scientific way.3
The archaeological record is made up of the human remains of
the victims, along with the material items they had with them at the
time of their death: from personal objects (clothing, shoes, buttons,
rings, pencils, glasses, medallions), through the material evidence
of the crimes (bullets, cartridges, rope used to tie the hands), to the
1
According to Francisco
Espinosa, the figures
for Spain as a whole are
49,426 victims on the
home front and 140,159
at the hands of the
regime. In the province of
Valencia, Vicent Gabarda
sets the corresponding
figures at 6,415 and
6,386 respectively (2020:
20-21).
2
Although the most
recently published
number is 2,238, we are
trying to corroborate the
identity of a person whose
confirmation as a victim
of the post-war repression remains pending.
In this text we state that
at least 2,237 people
were killed; these are the
people whose names and
surnames and date of execution are known based
on the studies of Vicent
Gabarda (2020).
3
Archaeological practices
require the authorization of the Ministry of
Culture and Heritage
(Law 4/1998 and Decree
107/2017) and are subject
to the regulations set out
in the Democratic Memory Act (Law 14/2017).
Exhumations in Spain
must comply with the
Protocolo de actuación en
exhumaciones de víctimas de
la guerra civil y la dictadura
(Order PRE/2568/2011).
[page-n-20]
19
Glass bottle recorded
next to the body of César
Sancho de la Pasión
during the exhumation
of the mass grave. Photo:
Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association.
Grave 120, Paterna Municipal Cemetery.
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
evidence of the families’ mourning and remembrance (bouquets
of flowers, bottles with handwritten notes, panels bearing the
personal data of the victims as memorials). Apart from the objects
themselves it is important to understand where and how they appear, in order to be able to reconstruct the events and study their
value – symbolic, historical, scientific, social, and personal. Obviously, the scientific interpretation of this material culture must be
based on the context in which it is recovered.
Contrary to what many people may think, archaeology does
not seek to empty out the subsoil in search of objects, but rather,
as a social science, it studies these objects – and their contexts – to
learn more about the people behind them, whether they are from
remote societies or from the recent past. In the specific case of
mass graves, forensics is an important new dimension to add to
the spatial context. Since the aim of these procedures is to locate,
identify and recover people who were victims of human rights
violations, archaeology applies specific protocols and employs
[page-n-21]
20
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
interdisciplinary teams of anthropologists, forensic medicine specialists, historians, sociologists, psychologists and lawyers. The
field of forensic archaeology4 intends to shed light on crimes against
humanity, but also to understand the memory-building processes
around these events, to think about the mechanisms for dealing with
the trauma and the management of the conflicts in the family and
in the public sphere, and to encourage the creation of spaces for reflection and debate. Although neither the work of archaeology nor
any other discipline can ensure that crimes of this kind will not be
repeated, at least it offers tools for reflecting on them, with the aim
of raising public awareness of our history.
4
The purpose of archaeology is, therefore, to build and disseminate
knowledge of the past – a past that, we must not forget, begins yesterday – based on a firm engagement with the realities of the present. The
temporal dimension does not limit the practice of archaeology, as this
is a discipline that can be methodologically and epistemologically applied to any chronological context. And when it centres on the recent
past, archaeological research also has access to sources of other kinds
of a crucial importance, such as oral testimonies, historical documentation and personal records.
Families are key actors in
the exhumation processes, and often accompany
technical teams at the site.
Pepita Peiró in front of the
grave where her father lay
(Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association,
Grave 112, Paterna Municipal Cemetery).
Forensic archaeology is
associated with forensic
anthropology, legal medicine and humanitarian
law; thus, it differs from
funerary archaeology,
whose purpose is the
study of death (rituals,
burials, associated remains) in order to analyse
these practices in human
societies from a social and
cultural point of view.
[page-n-22]
21
Pepita Peiró holding the
photo of her family on All
Saints' Day, visiting the
grave of her father, José
Peiró. (Photo: Eloy Ariza,
Grave 112, Paterna Municipal Cemetery).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Forensic archaeology is a key part of the study of recent times.
Unfortunately, in Spain it is still in its infancy. Although in the last
two decades some local governments have started to promote public
policies on memory, above all by providing funding for exhumations,
and although historical memory has attained a certain presence in the
media, we are still a long way from achieving an effective commitment
to the triad of “truth, justice and reparation” – at least not at institutional level, because the truth is that the citizens’ associations that
make up the historical memory movement have been claiming these
rights for decades. In fact, the families have never forgotten those that
disappeared, and have been the real drivers of these processes from the
very beginning – some even from the moment of the execution. This
is why, despite the control and repression imposed by the regime, the
transmission of memories in the private sphere has allowed many of
the stories of the victims of reprisals to come down to us today.
[page-n-23]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
Let’s turn back to the story of Bautista Vañó Sirera. A few hours
before the shooting, and fully aware of the crime that was about to
be perpetrated, he wrote his farewell letter. The words are a forceful
expression of his feelings: “in a few hours I will have ceased to exist”.
On that 15 July, 1939, they took his life. But, despite his loss, he never
“ceased to exist”, because Magdalena Puerto Mora, his wife, kept his
memory alive and transmitted it as a legacy to his children, who still
maintain and disseminate it today.
This is how the memory of the people who were shot or who
disappeared has usually been preserved, in the family sphere, where
women have always played the leading role (Moreno, 2018; García
Hernandorena and Gadea Peiró, 2021). Under the dictatorship this
form of resistance – the decision not to forget, and to speak out and
tell others – was a private survival mechanism, and after the return
of democracy it remained an intimate, low-key ritual, the result of
stigmatization and the lack of public recognition. Only recently have
these family stories been listened to attentively, and now they have
become part of the public dimension of memory. This “democratic
memory”, as it has come to be called, is built through the joint participation of institutions, professionals in the field, and civil society
(Baldó, 2021). As we understand it, memory is a right that goes beyond the private sphere and must take on meaning for all citizens.
In this reconceptualization of memory, archaeology has a great
deal to say. Once again avoiding the entrenched stereotypes, archaeology does not just describe the remote or recent past; it also has a place
in the present and future. The knowledge it provides of the past and
its material heritage enable us to rethink and transform our reality
and the reality to come. This is the idea behind currents such as public
archaeology, which proposes a change of perspective: namely, making
the people of the present the true protagonists.
This understanding of archaeology, together with an awareness
of the complexity of exhuming the mass graves of the Franco regime
and the need to enrich the public debate on democratic memory, form
the cornerstone of the exhibition The Archaeology of Memory. The mass
graves of Paterna.
The exhibition is based on the research carried out by the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association in the Municipal Cemetery of
Paterna. For more than a decade, the association has been working
on the recovery and identification of victims of the war and of the
Franco dictatorship in different parts of Spain, especially in the
Valencian region (Díaz-Ramoneda, et al., 2021; Mezquida, et al.
2021; Moreno et al., 2021). In Paterna, between 2017 and 2023,
more than twenty graves have been exhumed. In parallel to the
22
[page-n-24]
23
5
Saponification is a
process induced by a high
level of humidity in the
subsoil that favours the
body’s preservation. It
occurs through a process
of chemical change that
affects the body fat,
which is transformed
through hydrolysis into
a compound similar to
wax or soap. In Paterna,
saponification has been
documented in several
graves, at depths of more
than four metres, and has
allowed the exceptional
preservation of anthropological remains, clothing
and a set of other items
(Moreno et al., 2021).
6
Particular thanks to each
and every one of the
families and associations
that have accompanied us
in this exhibition project
for their enthusiasm and
commitment; for the care
and affection with which
they described their family objects; for the trust
they showed in us in
sharing their most intimate and personal memories, and for allowing us
to tell their stories.
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
field work, ArqueoAntro has brought the project to a wider public
through the publication of articles and the organization of conferences, courses, guided tours and exhibitions. In 2018 ArqueoAntro
collaborated in the exhibition “Prietas las Filas. Daily life and Francoism” in L'Etno, where some of the materials exhumed in the mass
graves of Paterna were exhibited for the first time (Moreno and
Candela, 2018).
With these precedents, the project for the current exhibition
was put forward in late 2019, with a specific aim in mind: to present the material culture exhumed in the graves of the Municipal
Cemetery of Paterna from an archaeological perspective, applying
a comprehensive approach that explains and contextualizes the scientific process of exhumation, and demonstrating the uniqueness
of Paterna in several areas: as a place of memory since the post-war
period; as a site of barbarism and horror, due to the numbers of victims and the use of the cemetery as a mass burial ground; and as an
unusual example of conservation, as some of the remains have been
preserved in an exceptional condition due to a process known as
saponification5.
To meet the multiple challenges posed by the project, it was
decided to form an interdisciplinary curatorial team, comprising
experts in exhumation processes, heritage management and public
memory policies, and museum management. Specialists from the
fields of photojournalism, art and design also took part. Most importantly, in an act of enormous generosity, the families of the victims
have loaned certain objects that they kept at home in memory of their
missing relatives (for example, photographs, letters, personal items)
and allowed the us to display some of the exhumed objects, enveloping them in signficance and affection with their personal stories.
The close relationship between the technical team and the families,
following years working together and meeting at the foot of the grave,
made this joint participation possible. To all the families, once again,
we express our most sincere thanks6.
Given the archaeological nature of the project, the curatorial
team felt that the ideal venue for the exhibition was the Museum
of Prehistory of the Provincial Council of Valencia. The museum is
a reference centre for archaeology in both Valencia and Spain as a
whole, and its geographical proximity to Paterna is another reason
for its choice. The project represented a major challenge for the
museum; there are hardly any precedents of analyses of the role
of archaeology in the construction of the historical memory linked
to the mass graves of the Franco regime, or exhibitions in which
exhumed materials constitute the central theme. This is why it
[page-n-25]
24
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
is important to emphasize the museum’s firm support and engagement in the project7.
The launch of the project had three main objectives in mind.
First, the exhibition is a tribute and a public recognition of the victims
of Franco’s repression and their families, and of the groups and individuals who, for decades, have fought for the preservation of their
memory. Second, to highlight the work of the scientific and technical
teams which have exhumed the graves, identified the victims and
recovered their life stories. And, third, to establish a dialogue with
society about the need for public policies of memory, in order to face
the traumas of the past, to raise public awareness of the issue, and to
address the challenges of the future.
The exhibition is structured in five large areas, and takes visitors
on a journey that moves intermittently between the present and the
past. The starting point is the celebration of the role of archaeology in
the study of contemporary world, in particular in the field of conflicts
and traumatic episodes around the world during the 20th and 21st
centuries. First, we situate our case study in the international context
of human rights, and connect it with the principles of forensic archaeology in its role in compiling expert evidence of crimes.
7
The exhibition The
Archaeology of Memory:
The mass graves of Paterna
owes its existence to the
dedication of María Jesús
de Pedro, director of the
Museum of Prehistory,
and Santiago Grau, head
of the Dissemination,
Teaching and Exhibitions
Unit, and the curators
and technical staff: Eva
Ferraz, Begoña Soler,
Ramon Canal, Trinidad
Pasíes and Yanire Múgica.
Their work in the field of
management, restoration
and museography and the
contributions that arose
in the work sessions and
informal conversations
were fundamental for the
success of the project.
[page-n-26]
25
Carolina Martínez, granddaughter of José Manuel
Murcia Martínez (Grave
94, Paterna Municipal
Cemetery) during the
process of transferring
objects for the exhibition. (Photo: Eloy Ariza,
Museum of Prehistory of
Valencia).
Rendering of the exhibition “The archaeology
of memory: the mass
graves of Paterna” at the
Museum of Prehistory of
Valencia. (Design: Rosa
Bou and Kumi Furió).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
[page-n-27]
26
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
From here, we begin our first incursion into the past so as to contextualize the ideological, political and social reality of the post-war period in which the crimes of the Franco regime took place8, and where
the duality between the victims and perpetrators is clearly defined.
Next, the Municipal Cemetery of Paterna and the Mur del Terrer
are presented together as a unique example of this repression. The
explanation proceeds diachronically, seeing the cemetery as a site of
violence in the past, but also of memory and resistance, and one that
takes on new meaning in the present. The families of the missing persons, the memorialist movement and the local government appear in
this passage through time, as do the technical teams. We then explain
the scientific procedures and multidisciplinarity inherent in the process of the exhumation of mass graves today.
8
With the recovery of the human remains and the objects we go
back once again to the past, in order to remember the people who
were killed and thrown into the graves. This area is the centrepiece
of the exhibition. It is presented as a dialogue between the objects
exhumed and the objects belonging to the families, which, together,
help to reconstruct the socio-political context and the links that were
Event held by the Platform of Associations of
Relatives of Victims at the
mass graves of Paterna
(Photo: Eloy Ariza, Paterna
Municipal Cemetery,
2018).
Our exhibition is limited
to post-war crimes: that
is to say, those committed
after the declaration of
the end of the war on 1
April 1939. The repression lasted until the death
of the dictator in 1975,
when the regime came (at
least officially) to its end.
We should not forget that
violence and repression
can take forms other than
murder, and are manifested in many spheres of
daily life (Rodrigo, 2008).
[page-n-28]
27
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
woven between the prison and the outside world, and between the
inside of the grave and outside. The exhumed materials bear witness
to the precariousness of prison life and to the constant threat of a
violent death, but they also tell us about personal identities and strategies of resistance. For their part, the family objects, accompanied by
the stories of their owners, help us to name and reconstruct the personal and political projects destroyed by the dictatorship. Together,
these objects constitute the elements from which the memory of this
past is built.
The family stories bring us back to the present, to connect with
the final section of the exhibition, which is an open space for individual and collective reflection on the historical events and on how memory is constructed. The journey closes with a final tribute projecting
the names of all the people shot in Paterna between 1939 and 1956.
In addition to the exhibition inside the hall, there is a small display in the museum courtyard, dedicated to the representation of
Franco’s graves in vignette illustrations. This display is designed specifically for the educational visits scheduled by the museum as part of
the exhibition.
Bearing in mind the role of the exhibition and the museum, we
also contacted archaeologists who work in the field of historical memory in different parts of Spain. Queralt Solé, from the Department
of History and Archaeology of the University of Barcelona, explores
in The forgotten bodies of the war the historical contextualization of
violence in the Republican rearguard and the violence of the Rebels
during the Civil War. Establishing the reasons for the deaths and for
the treatment of the dead during and immediately after the war is
essential in order to understand the ways in which human remains
appear in exhumations in Spain. Precisely, Lourdes Herrasti, from
the Anthropology Department of the Aranzadi Science Society in the
Basque Country, focuses on the methodologies and tools of forensic
archaeology in her text The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves of the Civil War and the postwar period used to
compile the information needed to restore the identity and memory of
those murdered. Talking about memory and identity inevitably raises the issue of the agency of the families of the disappeared, and also
the need to create spaces to prove that the crimes existed, and to deal
with the trauma. In a study based in Galicia, Xurxo M. Ayán Vila of the
Instituto de História Contemporânea of the Universidade Nova de
Lisboa defends the therapeutic, mnemonic, pedagogical and political
function of community archaeology in his paper This archaeology will be
the tomb of Fascism, or it will be nothing. The role of community archaeology in
uncovering the common graves of Francoism. The voices of Xurxo, Lourdes
[page-n-29]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
28
Handmade pendant
made in prison by Vicente
Roig, shot in Paterna,
for his son. (Photo: Eloy
Ariza, Roig Tortosa family
collection).
and Queralt help to reflect the plurality of ways of thinking and the
cross-sectionality that the archaeological perspective brings to a highly
complex subject of study.
Above we stated that this project has raised multiple challenges.
The most profound of all is, without a doubt, the extremely sensitive
(and chilling) nature of the subject matter and the material culture
that accompanies it. The exhibits, both exhumed and family items,
are sensitive in many ways. Unlike other materials in an archaeological museum, they constitute forensic evidence; due to their state of
preservation, they are particularly fragile; they recall a traumatic past;
above all, they are sensitive because they have an incalculable sentimental value for the families of the victims.
The emotional charge of these objects and stories has deeply
affected the museographic approach to the project. We understand
the museum as a space of negotiation and conflict, where reflection
and dialogue must be encouraged in a multidirectional sense that
abandons the idea of a single truth emanating from the institution.
By immersing oneself in the context, the museum can become a safe
[page-n-30]
29
9
The expression of these
principles in a museum scenario was made
possible by the work
of Rosa Bou and Kumi
Furió, the designers of
the exhibition, who have
scrupulously respected
our wishes and have responded to our concerns
with exquisite professionalism. We would like
to show our gratitude to
them here.
Anthropologists analysing
the piled-up bodies in a
mass grave, prior to the
start of their exhumation.
(Photo: Eloy Ariza ArqueoAntro Scientific Association, Grave 112, Paterna
Municipal Cemetery).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
space in which to talk about complex issues, conflicts, and controversies. This is why it was so important to gather together different voices from the professional field, the memorialist movement, and the
families. This is also why we wanted to think of the exhibition as an
experiment, testing the potential of museums to approach the memory of the traumatic past in a critical and reflective way (Arnold-de
Simine, 2013).
Based on these approaches, we decided to establish a series of
red lines when conceiving and designing the exhibition9. These
three red lines, with their particular derivations, have ended up constituting a road map that guided us through the entire process.
As a starting point, we were determined to avoid the twin traps of
making the display either excessively spectacular or excessively banal, in the light of the growing media interest in the subject and certain distortions in its treatment (Aguilar Fernández, 2008; Vinyes,
2011; Cadenas Cañón, 2019). The exhibits require a careful scientific contextualization in order to avoid the risk of their fetishization or
even sacralization. It is necessary to balance the need for social and
public dissemination with respect for the items and their owners.
[page-n-31]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
From the very first moment we ruled out the display of human remains (a widespread practice in archaeological exhibitions devoted
to other eras and cultures). Even the use of photographic material is
limited to cases in which the explicit presence of human remains in
the grave was necessary to illustrate the scientific process of exhumation, to bear witness to the systematic practice of mass murder,
or to show the gruesome nature of the graves of Paterna. The aim,
far from being to play down the brutality of a bloody and traumatic
reality, is to guarantee respect for the victims and families, many
of whom are still in the process of mourning. So the bodies of the
victims are not on display, but their presence can be felt through the
objects and their life stories; in the same way, from the outset their
deaths are described as criminal actions. The challenge is to be able
to stir people without upsetting them, to move without being sentimental, to cause a certain unease – based on a profound respect –
without generating overkill.
Secondly, in our story, we have avoided statistics. It is true that
numbers and figures are essential in scientific studies, as they help to
reconstruct the facts with empirical data. They also feature heavily
30
Consuelo Pérez Fenollar
with the photo of her father, Rafael Pérez Fuentes,
shot in Paterna. (Photo:
Eloy Ariza, ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association,
Grave 22, Paterna Municipal Cemetery).
[page-n-32]
31
10
An artistic creation
by Guillem Casasús
Xercavins and Gerard
Mallandrich Miret,
whom we want to thank
for their participation in
this project.
Fragments of a diary,
mounted on the original
document. This is a cartoon by the illustrator Bluff
(Carlos Gómez Carrera,
also shot in Paterna) that
was exhumed in Grave
111 of the Paterna Municipal Cemetery, associated
with Individual 79 (Photo:
Eloy Ariza ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
in the media and in political discourse, because they are straightforward and easy to understand: so many graves exhumed, so many
people identified. The reality, however, is that focusing on numbers
runs the risk of dehumanizing the story, by making the names and
life stories invisible, and by turning the people shot into a homogeneous mass of victims, into a mere statistic. Above all, we have cited
personal names wherever possible. In fact, one of the meta-narratives of the exhibition is the transition from anonymity to recognition: from the cardboard boxes containing human remains and the
use of scientific terms such as “individual” or “forensic unit”, the
identity of people is gradually defined – through their DNA, their
personal objects, or their family histories – until they can be named.
The exhibition culminates with the memorial Resilience to oblivion10
and with a book where visitors can consult the data available on all
the people shot by the Franco regime in Paterna. This may encourage
families who do not have information about their missing relatives,
or do not know that they existed, to explore further.
Thirdly, the need to humanize the story has also led us to rethink
the way we present the objects. Compared to the standard taxonomy-based displays usually found in archaeological museums, where
the objects usually appear classified as an inventory with identifying
placards focusing on technical aspects, we opted for more organic
compositions and descriptions that place the emphasis on the people
behind the objects. The exhibition’s discursive potential centres on
the objects and their ability to arouse empathy with the stories told,
and so it is vital that the museographical resources support this ambition. This approach, we think, opens up interesting reflections on
the potential of archaeology in the construction of new imaginaries
around historical memory.
[page-n-33]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
Obviously, in addition to the professional challenges referred
to above, any research process entails a whole series of personal and
emotional engagements that are not always reflected in the final result. In this case, however, we feel it necessary to mention them. From
the moment when we took the first steps to define the project until
right now, as we write these final lines, the object of study has moved
us, on a personal level, in a particularly intense way. No one can be
indifferent to the shocking experience of opening a grave containing
a heap of bodies piled up in a totally inhumane manner; or to sharing
in the anxieties, concerns and longings contained in the letters written by those who were in prison, and also of their families suffering
in their homes; or to noting the indefinable smell of the boxes where
the materials that have undergone saponification are stored; or to
holding in your hands a piece of clothing that the family has hidden
in a chest of drawers for so many years – a priceless treasure, the only
material memory of the missing relative; or to listening to the testimonies of people who have experienced in silence the loss of a parent
they never met or who were murdered when they were barely a few
years old; and to those of the new voices of the “post-memory generation” (Hirsch 2015), who, although they did not experience these
events first hand, have inherited the stories and now demand that justice be done.
The work process has been very demanding both personally and
professionally, but it has been exciting as well. It has required a firm
ethical commitment and a rigorous approach. It has not always been
easy to deal with the diversity of viewpoints and, above all, with the
interests that come into play (and clash with each other) when dealing
with such delicate and conflicting issues. Nevertheless, and despite
the dangers of politicization and opportunism, for us the commitment to the families of the victims and to scientific research prevails,
and the conviction that, as an exhibition organized by a public museum institution, The Archaeology of Memory. The mass graves of Paterna
will stimulate reflection on our traumatic recent past and invite us to
think about the scenarios of coexistence that, as a democratic society,
we would like to build for the future.
“I have a few hours left, I will never see you or our children again.
Keep this letter as a memento. Your husband Bautista Vañó.
Goodbye forever”.
32
[page-n-34]
33
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
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Museu Valencià d’Etnologia-Diputació de València, València.
Moreno, J. (2018): El duelo revelado. La vida social de las fotografías familiares de las
víctimas del franquismo. CSIC, Madrid.
Rodrigo, J. (2008): Hasta la raíz: violencia durante la Guerra Civil y la dictadura franquista. Alianza Editorial, Madrid.
Vinyes, R. (2011): Asalto a la memoria. Impunidades y reconciliaciones, símbolos y éticas.
Los Libros del Lince, Barcelona.
[page-n-35]
A model of a sandal carved out of an olive bone
Individual 144, Grave 115. Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-36]
35
The archaeology of memory:
the application of forensic
archaeology to the graves of
the Civil War and the postwar
period
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
DPTO. ANTROPOLOGÍA, SOCIEDAD DE CIENCIAS ARANZADI
[page-n-37]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
In the mass grave of Priaranza del Bierzo in the province of León, in
the year 2000, a methodological approach combining archaeology
and anthropology was applied in the exhumation and analysis of
clandestine burials of victims of the Spanish Civil War for the very
first time. This intervention by archaeologists and anthropologists
launched a process that has now gone on for more than twenty years,
which has come to be called “the recovery of the historical memory”.
Over this period, the methods used have become more sophisticated,
but at all times the aim has been the recovery of the remains of the
people murdered, in order to record the information necessary to
restore their identity and their memory.
Now that more than twenty years have passed, it is time to take
stock of the process and to examine the contribution of archaeology
to the historical understanding of the repression perpetrated by the
Franco regime.
Nothing tells us more about the horror and injustice of an age
than the sight of human skeletons crowded together in a common grave.
Introduction
Forensic archaeology is heir to the branch of the discipline known
as the “archaeology of death”, from which it has adopted the methods needed to recover skeletal and other remains from individual or
collective burials. Archaeology becomes “forensic” when it focuses
on people who died not of natural causes but by acts of violence, and
provides evidence that can be presented in court or in legal debate.
In the English-speaking world this area of study tends to be
called “forensic anthropology”. The two disciplines are complementary: in archaeology the focus is on the process of recovery of remains
and documentary evidence, while anthropology studies the biological profile of the buried; in turn, legal medicine analyses the cause
of death. When forensic archaeology is applied to the analysis and
recovery of historical memory, it can be termed the “archaeology of
memory”.
The action protocol for the exhumation of victims of the Civil
War and the Dictatorship, dated 26 September 2011, describes it as
an interdisciplinary activity involving historians, archaeologists and
forensic specialists. The latter include anthropologists and forensic
odontologists, as well as specialists in legal medicine.
Archaeological methods unearth remains in mass graves, allowing
them to be collected and then sorted. First, drawings are made of the
positions of the bodies and of the graves themselves, and photographs
36
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
are taken of each individual and of all the features of interest. The results of this exhaustive documentation process are recorded with data
on each individual and the spatial relationships between them, in order to carry out the exhumation in an orderly fashion.
The testimonies of the people who lived through the events or
who heard accounts of what had happened are crucial, because they
provide information about the location of the graves. The same can
be said of the information supplied by witnesses who were children at
the time, and who saw the murders and clandestine burials from their
hiding places. A clear example is the mass grave in Barcones, Soria,
which serves as a model for the discussion of several key aspects.
Recording of testimonies
and information from
relatives at the grave. La
Andaya IV (Burgos).
Importance of the eyewitness offering testimony.
Grave of Barcones (Soria).
[page-n-39]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
38
The procedure for the search, removal and exhumation of human remains is described in the article by Polo-Cerda et al. (2018).
The excavation exposes the skeletal remains by removing the soil
above and around them; using a technique known as the pedestal
method, the remains stand out in relief against the ground. Sometimes it is practical not to preserve the side walls of the grave, because
this makes it easier to access the remains around the entire perimeter, allowing a clearer view of the interior. In trench graves, however,
it is better to preserve the walls in order to highlight the grave’s use as
an improvised burial place.
Exhumation process at
the grave of Barcones
(Soria).
Types of grave
Mass graves are usually rectangular in shape, deriving from the depositing of one or several bodies lying on the ground. In general, the
bodies tend to be laid out in a fairly orderly way adapting to the space
available, regardless of who was in charge of the burial the corpses.
Thus, they might be arranged in alternate head-feet positions, with a
body in each corner, or aligned and overlapping. In the grave in Barcones, Soria, the six bodies were placed very close together, alternating heads and feet.
On other occasions the graves were dug into already existing
ditches, a practice that was much easier and particularly attractive
when the diggers were in a hurry or were frightened. The bodies
would be arranged in lines, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
[page-n-40]
39
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Grave of Barcones (Soria).
Arrangement of individuals in the pit.
A clear example of this type is found in Berlanga de Roa (Burgos),
where it is known that a road labourer, who may have known the
victims, buried the five men (among them a father and son); the
bodies overlapped and were arranged with care and respect. In other
cases, a wide ditch was dug that allowed the bodies to be arranged
cross-sectionally, as in La Pedraja (Burgos), where a total of 105 individuals were buried in 10 successive graves; in Fregenal de la Sierra
(Badajoz), with 47 victims in seven graves, and in Villamayor de los
Montes (Burgos), where 45 men were found in two graves. Elsewhere, the bottom of the grave was covered with several bodies and
then others were thrown on top of them. In the graves of Estépar
(Burgos), the bodies of 96 men who had been taken there from Burgos Prison were recovered.
The perpetrators, or the gravediggers, often made use of wells,
mines, and pit caves to get rid of the corpses. There are many examples
in Navarre, Extremadura, and the Balearic and the Canary Islands.
[page-n-41]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
40
The placement of victims
in the pit. Grave of Berlanga de Roa (Burgos).
[page-n-42]
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Grave 2 of Estépar
(Burgos).
At the Sima del Raso in Urbasa, Navarre, the corpses of ten people
were thrown into the cave on three different occasions. This suggests
that it was the same people who murdered the victims at the mouth of
the cave then threw them inside.
But the commonest practice was to take the corpses to the cemetery. Bodies found in ditches by the side of the road, if they were not
buried nearby, would be loaded onto pack animals or carts and taken
to the cemetery where the gravedigger himself, perhaps with other
townsfolk, would bury them on the edge of the cemetery, or in the
civil cemetery so as not to contaminate the area where the upstanding
residents of the town were buried.
Many mass graves contain victims of extrajudicial killings in the
cemeteries, deaths that occurred during the first months of the war,
in 1936, but many others hold the remains of people sentenced to
death from 1938 onwards. Cemeteries attached to prisons and concentration camps have also been exhumed: at the prison cemetery of
[page-n-43]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
Valdenoceda, Burgos, a total of 106 corpses of prisoners have been
recovered, and in Castuera, Cáceres, the bodies correspond to people who died or were murdered in the concentration camp. The large
cemetery of La Tahona de Uclés in Cuenca holds more than 570 bodies of combatants from the war hospital and others who died in prison. The frontline hospitals tended to have a space behind the building
that was used as a cemetery for those who died there. Examples in
Catalonia are Soleràs in Lleida, and Pernafeites de Miravet and Mas
de Santa Magdalena in Tarragona, with more than a hundred individuals in each one.
Belongings
The objects that the individuals had with them when they were killed
are often highly personal. The most numerous are items of clothing:
shirt buttons, belts, buckles, loops and trouser fly buttons, and even
zips and garters. Although these are simple, everyday items, they can
be transformed into objects of memory. In one instance in which
the remains of an identified person were handed over to family
members, they were interested in some buttons and the remains of
a buckle that appeared photographed in the report. One of the relatives asked to be able to keep a mother-of-pearl button because “I
am certain that it belonged to my grandfather”. In this way, a simple
button became a relic.
A good example of the variety of the objects recovered is found in
the grave of La Mazorra in Burgos: items of clothing such as berets,
zips and footwear; personal items such as earrings, a comb, a lighter
and a carpenter’s meter, and objects related to health such as a hernia
support and a dental prosthesis.
There are also more specific objects that might once have helped
in the identification of their owner. Objects such as rings, watches
and cufflinks could have been associated with a particular person;
but now, since so many years has passed, these memories have disappeared and the information has been lost.
Sometimes the objects retrieved are personalized. An example is
a silver belt buckle, found in the grave in Bóveda (Álava), belonging to
an indiano (a Spaniard who had made his fortune in Cuba) and which
bore an engraving of the initial of his last name. The historical data
provided strong indications of the man’s identity, which was then
confirmed by genetic tests. Other finds include rings with initials and
the dates of a wedding. In grave 3 at Estépar, for instance, a gold ring
was found bearing two initials, “P and E”, and a date; a member of the
team located a marriage certificate in which the two initials coincided, suggesting that the man in question was a teacher named Plácido
42
Objects recovered from
the grave of La Mazorra
(Burgos). The image
shows that the thirteen
victims in the grave had
their hands tied when
they were murdered and
buried.
The images show the
following objects (and an
injury); clockwise from
top left: woman's cap and
comb, dental prosthesis,
clothes worn, sweater zip,
notch where the projectile
entered the jaw, wick
lighter, reinforcements of
the ends of a carpenter's
measuring instrument,
hernia truss attached to
the left hip, beret, earrings
and shoes.
[page-n-44]
43
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
who was married to a woman called Emilia. From the genetic information, it has been possible to identify the group of the other 26 victims who were with him in the grave, all of them murdered on 9 September, 1936, after being taken to the site from the prison in Burgos.
One exceptional find was the discovery of an identification document preserved inside a bottle. In the prison cemetery known as Las
Botellas, where 131 people who died in the San Cristóbal de Ezkaba
prison in Pamplona were interred, each of the victims was buried
with a bottle placed between their legs, containing an official document with the prison’s own letterhead, Ezkaba Sanatorio Penitenciario
de San Cristóbal, which recorded the name of the deceased, their place
of birth, affiliation, offence and the sentence imposed, as well as the
cause of death – usually tuberculosis, an endemic disease in prisons,
especially in one that called itself a sanatorium. This process of documentation complied with the order issued by Franco in January 1937,
ordering the identification of those killed in combat and in prisons.
[page-n-45]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
Biological profiles of the bodies exhumed
The remains of the victims in the graves are collected individually
with their associated belongings, in separate boxes, and are then
transferred to the anthropology laboratory. There, the analyses are
carried out with a standardized methodology for appraisal of the person’s sex, age, possible pathologies, dental features and injuries related to the cause of death.
The vast majority of the victims recovered in the graves of the Civil War are males. It is estimated that fewer than 3% are women.
Almost half of the men were young adults, between 20 and 40
years of age, and around 30% were aged over 40. The third group
were over 50 years of age, and a fourth group aged under 20. However, because of the poor state of preservation a more precise estimation of the age is often impossible, and in these cases the remains are
included under the generic category of adults.
44
Bottle placed between
the tibias. Inside was the
deceased's affiliation
document. Cemetery
of the bottles. Ezkaba.
Pamplona.
[page-n-46]
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Different graves for different types of victim
The graves can be differentiated according to the victims buried
there:
a) Graves containing victims of extrajudicial killings. During the first
months of the war, particularly between the months of July and
November 1936, the period known in Spanish as the “hot terror”,
thousands of extrajudicial killings took place, the product of indiscriminate and uncontrolled violence. This repression was particularly
harsh in the provinces where the coup d’état triumphed and gained
territory as the front line advanced. As the historian Francisco Espinosa emphasizes, these deaths were caused not by the war, but by the
repression. The regions most affected were Castile-León, Galicia,
Navarre, La Rioja and Cáceres.
The victims of this period were the civilian population, men and
women who were arrested for long periods before being taken to
their place of execution. These final journeys were euphemistically
known in Spanish as paseos, or “walks”. The victims were illegally detained, handcuffed, and often killed and buried with their hands tied.
An example is the grave of La Mazorra in Burgos, in which the bodies
of 13 people were buried, two of them women, all with their hands
tied. It is said that the bodies appeared abandoned on the roadside,
because they were seen by passengers on a passing bus. Several local
people collected the bodies and decided to bury them there in a rectangular grave, laid out in a relatively orderly fashion, still with their
hands tied.
Graves of this type constitute the most important and numerous
group. Examples are the cemeteries of El Carmen in Valladolid, with
more than 200 victims; Magallón in Zaragoza with 84, La Carcavilla
in Palencia, with 108; Porreres in Mallorca with 104; La Pedraja in
Villafranca Montes de Oca, Burgos, with 136, and four graves in La
Andaya in Quintanilla de la Mata, Burgos, with 96, and so on.
b) Graves containing victims of “legal” repression. From 1937 the authorities sought to legalize executions through summary trials in which
the sentence was nonetheless a foregone conclusion. These executions were carried out in specific sites such as the walls of the cemetery. The most notorious example is the wall of the Paterna cemetery
in Valencia, a place where, according to the documentation compiled
by Vicent Gabarda, 2,238 victims were sent for execution. When
death and murder became routine, the same pattern was repeated:
four people on one day, five the next day, seven, fifteen... all sent to the
wall to be shot. The chaplain Gumersindo de Estella describes that he
had to assist many of these victims who were about to be executed;
[page-n-47]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
in his book he describes their last moments in the Torrero cemetery in
Zaragoza. There, too, more than two thousand were killed.
There can be little doubt that the large graves in cemeteries that
have been exhumed in recent years contain the victims of summary
executions. They include Paterna in Valencia, Pico Reja in the San Fernando cemetery in Seville, and the San Rafael cemetery in Córdoba.
c) Graves containing the bodies of combatants. A third type of victim
comprises those killed in the hostilities, both combatants and
non-combatants. These are, for the most part, individual burials of
bodies that were abandoned where they died at the front, and were
not collected and removed at the end of the war, or once the frontline
moved on. Many corpses were collected by the residents of the area to
prevent scavenging by dogs and the spread of vermin and disease. The
graves of a small number of combatants have been exhumed in the
area of the Battle of the Ebro and on the Northern Front. The ditches of the trenches at the front were also used to bury bodies quickly.
In El Rellán in Grado (Asturias), for example, more than 30 people,
combatants and residents of the region have been found. In Alcaudete de Jara in Toledo a total of 41 civilian victims were buried, who
had been subjected to reprisals after the war ended. On Mount Altun
in Zeanuri, Bizkaia the residents buried five militiamen from the Perezagua communist battalion who had died in the battle on the same
day. Based on the historical documentation, the exhumation, the discovery of soldiers’ dog tags and the confirmatory genetic analyses, the
remains have been identified and delivered to the families.
d) Graves containing victims who died in captivity: in prisons or in concentration camps. These people perished in deplorable conditions,
subjected to hunger, cold, damp, lice, neglect and abandonment. In
these dank, overcrowded places infectious diseases, especially respiratory diseases, were easily transmitted.
In the San Cristóbal prison mentioned above, which had been
converted into an anti-tuberculosis prison sanatorium, the high mortality rate forced the military authorities to build a cemetery to bury
the prisoners who died there. It was built on the north slope, on the
least visible area of the mountain.
e) Finally, graves containing guerrilla fighters. After the war, anti-Franco
fighting groups were formed, mostly comprising communists, who
took refuge in mountainous areas and sought to harass the Franco
regime using guerrilla tactics. The task of countering these guerrilla
fighters, known as maquis, was entrusted to the Civil Guard, which arrested, abused and tortured family members and contacts in order to
46
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
obtain information. They also infiltrated the groups and created counter-guerrillas. The clashes took place in the mountainous areas of Galicia and León, Asturias and Cantabria, further east in Cuenca, Levante
and Aragón, and to the south in Sierra Morena, Cáceres, Toledo, and
Andalusia. In one of these graves, in Albalat de Tarongers in Valencia,
the bodies of nine guerrillas were placed with their heads to the sides
and their legs in the middle, opposite each other. It is a clear example
of a guerrilla grave because it combines several defining features: an
eyewitness report of the murder, documentation from the Civil Registry, autopsy reports, careful registration during the exhumation and
positive genetic identification of six of the nine individuals.
Identification
The main objective of the exhumation of a grave, comprising the
archaeological intervention and the subsequent anthropological
analysis of the skeletal remains, is to identify the victims through the
reconstruction of the historical account. However, the endeavour faces several major obstacles: the insufficient historical information and
documentation, the deterioration of the skeletal remains that makes
it impossible to obtain a genetic profile, and the lack of a suitable candidate from the family for comparison. All these factors reduce the
chances of obtaining a positive identification.
If the process is successful, the remains identified can be delivered to the family, either in private or in public. If an official event of
some kind is held, political institutions are represented. In recent
years, regional governments have played a more active role in commemorative tributes of this kind in which the remains are returned to
the families of the victims.
1
Order PRE/2568/2011,
of 26 September, publishing the Agreement of the
Council of Ministers of
23 September 23, which
orders the publication in
the Official State Gazette
of the action protocol for
exhumations of victims
of the Civil War and the
dictatorship.
The evolution of the exhumations over time
The exhumation of Priaranza del Bierzo in the year 2000 is considered to have been the first one to be carried out using archaeological
methods and with the participation of archaeologists, anthropologists and a forensic doctor. The exhumation of graves advanced very
slowly in 2001 and 2002. In the following year, 42 graves were uncovered, many of them individual. Until 2006, the number of exhumations from graves remained low, between 27 and 30, but in 2007,
the passing of the Historical Memory Act1 by Rodríguez Zapatero’s
Socialist government led to a notable rise in the number of graves exhumed and the number of victims recovered, which now rose above
300 for the first time, and in fact surpassed 600. The peak period of
exhumations was between 2008 and 2012, when between 60 and 90
[page-n-49]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
graves were excavated and between 385 and 630 victims recovered per
year. In 2011, a protocol was published to establish the correct methodological procedure for performing exhumations. That year, 66
graves were intervened and the remains of more than 400 people recovered, and in 2012 the remains of 500 people were recovered from
65 pits. However, with the change in government in late 2011, financial aid for exhumations was suspended, and in 2013 the numbers fell
dramatically – only 14 graves were exhumed, containing 55 victims.
As of 2014, and particularly from 2016 onwards, the regional governments have taken on the responsibility for recovering the historical
memory. Since then there have been notable increases in the number
of graves exhumed and in the number of remains recovered, which
exceeded 600 each year and reached 1,000 in 2021. In fact, since
2020 the financing plan has been renewed by the Secretary of State
for Democratic Memory, either through the provision of direct aid or
through the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces.
Also in this latter period, an intense exhumation programme has
begun in cemeteries where the number of victims was very high, such
as Paterna in Valencia, with more than 2,000, and Pico Reja in Seville,
with more than 3,000, 1,500 of whom were victims of repression.
Since 2000, many groups and teams of archaeologists and anthropologists have led the exhumations. In all, up to the end of 2021,
a total of 850 graves have been exhumed and the remains of more
than 11,500 victims have been recovered.
Dissemination of the results
During the exhumations, the researchers gave talks informing relatives
and visitors of the progress made, with the idea of encouraging them to
engage with the project and feel part of it. In the grave of La Pedraja in
Burgos, in the years 2010 and 2011, a routine was established in which
at the end of the afternoon’s work the team would describe how the
exhumation was advancing. Every day, more people came to listen. The
team encouraged them to take part and to make comments and contributions. The exchanges of information were very valid and fruitful, but,
above all, they offered the public the chance to express and share their
feelings and responses to the project. The experience was repeated in
Estépar in Burgos and in the cemetery in Porreres in Mallorca, where
the team gave their descriptions of the exhumations live on local television. In this way, the archaeological process became a social event.
Media coverage of the development of the exhumations has also
increased. The presence of schoolchildren and students from nearby
schools and universities centers has played a key role. The Navarre
Institute of Memory, for example, has devised a Memory programme
48
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49
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Nº of graves exhumed
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
0
Nº of victims exhumed
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
Evolution over time of the
number of graves excavated and the number of
victims recovered.
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
0
[page-n-51]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
50
for schools with the aim of involving pupils directly in activities to
broaden their historical, social and political knowledge of the Civil
War and the dictatorship.
Conclusions
There is no doubt that the exhumations have meant a shift in the historical analysis of the repression against the civilian population exerted by the regime that came to power after the coup d’état of July 1936.
The sight of the skeletons piled up in common graves is testimony
to the violation of the right to life of the victims. The gunshot wounds
observed demonstrate beyond any doubt that they were murdered.
Through the process of recovering the historical memory and the
application of forensic archaeology, other objectives have also been
achieved: the exhumation itself, the return of the remains to the relatives, the confirmation of the history of repression and the events
that caused so many to disappear without trace; and, above all, the
recovery of a memory that has been hidden and silenced.
Descriptions of the
exhumation process to
the general public. Grave
of La Pedraja (Burgos)
(2010).
[page-n-52]
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
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Espinosa, F. (2010). Violencia roja y azul. España 1936-1950. Barcelona, Ed. Crítica.
Etxeberria, F. (2017). «Antropología y patología forense como elementos de
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Polo-Cerdá M, García-Prósper E; Crespo Alonso S , Galtés I , Márquez-Grant
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(2018). «Protocolo de búsqueda, levantamiento y exhumación de restos humanos». Revista de AEAOF, 7-23.
[page-n-53]
Espadrilles
Individual 125, Grave 127, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
[page-n-54]
53
The forgotten bodies
of the war
Queralt Solé i Barjau
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
[page-n-55]
The forgotten bodies of the war
54
With the failure of the coup d’état in July 1936 and the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War, it was immediately clear that there would be
deaths, though few would have anticipated how many people would
die, or in what circumstances.
The initial widely-held assumption was that casualties would occur at the front, among the troops and the militiamen. Few thought
that there would be so many deaths in the rearguard, due to fighting,
bombing raids, starvation, disease and repression. At the end of
the war, it was common knowledge that tens of thousands of men
(and some women) had died at the front, and that tens of thousands
more civilians had been killed in the cities behind the lines. The ways
in which Republicans and Rebels died varied little. What differed
markedly on the two sides was the policy regarding the dead and
their treatment: the way in which they were buried and in some cases
exhumed, and thus the way in which their dignity and memory were
preserved in their families.
To understand the reasons for the exhumations of the Civil War
dead in the twenty-first century, an essential first step is to find out
how they died and how their bodies were treated, both during the
war itself and then later under the dictatorship. In fact, the exhumations of the dead began very soon, albeit with major differences in
the way they were carried out by the Republican and Rebel armies, or
by the Republican and Rebel governments. These differences would
become more accentuated with the establishment of the dictatorship
and its desire to emphasize the division between the victors and the
vanquished. In this regard, an important distinguishing feature was
precisely how the dead and victims were treated in the respective rearguards during and after the armed conflict.
Soldiers killed at the front
On 17 July 1936, the troops of the protectorate of Morocco rose up
against the government of the Republic. The Rebel commanders
were committed to the cause, but the army also had many recruits
who participated in the coup without having any choice in the matter.
Those who tried to oppose it, both in North Africa and from 19 July
onwards in the peninsula, were killed without ceremony (Villarroya,
2009). In an attempt to dismantle an army that proved largely hostile
to it, the Republican government ordered the factional units to be
disbanded. The Army of the Republic was not restructured again until
October, when the Mixed Brigades were created and incorporated
the volunteer militias that had sprung up since July. After almost
three months of war, it was clear that the conflict would be a long one,
and the Republic was aware that it needed a professional army. The
Inside page of LIFE
magazine, 12 July 1937,
with a report on the
Spanish Civil War. Private
collection, Valencia.
[page-n-56]
55
Queralt Solé i Barjau
[page-n-57]
56
The forgotten bodies of the war
Rebel army was in no need of restructuring: once the loyalty of the
majority of the military had been secured, they retained the classic
organizational hierarchy under direct command.
Immediately there were deaths. In the Spanish protectorate of
Morocco, where the coup started, the study of the graves of the victims
of reprisals (both military and civilian) began only recently (Ramos y
Feria, 2017). In the peninsula, the first to die were also military and
civilians who opposed the uprising. In the Spanish cities, where there
were street fights to preserve or gain control of power, the dead were
initially left lying in the gutter. After the first days, the killing of civilians continued: for ideological reasons, due to differences in class,
or for attitudes to religion. After a while, as will be seen, the Republic
started to investigate and prosecute these criminal acts in some of the
areas under its control; on the other side, in the areas where the uprising had triumphed, the structure put in place by the Rebels to act as a
government (known as the “government of Burgos”) not only failed
to prosecute these acts but actively encouraged them.
At the front the first deaths were recorded, although news of the
casualties did not reach the rearguard. In fact, attempts were made
to conceal them. In Catalonia, at the meeting of 10 September 1936
the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias ruled that the bodies
of those who died in combat at the front should not be moved: “Send
an order to the columns and organizations that form the Committee
indicating that the dead comrades, whatever their category and condition, should be buried at the front and that under no pretext should
they be moved to other places without the express agreement of the
Central Committee.”1 The order was not always heeded, but at another meeting on 25 September it was stressed that the remains of the
militiawoman Lina Òdena should not be sent to Barcelona: “Inform
the cruiser Llibertat which, according to the press, is bringing the remains of the heroic militiawoman Lina Òdena to Barcelona, of the
agreement made by the Committee that the dead comrades be buried
at the front and should not be moved without express agreement of
the Committee, and to warn it that in the event that the ship has already set out for Barcelona, it should dock and bury the body without
a public demonstration.”2 Even today it is not clear where Òdena was
buried3; in any case, she was immediately mythologized as a heroin of
the mobilization of the Spanish people against Fascism. Apart from
this order issued by the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, no other
order has yet been found indicating how Republican militiamen or
soldiers killed on the front were to be buried.
Neither the diaries nor the testimonies of those who participated
in the burials of comrades in the Popular Army refer to instructions
1
“Central Committee of
the Antifascist Militias
of Catalonia. Agreements
made at the meeting of
10 September, 1936”.
GC-35_E001_ D011
Montserrat Tarradellas
Macià Archive (Poblet
Monastery).
2
“Central Committee of
the Antifascist Militias
of Catalonia. Agreements
of the meeting of 25
September, 1936”. GC35_
E001_D018 Montserrat
Tarradellas Macià Archive
(Poblet Monastery).
3
In his article "Lina Ódena,
communist and militiawoman", José Miguel
Hernández López notes
that there is no record of
her burial in Montjuic
cemetery in Barcelona,
where she was presumed
to have been interred,
nor is there any way of
knowing whether she was
buried in Granada, since
the archives of the Registry between 1936 and 1939
were destroyed. El incorformista digital, periódico independiente del subsuelo, 25
September, 2021. https://
www.elinconformistadigital.com/2021/09/26/
lina-odena-comunista-y-miliciana-jose-miguel-hernandez/
[consultation August
2022. Unless otherwise
stated, this is the date of
consultation of all the
websites cited].
[page-n-58]
57
Queralt Solé i Barjau
of any kind, although some striking accounts of the coexistence with
death have come down to us. A soldier from the Leva del Biberón (“the
baby bottle levy”, so called because its members were only 17 or 18
years old when they were called up in 1938) remembered the number
of casualties after a battle on the Segre front. “It was ten in the evening when they gave us the order to withdraw. Horrible, monstrous.
After five hours, 120 of the 700 men – who were barely adults – remained. We didn’t understand. Between dead, wounded, prisoners
and missing we had lost 580 men. That operation was worse, far
worse for the members of the 224th Mixed Brigade than the Battle of
the Ebro!” (Portella i Massamunt, 2001).
Until the graves of Republican soldiers began to be exhumed in the
twenty-first century, the circumstances of their burial were unknown.
In their diaries or testimonies, the witnesses described experiences
that reflected the disorder, but also their ability to adapt to the circumstances. Pere Tarrés, then a young doctor, dug graves: “We buried them
in a field, on the side of the ravine. The captain and the paramedic and a
soldier from the 24th. All three of them were lying stretched out on the
ground. The moon shone its pale light on their faces, which made them
look even whiter. I dug a pit for each of them, very deep. Around twelve
o’clock at night, we buried them. One by one we placed them in the pit,
in a very dignified way. The moon had kissed them farewell. There was
a full moon that night. And then they covered them with earth using
spades. It was very moving!” (Tarrés, 2004).
The exhumations of Republican soldiers that have taken place
all over Spain since 2000 have made it possible to corroborate the
circumstances of their burial – that is, that there does not seem to be
any specific order, and the burials were adapted to the conditions of
the front and the terrain. Very often the bodies exhumed correspond
to soldiers who were buried where they had fallen. Graves of this type
have been found in places where there was fighting, such as the Basque
Country, Asturias, Extremadura, Catalonia in the area of the Battle
of the Ebro or along the XYZ line in Valencia (Muñoz-Encinar, 2016;
Herrasti, 2020; Ramos and Busquets, 2021).
But soldiers did not just die at the front; they also died in military
hospitals, many of which had been schools, spas, or convents converted to meet the needs of the conflict. In the cemeteries of the towns
that housed these makeshift hospitals, soldiers were buried – on the
Republican side, without following any particular order. The state of
the graves attached to the military hospitals that have been exhumed
suggests that the diggers acted in the same way as at the front, that
is, adapting to the circumstances. In Uclés in Cuenca, in Pernafeites
or Mas de Santa Magdalena in Tarragona and in El Soleràs in Lleida
[page-n-59]
The forgotten bodies of the war
58
[page-n-60]
59
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Poster for the 2nd National
Conference of Antifascist
Women. 29-30 and 31
October, 1937. Artist: Luis.
Source: Spain. Ministry
of Culture and Sports,
Documentary Center
of Historical Memory
PSCARTELES, 351.
Republican soldiers were buried in collective graves containing two,
three or four bodies or even dozens of piled up corpses, in stark contrast to the way the Francoists buried their dead.
In most of the graves where the bodies of Republican soldiers
have been exhumed, it has not been possible to establish their identity. In some cases, items such as bracelets with identification numbers
in graves in the Basque Country have allowed researchers to identify
of the remains4. Certain graves attached to military hospitals have
preserved documents from the doctors who attended to the dying soldiers, or lists of buried soldiers kept in town halls, as in Pradell de la
Teixeta (Tarragona) (Hervàs, 2014). In general, however, the identity
and the place of burial of Republican soldiers went unrecorded.
The case of Franco’s troops was very different. On 22 January
1937, Franco’s headquarters issued the following order: “To ensure
that the burials of personnel killed in action or in accidents are carried
out following the same rules on all fronts, and thus to facilitate proper
identification, show the respect due to those who have fallen in this
struggle and to allow the adoption of the necessary hygienic measures, the following instructions must be observed ...” The instructions for burying the soldiers ran for an entire page: “The burial will
take place in the cemetery close to the event, if it is not too far from
the battlefield or place of the accident. Should the distance or number
of deceased make it difficult to transport the bodies to the said place,
a burial plot measuring 15 x 24 metres will be made on soft terrain
and on a slope, for every hundred corpses, divided into one hundred
numbered graves correlatively from left to right and from top to bottom, and a drawing will be made indicating each one. In these graves,
which will be individual and in which the corpse will be covered by a
layer of tamped earth of at least 0.5 metre, once the burial has been
completed, a wooden cross will be placed at each head, with the vertical arm nailed at a height of 0.5 metre of tamped earth and protruding
0.3 metres which will bear, in black paint, the number of the grave,
and on the horizontal arm, on the front, the name and surnames and
on the back, the deceased’s post or capacity. The corpse will be buried
with the upper part of the regulatory identity badge; if the badge is
missing, a stoppered bottle will be placed between the legs and will
contain a concise description of the deceased’s parentage.”5
In general, this order was followed: when the graves of Francoist
soldiers began to be exhumed in 1958, to be moved to the Valle de los
Caídos, they were found lined up, in an orderly fashion, with bottles
between their legs or next to the skulls with a piece of paper that
recorded the dead man’s parentage. Although the regime belittled
its fighters, keeping them buried in cemeteries all over Spain and
4
Exhumations of the Civil
War in Euskadi. Gogora
library, Department of
Equality, Justice and
Social Policies and Aranzadi Science Society, s/d.
https:// www.gogora.
euskadi.eus/contents/
informacion/ gogora_dokumentuak/es_def/Exhumaciones-de-la-Guerra-Civil-en-Euskadi.pdf
5
General Military Archive
of Ávila, L8 R122 C100.
Document also referenced and reproduced in
Etxebarría et al. (2011).
[page-n-61]
The forgotten bodies of the war
later moving them like freight to the Cuelgamuros monument, the
families were officially informed of the place where their loved ones
had died and in most cases the deceased could be identified when exhumed. It should be noted, however, that some of the graves of Francoist soldiers that have been opened contained remains that were respectfully arranged but were not identified, for example in Figuerola
d’Orcau in Lleida (Armentano et al., 2020) and in Abánades in Guadalajara, the bodies were just piled up without any kind of identification (Martínez and Alonso, 2014).
The death of civilians
The number of deaths on the home front due to the war could not
have been anticipated – nor could the degree of violence unleashed
when the coup d’état failed in July 1936, and later once the military
conflict ended. Civilians died in bombing raids, from starvation,
while fleeing the front line, or were executed with or without a council of war sentencing them to death. Some of those on Franco’s side,
however, were honoured and remembered in perpetuity at the end
of the war. Their side had won and their victory had to be proclaimed
constantly, through the continuous presence of the memory of the
heroes and martyrs of the cause. The others, those who had lost, often
did not know where their loved ones were buried or, if they did, were
unable to honour and mourn them freely. The victors’ adulation of
their dead and the consequent contempt for all the others was an essential element in the shaping of the new Francoist identity.
Most of the victims in the Republican rearguard were buried in
mass graves, then called “clandestine cemeteries”. Studies carried
60
Boxes with remains exhumed and sent from different Spanish provinces
to the Valley of the Fallen,
near the town of San
Lorenzo de El Escorial,
Madrid, for burial there. In
the foreground, remains
from Castellón de la Plana,
Ávila, Alcora, Aldeaseca
and Suera 1959. Source:
Agencia EFE.
[page-n-62]
61
Queralt Solé i Barjau
out throughout Spain have shown that a total of 49,272 people were
killed in the cities of the Republic (Ledesma, 2010). The crucial role of
the trade unions in defeating the Rebel troops in many Spanish cities
meant that they took control of public order, and many saw in those
moments of chaos and violence the chance to achieve the longed-for
revolution. To change the world it was necessary to wipe the slate
clean, break with the past and eliminate the class enemy. By burning
notarial documents, revolutionaries felt that they were contributing
to the abolition of property, something that these papers officially
recorded; by burning churches and ecclesiastical buildings they were
helping to bring down an institution that they saw as the great ally of
the class enemy, the exploiter of the workers – an institution which,
at the same time, held society in its iron grip through the imposition
of religious beliefs. For some, killing priests and nuns, property owners and the wealthy formed part of the war that had to be waged if the
revolution was to succeed. The province where the most deaths on
the home front were recorded was Madrid, with around 10,000 victims (though this figure is not definitive, Payne, 2012), followed by Barcelona, with 4,713 (Solé and Villarroya, 1989). In the province of Valencia, however, Vicent Gabarda (2007) reports a total of 5,996 victims.
Already before the end of the war, when the Republican authorities had regained control of public order, they prosecuted the crimes
that had been committed in the home front. In Catalonia, a special
court was created to investigate clandestine cemeteries; the remains
of more than 2,000 bodies were exhumed and 200 people were prosecuted (Dueñas and Solé, 2014). Finally, due to the evolution of the
war itself and political confrontations, no one was tried, but the tasks
of exhumation and recognition of these victims by their relatives
were carried out in the middle of the conflict in an attempt to counter
the vision that Francoism was spreading of the Republic as a government which was out of control and which sanctioned murders. It was
important for the Republic to demonstrate its integrity to the international community and to show that justice was independent of any
political power, and it did so by resolutely prosecuting the crimes of
the first months of the war.
At the end of the war, the Francoist authorities ordered the exhumation of all the victims in the Republican rearguard. Paradoxically, therefore, it is impossible to know what methods the extremist
revolutionary groups used to kill and bury their victims during the
first months of the conflict. The regime controlled the graves that
were opened all over Spain from 1939 onwards, and from April 1940
through what was known as the Causa General, an investigation of
wartime atrocities that emphasized the difference between victors
[page-n-63]
The forgotten bodies of the war
62
Poster Bolshevism, social
injustice, politicians,
masons, separatism, F.A.I.
Spanish, anonymous. Ca.
1938. Source: National
Library of Spain.
and vanquished at all times. The losing side had no rights regarding
their dead; missing persons could not even be recorded in the Civil
Registry, as published in the Official State Bulletin of 10 August,
1939, which specified that registrations of missing persons could be
made “whenever they were persons who adhered to the Glorioso Movimiento Nacional”. For the Dictatorship, the physical disappearance of
the enemy was not enough: prohibiting the registration of the death
in the Civil Registry left a cloud of doubt about the very existence of
the person in question. With this order the regime provided an instrument of repression to the victors who wanted to use it, but in fact
many families on the losing side were able to record their dead in the
registers – something that they had to do, despite the regime’s stance,
[page-n-64]
63
Queralt Solé i Barjau
because otherwise many situations to do with inheritances or orphanhood or widowhood could not have been resolved. Interestingly,
historians have found registrations of Republican soldiers who died
during the war in the records of deaths in 1939, and then find them
again from 1976, when their relatives were finally able to record their
missing persons in the register without fear of reprisals.
The regime’s control over the management of the dead was so
strict that on 4 April 1940 (State Bulletin 5 April) another order was
published which in this case converted the graves of those “Fallen
for God and for Spain” into holy places, specifically specifying that
“the Town Halls must adopt measures that guarantee respect for
the places where the victims of the Marxist revolution are buried”
(Saqqa, 2022). The regime decided the graves that were opened, the
people who were to open them and the reports that were to be written, and encouraged each municipality to pay tribute to these victims
and rebury them collectively in the cemetery, under a monument
that denounced the memory of revolutionary violence. At the same
time, plaques were placed on the façades of all the churches in Spain
bearing the names of the dead who, according to the dictatorship,
deserved to be remembered – that is, those of the victors.
The regime glorified one side and denigrated the other, consigning it to oblivion. In the cities in the Francoist zone, orders to practise
extreme violence were followed from the beginning. General Mola,
one of the coup plotters, issued a reserved instruction (number 1, 25
April 1936) that specified all that needed to be done to establish a Dictatorship: “Point 1: The conquest of power must be carried out taking
full advantage of the first favourable moment and the Armed Forces
must play their part, together with the contributions made by political groups, societies and individuals who are not affiliated to parties,
sects and unions that receive inspiration from abroad: namely, socialists, freemasons, anarchists, communists, etc. Point 2 [...] The actions
must be of extreme violence in order to bring down the enemy, which
is strong and well organized, as soon as possible. Of course, all the
leaders of political parties, companies or unions not affiliated to
the movement will be imprisoned and will receive exemplary punishments so as to strangle rebellious movements or strikes. Once power
has been conquered, a military dictatorship will be established with
the immediate mission of restoring public order, imposing the rule of
law and reinforcing the army as necessary in order to consolidate the
de facto situation that will eventually become law.”
The application of extreme violence did not end with the termination of hostilities, but continued in the post-war period. There were
no longer home fronts: the dictatorship was a totalitarian regime
[page-n-65]
The forgotten bodies of the war
that sought full control over everything – including who should live
and who should die, and how. With the war over, from 1 April 1939
onwards there were few murders and most of the deaths were sanctioned by military justice or by the enforcement of the laws on fugitives (Fernández Pasalodos, 2021). While the victors exhumed mass
graves and praised their dead with ephemeral tributes and permanent
monuments, the losers had on way of knowing where their dead lay;
in addition, they continued to suffer “the actions of extreme violence”
championed by General Mola, since the summary trials sentenced
men and women to years in prison or imposed the death penalty. On
many occasions, the punishment endured, in so far as the families
were unable to mourn the person who had faced the firing squad.
In all the provincial capitals of Spain, people sentenced to death
were executed, and everywhere the procedure was similar: a trial,
without any legal safeguards, of multiple defendants which lasted
just a few hours and ended in long prison terms or death sentences.
Indeed, the process flouted the legal principle of presumption of
innocence; the accused were assumed to be guilty at the outset and
were obliged to prove otherwise. Those condemned to death awaited
the dictator’s authorization and, when it arrived, a day was set for the
execution. The families were not notified of the date of the execution
or the site of the burial. Usually the victims were buried in the cemeteries of the provincial capital (though there were exceptions, such
as Paterna) in mass graves in which identification was impossible.
64
Funeral procession for
the people murdered in
Paracuellos del Jarama
in November 1936. The
tribute was accompanied
by posthumous honours
and a military parade.
February 1940.
[page-n-66]
65
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Photographs of the bull
ring in Valencia, used as
a classification centre for
republican soldiers after
the occupation of the city
by Franco’s rebel army in
April 1939. Source: National Library of Spain
For the relatives of the victims, the punishment was multiple: the uncertainty as to whether their loved ones had been executed; the secrecy regarding the place of burial; and finally, once they had located the
cemetery, the impossibility of identifying a place to mourn. The Dictatorship wanted to control the life, death, memory and pain of the
vanquished, and it was not until the twenty-first century that the first
steps were taken to shake off this imposed inheritance.
[page-n-67]
The forgotten bodies of the war
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comuna de la Guerra Civil espanyola situada fora del cementiri de Figuerola d’Orcau (Isona i Conca Dellà, Lleida)”, Segones Jornades d’Arqueologia i
Paleontologia del Pirineu i Aran, Generalitat de Catalunya; Consell Comarcal del
Pallars Jussà; Institut Català de Paleontologia; Institut de Recerca de Cultures medievals, Lleida.
Aróstegui, Julio (1996), La Guerra Civil, 1936-1939, Historia de España, 27, Historia 16, Madrid.
Dueñas Iturbe, Oriol; Solé, Queralt (2014), “El juez Josep Maria Bertran de
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Análisis de la represión irregular franquista a partir de la excavación de fosas comunes
en Extremadura (1936-1948), Tesis doctoral inédita. Universidad de Extremadura, director Julián Chaves Palacios.
Payne, Stanley G. (2012), The Spanish Civil War, Cambridge.
Portella i Vilanova, Sebastià; Massamunt i Marqués, Josep (2001), “Els biberons.
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Saqqa, Míriam (2022), Cuerpos nación. Las exhumaciones de los “Mártires y Caídos por
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[page-n-68]
67
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Ramos i Busquets, Jordi; Busquets Costa, Cesc (2021), “Les fosses dels camps de
batalla de la Guerra Civil de 1936-1939. Una aproximació arqueològica a les
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[page-n-69]
Matchbox belonging to Vicente Ortí Garrigues
Grave 111, Paterna. Donated by the Ortí family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-70]
69
This archaeology will be
the tomb of fascism, or it
will be nothing. The role
of community archaeology
in uncovering the common
graves of Francoism
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
INSTITUTO DE HISTÓRIA CONTEMPORÂNEA, UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA
[page-n-71]
This archaeology will be the tomb of fascism, or it will be nothing.
The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
Cemeteries are ideal places for destroying evidence. Burying the
dead in the cemetery guarantees that they will be covered up by
other dead; the victims of reprisals, mixed together with vagabonds and suicides; the graves, undone or disfigured. The people
who excavate these infernal graves today know this well.
The ditches at the side of the road are the memory of political
violence in war. But to understand the true nature of Franco’s
repression, you must also explore the cemeteries.
Alfredo González-Ruibal (2022)
The exhumations in the cemeteries of Paterna, Málaga and Seville
are the palpable proof of two defining features of the Francoist repression in the centre and south of Spain. The first is the elimination
of political opponents, carried out on a practically industrial scale,
which back up those historiographic claims that these actions constitute a genuine extermination. The second is the continuation of this
practice throughout the postwar period, supporting the notion that
the regime continued to wage an irregular war that persisted until the
early 1950s. Today, the infernal graves in the large cemeteries in
the cities of Andalusia and Valencia are the reflection of a specific
socio-political context that has prompted the efforts to revive this
memory – with regional governments devoted to the mission, the
creation of historical memory associations and the involvement of
teams of professionals with years of experience in the exhumation
of the victims of Francoism.
When the organizers of this exhibition suggested that I should
write a text, with the idea of highlighting the community aspect of
this cemetary archaeology, I decided to address the subject from our
experience in a geographical setting far away from Valencia – rural
Galicia. I could have chosen to describe the work done by our team
in cemeteries associated with concentration camps such as Castuera in
Badajoz, or on the frontlines of the war in Alcarria or the Ebro, but I
felt that the research carried out at the micro scale, in a rural context
like Galicia, with small graves in the cemeteries of peasant communities, would provide illuminating insights into the community archaeology carried out at the sites of memory of Fascist political violence.
This approach is all the more necessary given the Galician regional
government’s disregard for the need of a public policy supporting historical memory since 2009.
In 2007 I began to investigate a skirmish that took place in Repil,
next to my maternal village (Cereixa, Pobra do Bollón, in the province of Lugo) on 20 April 1949, between the Spanish Civil Guard and
a guerrilla detachment. Several villagers in Cereixa who had links to
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the guerrillas were tried and sent to prison. Many years later, in 2016,
we started archaeological excavations in Repil, and only then did the
extent of Franco’s repression in the landscape of my childhood begin
to dawn on me. As a historian, I had to reach the age of 40 to find out
that in the cemeteries of all the parishes adjacent to Cereixa (Fornelas, Abrence, Castroncelos, Saa) there were Republicans buried like
vermin in common graves. The Fascist pedagogy of violence and the
policy of oblivion appeared to have triumphed. The graves were invisible; the dead, dehumanized, did not exist. But their memory lived on
in the traumatic collective consciousness of these rural communities.
At the age of forty I realized that I had been brought up in the midst
of an absent, politically neutered landscape, marked by the communities of the dead but intentionally kept apart from the communities
of the living – a landscape that, nonetheless, could be exhumed via
the application of archaeology.
Just one yard more
The brothers José and Ricardo García Moral lived in the parish of
Montefurado (Quiroga, Lugo) when they were arrested by Fascist
gunmen on 6 September, 1936. After an interrogation in the Falange
barracks, the two brothers were put on a train that took them from the
station in Montefurado towards Monforte de Lemos. The Falangists
forced the prisoners to get off at A Pobra do Bollón, and then shot
them. José received three bullets, Ricardo four. The two bodies were
left on the road that leads to Quiroga, in front of the house of a certain Bernardino. In A Chá de Castroncelos the bodies were inspected
by the judge and the doctor. It is still surprising that this inspection
should have happened in the earliest days of the Franco period, and is
something that would be unthinkable in modern-day Spain: no judge
would make their way to a common grave bearing victims of Franco.
From there, the bodies were taken by oxcart (the great icon of repression in Galicia) to the atrium of the church of Santiago de Castroncelos. There, they were buried together, as described in the military
report: “next to the church in an open grave, close to the wall of this
church (and four yards away from the corner) on the northwest side,
measuring a yard and a half and two yards long, together without a
coffin and with the heads placed facing northwest”.
In July 2018, Pepe Ogando, grandson of one of the victims, requested help from the Association for the Recovery of Historical
Memory (ARMH) to exhume the remains of his grandfather, just as
he had promised his mother and grandmother. According to oral testimonies, the two brothers were buried under the altar of the church.
How would that have been possible? It transpired that, decades later,
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a parish priest decided to knock down the old church and build a new
one, in a style combining kitsch and gore, and oriented it from north
to south rather than from east to west. This crazed renovation work
changed the appearance of the site forever and meant that the indications in the document were no longer of any use.
Pepe Ogando shows us a
family photo on his tablet
during the exhumation of
Castroncelos. The women
in the family had kept alive
the memory of repression
in their grandmother’s
house in Montefurado.
This attempt to recover the bodies of these victims was not the
idea of the residents of Castroncelos. In fact, the exhumations performed have always been promoted from outside the local community, for instance by historical memory associations, or supported
by people who are politically committed to this cause. The brutal
repression, Franco’s propaganda, the imposition of the landscape of
the victors, emigration for political reasons, the control by local party
bosses and the new elite that usurped local power are all factors that
help explain why rural communities adopted silence and inaction
as their strategies for survival. Nevertheless, the culture of death in
the Galician countryside has a sufficient weight in the peasant moral economy to generate a collective need for reparation. The graves
of the victims are open scars in the community ethos. Although the
Galician right sidelined the Historical Memory Act of 2007, since
then, the media have followed and reported with great respect the
exhumations carried out. But that was all. This exhumation of Castroncelos exemplifies very clearly how an activist archaeology can
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
develop in this particular socio-political context. This would not have
happened without the involvement of Rafael Castillo, secretary of
the Town Council of A Pobra do Bollón, grandson of the Republican
Mayor shot in 1938, whose commitment to the project was vital. The
symbolic support of the municipal government was also vital, in this
case of the Galician nationalist party, which has promoted a range of
acts and events to honour the victims of Franco.
Just as our Valencian colleagues in Arqueoantro organized concerts with heavy metal tribute bands to raise money for DNA tests to
identify Civil War combatants in the hills of Castellón, our group sold
wine and t-shirts advertising the Castro of San Lourenzo archaeological project at local fairs to be able to buy a power shovel. For its part,
the ARMH team involved in this project also has an intake of foreign
volunteers. A Californian student from Duke University came here
to do the work that Spanish universities prefer to ignore, perhaps
because taking up a political position may have dire consequences for
the CV of an aspiring academic. While Galician public television has
not covered a single exhumation so far, Castroncelos welcomed the
team of the Spanish producer Newtral, with the journalist Ana Pastor
at the head, to record a piece about the recovery of historical memory. Two other audiovisual professionals who work for the US chain
HBO and were recording a documentary about the crimes of Franco
also covered the event. Although they knew that this exhumation was
very difficult and was very unlikely to be successful, they recognized
something that our research team has been stressing for some time:
namely, that the processes set in action when we dig are more important and more interesting than the results of the investigation itself.
As for the local community, the residents are divided. The older
people who wanted to participate, more than anything due to family
ties, and who kept the memory of the events, were reluctant to speak
in public or visit the site; we had to go to their homes to talk to them
and record the information. We were lucky to have the help of the
writer Olga Novo, winner of the National Poetry Award, who lives in
the town. She contacted the older women who looked after the church
and the surroundings, borrowed the key to the church to let the journalists in, persuaded the elderly to provide their testimonies and urged
the priest to continue the work in the future. Carmen García-Rodeja
of the ARMH also came to our rescue. Being with the relatives of the
victims during exhumation is fundamental: a carousel of emotions,
of frustrations and hopes accompany each shovel-load of soil as it was
removed.
On the other hand, many villagers were indifferent to the project
– the majority, in fact – and another sector opposed what they termed
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The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
“moving the dead around”. There were even some who complained
and blamed the ditches we dug for the appearance of cracks on one of
the walls of the church: they were more concerned about the old scars
on the walls than the graves they step on every Sunday.
The absence of any support from the State was compensated
for in Castroncelos by the cooperation of residents, volunteers and
archaeologists who were militant defenders of historical memory.
Pepe Ogando asked us to try to dig further in the area surveyed two
years previously. When we felt that there was nothing more to be
found there, we asked the digger, nicknamed the Flea, to stop. At
that time, on the point of tears, Pepe had come up to us and asked if
we could please just dig a couple of feet more. We felt so sorry. Once
again, the oral tradition had been confirmed: the change of orientation of the church floor plan in the postwar period meant that the
bodies of the García Moral brothers (if they are there) are lying in a
recess near the main altar, inside the new church. It is very hard to
have to stop just a few inches from the truth.
At the foot of the famous cracked wall, in 2016 a commemorative plaque was installed in tribute to the García Moral brothers so
as to preserve their memory. So far it has not been vandalized. The
writer Olga Novo brought her pupils from the school A Pinguela in
74
Opening of a prospective
ditch in the atrium of the
Church of Castroncelos, at
the foot of the stone block
and plaque in memory of
the García Moral brothers.
Relatives, journalists,
volunteers and archaeologists are shown.
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
Monforte de Lemos to this place of memory: an act to reaffirm the
pedagogy of love against the pedagogy of terror. The fact that this educational visit was quite exceptional in Galicia, a pioneering event, is
a reflection of the abnormal situation that still reigns in this country,
even in times of democracy.
Class given in the atrium
of the Church of Castroncelos by the teacher
and writer Olga Novo to
the pupils of A Pinguela
(Monforte de Lemos).
The summer they killed “The Winter”
From Castroncelos, in the same month of July 2018 we moved on to
the neighbouring parish of Saa to try to exhume the remains of Jesús
Casas, also known as O’Inverno (“Winter” in Galician) who had lived
in the village of Eirexalba. For many years his granddaughter Isabel,
who now lives in New York, had been leaving flowers near the site
where her grandfather was killed on 6 August, 1936, near the Alto de
Santa Lucia. After knocking on many doors, without success, Isabel
had requested help from the ARMH to find the exact place. Both
Saa and Eirexalba have a traumatic past that casts a shadow over the
present. In Saa, several families had a prominent role in the local
Falange and Eirexalba had been home to the main group of gunmen
who sowed terror in the region, the self-styled “Black Squad”. As late
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76
as 1944, with the presence of anti-Franco guerrillas in the area, a local
newspaper in Sarria issued the following admonition to the civilian
population: “Warning: Watch out for the Black Squad!” Their extreme cruelty and their continuous abuses even led the authorities to
condemn their leaders to death (Ermida, 2017).
Before launching into the study of this delicate subject, we asked
the secretary of the Town Council if we could hold a meeting with the
residents in order to compile information and describe the project
to them. The villagers’ response to our invitation was lukewarm and,
as in the case of Castroncelos, we obtained most of our information
from relatives of older people who invited us into their homes. During
the exhumation we received hardly any visits. One very special exception was the visit of the parish priest who asked to meet me, the director of the exhumation, in person. We received written permission
from the Bishopric of Lugo to carry out the works as long as the “good
harmony” among the villagers was not disrupted and that the digging
“did not affect coexistence” inside the parish. As we can see, this exhumation interrupted the silence imposed for decades and raised hackles among certain members of the local community who accused us,
again, of disturbing the rest of the dead and of reopening the wounds
of the past.
The murderers of Jesús
Casas: The Black Squad
of Eirexalba (in Ermida
2017).
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
The oral accounts and the available documentation suggested
three possible sites where O’Inverno’s remains might lie. One of them
was in the old cemetery. This area, limited by a shale masonry wall, is
occupied by an illegal landfill. Bedframes, pots, mattresses, shoes and
debris were strewn everywhere, especially in the part closest to the
road, within easy reach for people wanting to throw away things they
no longer want. The people who ranted about archaeologists not letting the dead rest in peace were the ones who dumped rubbish in the
cemetery where their ancestors are buried.
O’Inverno was a member of the CNT, the anarchist trade union
movement. He returned from Cuba with progressive ideas and had
a gift for public speaking. With the victory of the Popular Front, he
stood out for the speeches he gave on land ownership in O Incio and
for opposing the privatization of the communal hill in his parish.
According to the Fascist justice, “by the use of terror he had forced
the majority of the residents of the parish to share his destructive
ideas.” With the news of the military uprising of 18 July 1936, the Republicans of O Incio and A Pobra do Brollón joined together to block
roads, requisition weapons and stop the advance of Rebel troops.
When the situation became desperate, O’Inverno fled to the mountains, taking refuge in the house of some relatives in the village of Covadellas. But he was betrayed; on 6 August, 1936, the Black Squad of
his town, Eirexalba, arrived in Saa at five in the afternoon.
The village elders remember perfectly well what happened, and
their accounts confirm the official records. According to O’Cachete, a
ninety-year-old resident of Saa, who has since died: “Some unknown
men arrived, they said they were Falangists from Sarria. They arrived
in Covadellas and O’Inverno was eating with the owners of the house:
They said “Come on, he’s had enough to eat and drink!” and they took
him to Saa, beating him all the way. One said: “Look at the fat legs
on this rabbit,” and they hit him in the shins with their rifle butts. It
was very hot, and he was wearing short trousers. Covered in blood, he
fell over at practically every step, with his hands tied. The Falangists
did not take him along the road, but turned through the village called
Pousa, in view of everyone. A woman asked them not to beat him,
and said that she wanted to give him a glass of water: “No, señora, he
already had enough to eat and drink up there”. They went towards the
hill of Santa Lucía, and when they reached the pines of O’Xexo, they
told him to choose whether to die facing them or with his back to
them. He chose to be shot in the back, looking to the north towards
his village of Eirexalba. They killed him right there and left the body
sprawled out on the road. The local authorities were informed and
two men went to the Church to fetch the platform used to carry the
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78
On the left, Carlos, the
quarryman. On the right,
another Carlos, a retired
miner, a volunteer of
the ARMH. Both are the
grandsons of victims of
reprisals. They are standing in one of the possible
locations of O’Inverno’s
grave, although this site
was later ruled out after
the excavation.
statue of the Virgin in processions. The next day his widow arrived
with two young girls, two of his daughters”.
The story of this man’s martyrdom became part of the collective
imaginary, which took the ordeal of Christ as reference. The popular
account, so descriptive when addressing this man’s tragic destiny,
does not include his place of burial. The tradition situates O’Inverno’s
grave just at the entrance of the atrium, to the left of the stairway,
in a quadrangular recess in the wall. For decades this area was used
to launch fireworks on the day of the village feast, held precisely in
the month of August. Some of our informants tell us that bunches
of flowers occasionally appeared at that precise spot. But the exploration of this site proved fruitless, as did the study of the ditch dug
in the old cemetery. Finally, we found out that the original location
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
of the pit corresponded to the description found in the municipal
records: “Next, in the cemetery of the parish of Saá the autopsied
body was buried in an open grave next to the wall of the south side
and six yards away from the west side.” At this same point, recently added niches have destroyed the remains located in the subsoil.
In other places, the memory of the victims has endured, and the
tradition forbade any further burials or changes; here, though, it
was different, so much so that O’Inverno rested under the niche of
Recently made niches in
the atrium of the church
of Saa that destroyed
O’Inverno’s resting place.
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The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
families of Falangists. And this is where the dramatic circle of a man
who died for his ideas closes. His granddaughter Isabel still receives
anonymous threats in Eirexalba for wanting to know what happened to her grandfather.
When time stopped in O’Decimal
Love in the times of anger. Despite the fear, the war and the threat
of the death squads, the young folk tried to enjoy the last days of that
tragic summer. A young lad from Piño, over the valley of the River
Teixugo, set out, all spruced up, in the direction of Fornelas. At the
town’s feast a month earlier, he had danced with a girl, and since
then, he had meant to court her. As they say in these parts, “he was
going to Fornelas for courting.” That September night, the suitor
came across something surprising: a truck, motionless at the side
of the road with the headlights on and the engine running. Shouts
and insults could be heard from the rear. Scared, he hid behind some
bushes a few yards away. That plot of land went by the name of “A Bernarda”, but in recent times a sign had been added on the side of the
road indicating the distance from the village: one kilometre. Since
then, the place had been known as “O’Decimal”. Now, the roads were
to become part of a whole cartography of terror.
That day, time stopped in O’Decimal. The suitor saw everything.
Armed men with Falange insignia, forced two men with their hands
tied behind their backs to get off the truck. One of them, older and
thickset, managed to fight off one of the Falangists, and had even got
hold of his weapon. The driver of the truck approached the prisoner
from behind and hit him over the head with the motor crank. Then
the shots rang out; the suitor could hardly believe his eyes: it was all
he could do to hold back the screams he could feel building up in his
throat. A few minutes later, the truck roared off down the road towards Nadela. And then ... silence.
This is the version passed down through the generations in the
parish of Fornelas about the events of 7 September 1936, when
the Fascists murdered the socialist Gervasio González and a stranger.
Gervasio’s granddaughter, María José, went to the ARMH to ask for
help in finding her grandfather’s grave in the cemetery of Fornelas.
Unlike the cases of the neighbouring parishes of Saa and Castroncelos, and despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the local community were
keen to take part in the exhumation carried out in August 2020. In
Saa and Castroncelos, the murderers had been from other municipalities, but in Fornelas one of the executioners was a local – a troublemaker who would later kill another man in an argument over land
hitting him over the head with a hoe. Paradoxically, this collaborator
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of the Fascist gunmen ended up in a Francoist prison. The involvement of a villager in that abject event was felt as a collective stain on
the community, something that Fornelas had to atone for. The need
to cure that wound probably helps to explain the villagers’ engagement in the process of exhumation.
Residents of Fornelas
provide information to
Gervasio’s granddaughter,
María José during the
exhumation in the parish
cemetery.
During the excavation we found that Gervasio’s grave had been
destroyed by later burials, in particular by a niche built for an emigré
who had returned from Cuba. While Gervasio was left to rest for
decades like vermin, the Fascist doctor of Fornelas and the Francoist
mayor of A Pobra de Brollón lie in the finest mausoleum in the cemetery. The collaborator in the murder has a side niche. The archaeological excavation brought to light this entire traumatic story, and served
as collective therapy and a teaching resource for new generations. Of
course, to obtain the unanimous support of the people of Fornelas the
name of the collaborator was omitted; his descendants are part of
the community and are not responsible for their grandfather’s misdemeanours. Our magnificent relationship with Fornelas that developed during the exhumation led us to launch a new digging campaign
in the summer of 2022 in a prehistoric deposit known as Muradella.
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The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
82
The inauguration on 30 July, 2022 was capped by a session inside the
parish church where our forensic anthropologists Márcia Hattóri and
Candela Martínez described the details of the exhumation of 2020
and the subsequent research. The church was full to bursting – 80
residents, that is, the entire parish, were reunited with their past and
were able to heal the scars of the wound opened in 1936.
Open day at the church of
Fornelas (30 July, 2022).
Anthropologists Márcia
Hattóri and Candela
Martínez describe the
exhumation of 2020.
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
Conclusion
As Alfredo González states in the quotations at the beginning of this
text, cemeteries are living entities that grow and remove the traces of
the people who disappeared during the times of Franco. The passing
of time plays to the advantage of a Fascist movement that planned
both the physical elimination of its political opponents (as is clearly
seen in Paterna) and the progressive destruction of these graves and
bodies. The three exhumations we describe in this text share three
major common features. In all of them, the press printed headlines
such as “Unsuccessful exhumations; the archaeologists fail; digs end
without success”. It is true that we were unable to find José, Ricardo,
Jesús or Gervasio, but their names have returned to the public arena;
their grandchildren (Pepe, Isabel, María José) have felt supported,
and through our committed and courageous digging we have tried to
repair the wrongs of the past.
What is more, these excavations are an ethnoarchaeological
emergency, an endeavour that has arrived late in the day – though
there is still time to record the testimony of people in their eighties
and nineties, like O’Cachete in Saa, and Ramón from Piñeiros (Castroncelos) who passed away in these last three years. Collecting
this oral memory is essential to reverse the process of invisibility
and to break the silence imposed on the tombs of Fascism. And,
finally, these three exhumations underline the need to persevere
with community-based archaeology, even if it takes place in difficult
and sometimes hostile contexts. Excavating the truth is a powerful
weapon, since it breaks down the hegemonic story of the victors
of the war and provides communities with evidence of the crimes of
Franco. Whether they decide to acknowledge the traces unearthed is
another matter. The process of opening and disseminating these infernal graves, whether or not the victims of the reprisals appear, implicates these small rural populations of the present in their recent
past. In my opinion, this community archaeology, brave and always
controversial, never ends in failure; it achieves valuable symbolic
victories, such as the commemoration of the García Moral brothers
in the cemetery of Castroncelos, the media impact of the recovery
of the figure of O’Inverno and the identification of his murderers, or
the cathartic day of memory in Fornelas attended by the entire community. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, residents, and social and
human scientists, José, Ricardo, Jesús and Gervasio have returned
from the community of the dead to the community of the living. Our
Valencian colleagues are fighting to do the same for the thousands of
their compatriots whose remains are trodden over in the plots of the
cemetery of Paterna.
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84
This exhibition is another milestone on this road which, in many
places, has opened up only very recently – without any aid from the
State.
Replacing the original soil
after the exhumations.
Volunteers from the
Castro de San Lourenzo
site (2020) sow seeds to
regenerate the grass in
the cemetery of Fornelas.
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
Bibliography
Ermida Meilán, X. R. (2017) «Para nós o matar é unha honra». As Escuadras Negras de Falanxe. En X. R. Ermida Meilán, Fernández Fernández, E., X. C.
Garrido Couceiro e D. Pereira González (coords.): Os nomes do terror. Galiza
1936: os verdugos que nunca existiron: 63-80. Sermos Galiza.
González Ruibal, A. (2022) «Las grandes fosas de la Guerra Civil no están en las
cunetas». Público, 11 de septiembre de 2022.
[page-n-87]
ANTHRO
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OPOLOGY
91
Where does memory live?
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
113
Objects and memories: the material dimension
of the mass graves
Zira Box Varela
127
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass
graves
Aitzpea Leizaola
145
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary
exhumation process: possibilities and tensions
in the fight for memory(ies)
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
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88
Postcards sent from prison
by Francisco Sanz Herráez to his family
Grave 127, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
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89
Glasses, pencil and stamps
Individual 124, Grave 115; Individual 99, Grave 127, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
[page-n-91]
Knitted sweater, with a necktie of the same fabric,
belonging to Francisco Peiró Roger
Grave 111, Paterna. Donated by the Peiró family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
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91
Where does memory live?
Maria-José García Hernandorena
& Isabel Gadea i Peiró
CURATORS OF THE EXHIBITION «2.238. EL CEMENTERI DE PATERNA:
LLOC DE PERPETRACIÓ I MEMÒRIA»
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Where does memory live?
Where does memory live? Or more specifically: Where is the memory
of Francoist repression and where has it been? Those questions are
central to the discourse of the exhibition: “2238. El cementeri de Paterna: memòria i perpetració” [2238. Paterna Cemetery: Memory and
Perpetration]. Based on ethnographic research and taking Paterna
cemetery as our case study with more than one hundred mass graves
located there, this site is both exemplary and pragmatic to reply to
those questions1.
Within this framework, this exhibition provides a fundamental
tool to understand the emergence of a number of contemporary
claims by Valencian society, those who lost everything after the end
of the Spanish Civil War due to repression for their political ideology. They had lost it all, but they never lost their memory. Despite
the efforts by the Dictatorship to physically and symbolically bury
everything that challenged its legitimacy, a thread, strengthened
generation by generation, has kept it alive and given continuity to it
through time.
There are three spaces where we can find the memory of Franco’s
repression associated with Paterna cemetery: the cemetery itself, the
mass graves and the homes of the victims. In addition to the territorial limits, the material culture associated with repression, i.e.,, the
objects, comprise mobilising agents of memorial processes, projecting voices that are capable of affecting individual and social reality
(Bustamante, J., 2014). Hence, and continuing with this author,
while these processes remain inside those places of memory, the objects are activators and the actions and practices are activated through
and by them.
The exposition is a diachronic journey of voices, interests, politics and ways of how the repression was felt and expressed in a confrontation of spaces. On the one hand, the private, closed off, claustrophobic places: a mass grave, a chest of drawers or a cupboard in
the house of the victims of reprisals, who safeguard and transmit an
inconclusive dowry or mourning. On the other hand, an open, public
space: Paterna cemetery. In addition to these spaces, everything they
either contain and/or have contained in the past is striking, comprising a game of different mirrors and journeys that explain why part of
Valencian society still feels indebted to memory. A debt that entails
recovering the bodies of their relatives, but also public recognition
through repairs for injustice, economic and moral compensation,
among others.
Approaching the exhumation of a mass grave today and its current impact on society is also the subject matter of this exhibition,
through a perspective that goes beyond the deep hole in the ground
1
This text is accompanied
by images that are interwoven into the events that
occurred and are a significant part of the story. The
images were produced in
different contexts and for
different purposes, and
so their format, and their
quality, may vary. Each
one of them was vital to
the research necessary
to make this exhibition
possible.
[page-n-94]
93
2
Let us remember that
between 1939 and 1956,
out of the 2238 people put
before the firing squads in
Paterna, 2219 were men,
and only 19 were women.
Most of those women
were murdered because
of their active participation in the 2nd Republic
and/or during the Civil
War. Many of them were
teachers and members
of the militia who held
public offices traditionally assigned to men, and
their political involvement cost them their
lives. In addition to those
women, many others
suffered social, economic
and sexual repression
that the regime reserved
for the “reds”. In the latter
case, it was often those
women who, despite not
having transgressed the
domestic scope that was
assigned to their gender,
they were slandered,
shaved and humiliated
through because of the
fact they were related to a
“red”. They were mothers,
sisters and colleagues
of the victims, all those
first generation women
who made the cemetery a
feminine place.
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
comprising the grave itself. The exhibition widens our outlook on
the lives of the people whose days ended in those graves and their
families, to take a closer look at the objects and places that have been
transmitted over time, and which are witnesses, bearers and transmitters of their memories.
These dynamics cannot be understood without a gender approach: whereas the mass graves in Paterna are mainly masculine2,
the cemetery and the places where the memories of repression are
kept and transmitted are mainly feminine. This inheritance has been
able to take place partly thanks to the objects kept in the households
of the victims, held and hidden by the families as the evocative materiality of the bodies they were unable to receive to end their mourning,
and transformed in “profane altars” (López, J and Picazo, L., 2011).
When interpreting the cemetery and the mass graves in Paterna
from an ethnographic perspective, in terms of gender, we put emotions, feelings, experiences and the subjectivity of the narratives at
the centre, and we try to respond to those who still question the relevance of their claims.
The cemetery
It was the inside of the places and spaces where repairing and commemorative activities were traditionally performed for the victims of
traumatic events and past conflicts, in order to vindicate, repair, honour and remember them, as mentioned earlier. In the case of the Region of Valencia, Paterna cemetery and the mass graves in and around
it (the firing squad wall, the road of Blood) has become one of those
powerfully paradigmatic, symbolic places to observe and analyse processes of remembrance and homage to all those who were executed
during Franco’s dictatorship between 1939 and 1956.
Furthermore, a cemetery is more than just somewhere where
the dead are laid to rest. It is a place where a number of rituals are
performed, understood as collective acts that lead to cohesion and
balance within a community, where social relations and actions take
place over time as a reflection of the surrounding society. In the case
of a cemetery such as Paterna, where there are over one hundred mass
graves dating back to the days of repression by the Francoist dictatorship following the war, those relations, interactions and actions
are even more poignant. They ask us what we should expect of a full
democracy as citizens, but not only that, those questions are asked to
us as social investigators involved in subjects on democratic memory
and human rights.
Likewise, it is the place where exhumation processes of over
one hundred mass graves takes place, following the established
[page-n-95]
94
Where does memory live?
scientific/forensic and archaeological protocols with the aim of repairing the pain and anguish of the families of the victims, returning
the exhumed mortal remains of their loved ones to them. From 2016
onwards3, in response to the demands by relatives of the victims, exhumations began in this town in the l’Horta region, financed through
public funds by means of a policy of subsidies to defray the costs of
exhumation of the mass graves. The objective of the exhumation process is to identify the 2238 executed victims and return their remains
to the relatives who ask for them so that they can be laid to rest and
honoured wherever they wish.
In this volume, regarding the case of Paterna Cemetery, the anthropologist, María-Laura Martín Chiappe from the Autonomous
University of Madrid (UAM) proposes “Revisiting the contemporary
exhumation process of the victims of Francoism, describing some of
the layers of memory that link the memorial stages and the practices
inherent to each of them, but also the possibilities and limitations,
continuities and tensions that surround them”.
The role of women in the cemetery becomes fundamental, and
even today it is barely acknowledged4. In the specific case of this site,
one of the main particularities differentiating it from other places
where executions were perpetrated is the fact that it is a site of memory from the very moment of the executions, thanks to the women
and their open mourning practices that successive generations have
inherited.5 We therefore uphold, as mentioned above, that while the
mass graves are a masculinised space, the cemetery itself is feminised.
In order to analyse the biography of this place of memory, we
have mapped the presence, struggles and resistance that took place
around the mass graves over all these years. As for feminine presence,
there is a gender genealogy linked to the cemetery dating back to
the attendance of women from 1939, when the first mass graves appeared. The appearance of bunches of flowers during the contemporary exhumation process is evidence of the footprint of the first generation of women, the mothers, partners and sisters of the victims,
many of whom went to the cemetery on hearing about the fate of
their relatives and loved ones, with the intention of taking their bodies away and giving them a dignified burial6. They have never stopped
going there since then.
The repression of these families also included the prohibition of
any outward demonstration of mourning. That is why the presence
of those mourning women filling the graves every 1st of November
is a symbol of resistance against the Regime, a fight against oblivion. That is how it was interpreted by the fascist authorities who
tried to evict them, and that fact is kept in the collective memory of
3
Following the example
of a wider movement in
the Spanish State in 2000
started by Emilio Silva,
who demanded exhumation and identification
of his grandfather and 12
other victims executed
by the members of the
Falange movement and
thrown into a ditch in the
roadside in Priaranza del
Bierzo (León) in 1936.
4
There are few places in
Spain where that role of
women transmitting and
keeping the memory of
Francoist repression is
acknowledged. The most
relevant is the Barranca
Memorial in La Rioja
region.
5
The analysis of custody
and transmission of
memory allows us to differentiate between three
different generations of
women. Regarding this
subject, we furthered our
ethnographic investigation (García & Gadea,
2021) and also the text
where we reconstructed
the female family trees related to the mass graves in
Paterna cemetery (Gadea
& García, 2022).
6
Only a small minority
managed to take the
bodies of their relatives to
their respective hometowns or bury them
individually in a niche in
the cemetery itself.
[page-n-96]
95
Bunches of flowers left
inside the mass graves in
Paterna, exhumed by the
teams of archaeologists.
Grave 115. Widows, sons
and daughters of those
executed in Paterna
cemetery. Undated.
Photograph loaned by the
Pastor family.
Grave 135. Widow and
grand-daughters of an
executed person in Paterna cemetery. Year 1959
Photograph loaned by the
Chofre family.
Grave 112. Widows, sons
and daughters of some
of the people executed in
Paterna cemetery. Undated. Photograph loaned by
the Gómez family.
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
[page-n-97]
Where does memory live?
Paterna cemetery. Furthermore, they did everything within their
power to appropriate the graves, to dignify them and bring their
loved ones out of anonymity from a hole in the ground covered with
soil and lime. Despite the financial struggles of the victims of Francoism, many of those women made and placed the first memorials,
using humble ceramic tiles. The violence against the “reds” also
targeted their memorials, which the Regime’s guards deliberately
destroyed. Nevertheless, the women did not give up and they relentlessly replaced them over and over again.
The mourning without closure and the rituals associated with
it were inherited by the next generation of daughters. Many of the
women in that generation drew up new claims surrounding the
graves, as is the case of the fight to declare them exempt of payment
and to dignify and maintain that place of memory. Those women who
went to Paterna throughout their lives saw how the political parties
and trade unions joined together to honour the victims of Francoism following the death of Franco, by erecting memorials or holding
different acts of remembrance. Hence, on 1st November, new dates
were added to the memorial calendar, such as the 14th of April and
the 1st of May.
Granddaughters and great-granddaughters took over the tradition of visiting the cemetery on those dates. Furthermore, as
promoters of contemporary repairing practices, several procedures
have been implemented that directly affect Paterna cemetery. As
mentioned earlier, the exhumation processes are the practices that
are most in the public eye, and in these cases the direct consequence
on the cemetery is the opening of the graves and the many effects
that this entails, at family, association, scientific, political, media,
social and cultural levels (García & Gadea, 2021). Unfortunately,
the goal pursued through these practices of recovering and identifying the bodies buried in those graves places emphasis on the
cemetery as the place where executions were perpetrated (mostly
targeting men), rather than a place of remembrance (mostly involving women).
Consequently, from our perspective, it is indispensable to
narrate the biography of the cemetery (Gadea & Garcia, 2022) as
a place that is explained through the acts of the living. In the exhibition at the Museu Valencià d’Etnologia different materials are
displayed that bear witness to the history of the cemetery as a place
of resistance and struggles, of family remembrance, but also collective, associative and political remembrance.
96
[page-n-98]
97
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Grave 100. Granddaughters and great-granddaughters of victims.
Photograph of the authors.
The mass graves and objects that are painful to see
Lime
Soil
Bones
Spherical projectile cartridge (10 mm)
7 mm Mauser projectile
Thirty-two wooden buttons
Seven bone buttons
Thirty-three metal buttons
Seventeen Bakelite buttons
Nine nacre buttons
A wire spool
Two alpargata sandal soles
A pocket lighter
A silver spoon
Two penknives
Four trouser buckles
Two belts with buckles
Two pieces to fasten clothing
Four pencil leads
Three gold teeth
Fragments of a truss
Fragments of a zip
Fragments of alpargata sandal soles
[page-n-99]
Where does memory live?
Fragments of clothing
Fragments of a pill box
Fragments of a wallet
This list of objects is just an example of the type of items that
appear along with the bones when bodies are exhumed from a mass
grave in Paterna. In this case, they are remains of twenty-one men
executed by firing squad on 2nd November 1939 after the end of the
war, and buried in a mass grave, grave 100 located in the first quarter
to the left of the cemetery.
In 2021 the Museu Valencià d’Etnologia started to show interest
in the cemetery on commission by the Valencia Council, and particularly in regard to the exhumations of the mass graves of the Francoist
Regime. The museum started to assess and consider the importance
of the objects and other types of materials associated with the bone
remains which have been unearthed since the scientific/forensic exhumation processes of the Paterna mass graves began in 2016. That
is how the process to collect these materials started, a process taking
us closer to the families, to the teams of archaeologists working on
exhumation of the graves and the public administration who holds
custody of those items in view of the legal circumstances at the moment. It is interesting to observe the process through which the items
change from very little being known about them, through conservation conditions and the unease they cause by putting them in plain
view and turning them into heritage and museum exhibits.
In this paper we can find the text by the anthropologist from
UPV/EHU, Aitzpea Leizaola, which deals with this subject in other
places around Spain and through her experience with the Aranzadi
Sciences Society. To quote her: “The nature of those objects, their
status, and their future destination are the central theme of this text
to further discuss the material side of memory, the need for a heritage framework to tackle the subject of transmission of those objects
within the context of exhumations”.
The exhumed items bear witness to the terrible events of the
past. We are able to hold dialogue on subjects as varied as the prison
conditions of the people sentenced to death under Franco’s regime,
their hopes, daily life in the prison (health, hygiene, how they dressed
and their footwear, writing, how they spent their time when waiting).
They humanise the victims and present them as people not so far removed or different from us, not the “red horde” with whom we have
nothing in common, but rather normal, ordinary people who ate,
washed, wrote, read and played, and who were also made to suffer.
98
[page-n-100]
99
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
The materials are hard to conserve, exhibit and explain. They represent the nearest, direct presence of the victims of Francoism, and
bear clear witness to the violence they suffered, and once again we are
shocked by that horror.
Loan by a family of objects from a mass grave at
the Ethnology Museum of
Valencia.
Collection of items
from the mass graves in
Paterna cemetery by the
Ethnology Museum of
Valencia.
Boxes where the items
exhumed from the mass
graves in Paterna are
stored. Valencia Council
Warehouse, Bétera.
Trays where the items
exhumed from the mass
graves in Paterna are
classified and conserved.
Valencia Council Warehouse, Bétera.
[page-n-101]
Where does memory live?
Houses and objects of mourning
Tears
Kisses
Silences
Seventeen photographs of executed victims
Six family photographs
Three marriage photographs
Three photographs of sons and daughters
A group photograph at an assembly
A medallion with a photograph of an executed victim
Six birth certificates
Six death certificates
Ten prison sentences
Five summary judgements
Eight municipal acts in respective villages
A newspaper cut-out
Two political party membership cards
An esparto cord with five knots (one for each daughter)
Esparto alpargata sandals in children’s size made in the prison
A handkerchief embroidered in the prison
Three wooden boxes made in the prison
A cigarette lighter
A pipe
A paper with a chess board drawn on it made in the prison
A fountain pen
Wooden tags with names
Two blankets
A bar of soap
A policeman’s personal diary
Forty-six letters and postcards from the prison
Eleven farewell letters
Five pieces of clothing worn during execution
A bullet
This list encompasses the objects related to twenty-one men who
were executed on 2nd of November 1939 and thrown into grave 100
in Paterna cemetery. The items have been kept by their families since
then. It is only a small sample of mourning objects, those that were
hidden in tin and cardboard boxes, cupboards and drawers, between
woven sheets, silence and tears.
100
[page-n-102]
101
7
“Hence, along with the
figure of the “Angel of
the home” the role of
“Guardian of memory”
goes hand in hand with
it, in charge of keeping
the memories, histories,
objects, photographs and
everything else related to
remembrance” (Gadea y
Garcia, 2022:218).
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
As can be seen, many of these objects are the same as those exhumed with the bones, lime and soil that covered the bodies for over
eighty years. The difference between objects that hurt and objects
of mourning is related to the rituals and practices that accompany
one and the other over the years, which we try to explain through
disciplines such as social anthropology. Therefore, while the objects
that hurt represent the bodies of the victims and the impact that
contemporary opening up of the graves has over eighty years later,
the mourning objects materialise and trap the open mourning that
was passed down from female generation to female generation over
the years.
In order to understand the importance and function of these
objects, we need to look at the everlasting mourning of the families
of the victims on the one hand, and on the other, the gender socialisation model on which the duty to mourn fell, particularly on the women. Firstly, it has historically always been women who have taken on
the role of material and symbolic upholding of the family, in accordance with the gender system, prototypical of the patriarchal culture.
Along with the housework and care for the offspring, the remembrance and custody practices of memory are part of the knowledge
alleged to be inherent to the feminine sex. In other words, biological,
cultural and symbolic reproduction is considered to be the responsibility of women (Troncoso and Piper, 2015)7. Part of the symbolic sustenance of the family includes keeping the memory of the dead alive
and being in charge of the associated rituals and practices, hence the
link between gender and mourning.
Secondly, and on the basis of the above, the murder of the victims of Francoism brought about changes to the rituals of death that
were practised at the time. Indeed, the families could not prepare for
the death of their loved ones (the preliminary stage encompassing
practices prior to passing away, such as prevention), nor could they
prepare for a dignified burial (the liminal stage including death, wake
and burial). Moreover, the culture imposed by the perpetrators forbade any outwards manifestation of mourning and cult by the “reds”,
which would usually be a part of the later stage of mourning. The
impossibility of passing through the different stages to guarantee a
“dignified death” led to open mourning as a symptom of an “undignified death”.
The women, mothers, partners and sisters of the victims, were
socially, economically and sexually repressed due to the links or relationship with the victim, and they disobeyed the prohibition of showing mourning and honouring their loved ones, insofar as the ritual
mourning practices that they were able to cling to. Hence, post-liminal
[page-n-103]
102
Where does memory live?
rituals became practices of resistance against the Regime, through
their inconclusive mourning in subversive, subtle, private and daily
mourning.
Among the resistance to forget, on the one hand is the fact that
they kept their mourning to the privacy of their homes and were denied participation in any social acts. Silence and sadness became their
distinguishing features, and the fact that they would be in mourning
until the end of their days. Although this is also related to rituals comprising part of the culture of death at the time, on the other hand we
can also find rituals that acquired greater significance owing to the
context of an “undignified death”. In this case, the practices involving
objects are of particular note.
Pieces such as those on the mourning objects list ended up becoming “profane altars”8 (López García, J. 2011) which were sacred
for their families, insofar as they represented the memory of death
(Fig. Page 108). Indeed, the first generation women (mothers, partners and sisters) would take those objects out of their hiding places in
the privacy of their bedrooms and pray and cry over them, with this
ritual helping them to shed their imposed silence. To quote Cate-Arries: “the significance of the objects of memory in a cult of fear, in
which the silent witnesses of the past managed to conserve the memory of the deceased when the crying relative ‘was afraid to speak’”
(2016: 140). The fact that those family amulets were hidden is a sign
of the repression and fear that those silent women suffered, who hid
those small treasures as part of the strategy of silence required to survive and protect their descendants.
From among the pieces displayed in the domestic altars are
photographs, which acquire great value insofar as they substitute
the body of the absent loved one. Many of those photographs are
still kept by the families today resulting from photo-montages and
enlargements (Moreno, J. 2020). Using the bromoil process, some
of the photographs brought together all the members of the family
despite their physical absence. Likewise, these montages permitted
dressing and shrouding the bodies who could not otherwise be given
a decent burial, at least in the photographs.
We can also find documents bearing witness to the fatal outcome
of their relatives, such as death certificates, prison sentences, summary trials and the documents on investigations into criminal offences
during Francoism, known as the “Causa General”. It must be said that
these documents are included as pieces of the objects of memory
passed on to the third generation of relatives. In other words, those
papers were not a part of the domestic altars of grandmothers and
mothers. Searching through the archives and requesting this type of
8
“Sometimes those thin,
delicate objects became
one of the items which,
along with the last
belongings of the relatives
(letters, scarves, packets
of cigarettes, etc.) were
used to make a type of
profane altar where they
were kept in memory
of those men” (López
García, y Pizarro, 2011:
580).
[page-n-104]
103
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Blas Llopis and Trinidad
Sanchis with their son,
Blas. Drawing made from
a photograph. Loaned by
the Llopis family.
Vicent Coscollá in a photo-montage with his wife,
Leonor Ferrer. Loaned by
the Coscollá family.
Communist Party membership card belonging to
Juan Luis Pomares. 1938.
Loaned by the Pomares
family.
material is part of the procedures and processes that the granddaughters and great-granddaughters have to carry out for exhumation,
since those items are considered proof that their grandfathers were
actually buried in those graves.
Those documents are part of the perpetrator culture, and as such
they have to be placed in context. Reading documents of that type
without considering the reference framework can sometimes lead to
anguish and unease among the relatives. In this sense, we believe that
the success of imposing the perpetrator culture as the only one and the
lack of democratic teaching regarding the repression imposed by
Franco’s Regime leads to those feelings when the information is taken
at undisputed face value
In regard to the documents that accredit political militancy and
participation by their relatives, they also tell us about the bravery and
courage by the women who kept those items, since in a context of repression, keeping documents of that type could be dangerous.
[page-n-105]
Where does memory live?
104
Amidst the coldness of those documents we also find the warmth
of the objects that the victims crafted for their partners, sons and
daughters from the prison. Along with these prison-crafted objects,
the everyday, common objects that they used on a daily basis in the
prison can also be found, such as a bar of soap, a cigarette lighter,
which become priceless for the families after the death of the victims.
A handkerchief embroidered in the prison by
Salvador Gomar. Loaned
by the Gomar family.
[page-n-106]
105
Children's alpargata
sandals made by Salvador
Gomar while in prison for
his son. Loaned by the
Gomar family.
Details of a wooden box
carved in prison by Blas
Llopis. Loaned by the
Llopis family.
A chess board drawn on
a piece of paper by Blas
Llopis while in prison.
Loaned by the Llopis
family.
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
[page-n-107]
Where does memory live?
106
The correspondence exchanged by the victims and their families
is worthy of a special mention (López, J. and Villalta, A., 2015; Sierra,
V., 2016). Through censored postcards or letters that managed to slip
through the prison control system, the social function of writing from
prisons had two goals: to keep in touch with the family and to resist.
The last farewell letters or “chapel” letters add some nuances to the
said function, since they bear witness to events. Beyond the distribution of assets, those final words by the victims expressed their moral
values and ethics that they wanted to pass down to the next generations, and also the need of the family to honour their memories, and
through that, their innocence.
Letter from José Morató
to his parents. Censored.
1939. Loaned by the
Morató family.
[page-n-108]
107
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Page 4/4 of the farewell
letter from Vicente
Alemany to his wife,
Consuelo. Loaned by the
Alemany family.
Finally, the fragments of clothing that the victims were wearing
when they were executed, or the bullets that put an end to their lives
are objects which talk to us about the presence of women at Paterna
cemetery from the early days of the mass graves, in addition to bearing witness to their undignified end.
Those objects were also significant for the next generation, the
generation of the sons and daughters of mourning. The age or just
how aware those boys and girls were when their fathers were executed
would condition their knowledge of the facts and their understanding
of their mothers’ silence. Indeed, regardless of those factors, all of
them would suffer the stigma of being a son or daughter of a “red”.
[page-n-109]
Where does memory live?
As mentioned earlier, it was the women who kept and transmitted
the memory of their loved ones, and therefore it was also the women
who inherited and received it. It was the daughters who inherited
the silence of their mothers, along with the mourning items and the
commitment and responsibility of maintaining family memory. In
short, the daughters took over the open mourning and its rituals as an
unavoidable legacy. This link between memory, mourning and gender
means we are able to talk about mourning as a part of the dowry of the
“reds”. The symbolic burden of this association becomes stronger and
more explicit when dealing with the items of mourning that were kept
with the dowry, such as embroidered sheets.
It would not be until the third generation, the one known as the
“post-memory generation” (Hirsch, M. 2021), of granddaughters and
great-granddaughters when these items of mourning, and the memories of their grandfathers, were publicly displayed and given places outside of the tin boxes and the drawers where their grandmothers and
mothers had kept them. As we can see, the movements and transfer of
those mourning items are connected to the transmission of memory
through the different generations, in the same way as each generation
is related to memory and materiality in a different way. Regarding
transmission, we must point out that there is a generational leap that
on many occasions means that the first generation grandmothers are
able to speak to their granddaughters about things that they kept from
their own daughters. This link between granddaughters and grandmothers emphasises the weight of the effects on vicarious, indirect
memory, a characteristic feature of the post-memory generation.
108
Small box container/
altar where the items
belonging to Juan Luis
Pomares are kept. The
items include some pieces of the clothing that the
gravedigger of Paterna,
Leoncio Badía kept for
possible future identification of the bodies. Loaned
by the Pomares family.
[page-n-110]
109
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
In many cases, this generation of women convert the open family
mourning in a spark of activism for memory. Indeed, we can see that
on the one hand many of them inherited their political and social
engagement from their grandfathers during the Transition period
and the early years of Democracy, and on the other, the inheritance
from their grandmothers has led them to seek repair for the harm
caused by Francoist repression. In these cases, they feel responsible
for restoring the memory of their grandfathers, making the use of
rights that their grandmothers, aunts and/or mothers did not have
(Egizabal, M. 2017).
T-shirts of several associations designed for
the Paterna mass graves
exhumation. Loaned by
Teresa Llopis (Grave 100
Association Platform) and
Daniel Galán (Grave 128).
The relationship that this generation establishes with the mourning items also has its own peculiarities. As we have already seen, the
repairing practices that are carried out and which place peripheral
memories in the limelight, bring out new documents that are added
to the items already comprising the family treasures. There is also
another feature of this generation which is that the granddaughters
are who publicly display those objects, the photographs in particular,
even at public events, in the press or on social media. Through these
actions, those objects acquire another dimension beyond the family
sphere, insofar as they comprise solid grounds on which public memorial vindication is based.
[page-n-111]
Where does memory live?
Even so, the sacredness acquired by the profane altars made by
previous generations of women is still valid for the third generation,
and some nuances are included regarding their materiality, feel and
encounter with the past. The author describes it as follows: “the objects are particularly susceptible to invoking sensitivities, since their
haptic properties connect them to our touch (they were touched in
the past; they have been touched by the passing of time and often
bear traces of it, of that time span, which remains in them and forms
a part of them” (Rosón, M. 2021:8). In that same sense, we could
say that the particularity of vicarious memory of the post-memorial
generation, who did not directly experience the events of the past or
personally know their grandfathers, makes their meeting with the
past through objects that their ancestors touched and used, more
significant. Likewise, the importance of the attachment that memory
is linked to also has the same effects on the objects, in that they were
held in the hands of their grandfathers, aunts and mothers, who caressed, touched and safeguarded them.
Exhumation of the mass graves dating back to Franco’s dictatorship has become one of the main repairing practices. Indeed, beyond
the political, economic and social factors that facilitate the opening
up of the mass graves, if it had not been for the custody and conservation by the previous generations of women, the processes started
by granddaughters and great-granddaughters would never have been
possible. In the same way as intimate, family memories have brought
about collective public repairing practices, we can also claim that at
the same time, the mourning objects are the things that have brought
about the unearthing of the items that appear during contemporary
exhumation, the objects of pain.
A more general outlook on the importance of the material culture from a social sciences perspective is given in this volume by Zira
Box from Valencia University, who highlights their potential to establish a discourse on memory within the framework of new materiality.
By way of conclusion, this exhibition puts memory in the limelight, and in this case, it also means putting women in the same
limelight. Those women are the people who are truly responsible for
bringing the histories of the victims of Francoist repression to us
today, for bringing those histories out of the mass graves of Paterna cemetery. The same women who established domestic practices
and rituals to fight against oblivion through those objects. The same
women who have made the site of perpetration, a site of memory too.
It is in them that memory lives on.
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Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Bibliography
Bustamante, Javiera. (2014). Las voces de los objetos: vestigios, memorias y patrimonios
en la gestión y conmemoración del pasado. Tesis doctoral, UB, Barcelona.
Cate-Arries, Francie. (2016). «De puertas para adentro es donde había que llorar:
El duelo, la resistencia simbólica y la memoria popular en los testimonios
sobre la represión franquista», Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 17(2): 1-30.
Egizabal, Maribel. (2017). «Algunas aportaciones desde la antropología al estudio de la memoria històrica», Kobie Serie de Antropología Cultural, 20: 101-112.
Gadea i Peiró, Isa, & García Hernandorena, Mª José. (2022). «Memorias, genealogías femeninas y lugares de perpetración. Etnografía de las exhumaciones
contemporáneas de fosas del franquismo en el cementerio de Paterna (Valencia)», Thémata. Revista de Filosofía, 65, pages 203-225.
García Hernandorena, Mª José, y Gadea i Peiró, Isa. (2021). Etnografia d’una exhumació. El cas de la Fossa 100 del cementeri de Paterna. Valencia. Diputación de
Valencia.
Hirsch, Marianne. (2021). La generación de la posmemoria. Escritura y cultura visual
después del holocausto. Madrid. Editorial Carpe Noctem.
López García, Julián, & Pizarro Ruiz, Luis F. (2011). Cien años para la libertad:
Historia y memoria del socialismo en Puertollano. Ciudad Real. Ediciones Puertollano.
López García, Julián & Villalta Luna, Alfonso. (2015). «Cartas y cuentos desde las
cárceles de Franco». Vínculos de Historia, 4, 147-173.
Moreno Andrés, Jorge. (2020). El duelo revelado: La vida social de las fotografías
familiares de las víctimas del franquismo. CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas).
Rosón, María. (2021). «La memoria de las cosas: Cultura material y vida cotidiana durante el franquismo». Kamchatka. Revista de análisis cultural, 18:5-14.
Sierra Blas, Verónica. (2016). Cartas presas. La correspondència carcelaria en la Guerra
Civil y el franquismo. Madrid. Marcial Pons.
Troncoso, Leyla i Piper, Isabel. (2015). «Género y memoria: articulaciones críticas y feministas». Athenea Digital. Revista de Pensamiento e Investigación Social,
15 (1): 65-90.
[page-n-113]
Small bottle containing a note with personal details
Manuel Lluesma Masia, niche 645. Paterna
Manuel Lluesma Masia family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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Objects and memories:
the material dimension
of the mass graves
Zira Box Varela
UNIVERSITY OF VALENCIA
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
“What is done with the objects belonging to the dead?” The Mexican
author, Cristina Rivera Garza, asked that question in “Liliana’s Invincible Summer”, the book dedicated to her sister, a victim of femicide
in 1990, whose belongings remained in boxes for thirty years, “in
sight, but out of reach” in a part of a wardrobe.
What to do with objects belonging to the dead is a question that
also needs to be addressed in the context of exhumation. What to do
with those photographs, letters, pieces of cloth or everyday belongings of the victims of Franco’s repression, whose bodies were thrown
into mass graves, is actually a question that has always been there:
What use were they to their widows, mothers and sisters who kept
them? Who would inherit them afterwards and what can those objects teach us about violence, remembrance and the memories they
contain?
Beyond the restorative work involved in recovering the bodies
and the forensic work helping to measure the nature of repression by
Franco’s regime, the mass graves have a material side to them due to
the objects surrounding them, such as those that have been brought
to light by the analyses from cultural perspectives, including the focus
on new materialisms. They are important at least for the five reasons
explained as follows:
1. The objects have materiality.
First of all, the objects are important because they confer a minimum
amount of the necessary materiality and physicality to the absence
of loved ones in order to overcome their loss. In the context of the
explicit disregard that Franco’s dictatorship had for the victims,
first through concealing their bodies in mass graves, and afterwards
through denying any form of rituals and externalising mourning by
their families, the recovered objects were an intermediate stage to
alleviate the absence of the victims.
Concerning this matter, photographs of the dead are a paradigmatic example of this, which were kept by the relatives, and to quote
Jorge Moreno, they permitted problematizing relationships with
people who were no longer there. The author goes on to say: “The
disappearance of the body makes the memory of the missing person
fade, whereas photographs remind us of the appearance of their bodies, the look that we would end up forgetting without an image. That
is why relatives chose photographs, when they were available, as a
form of speaking to the dead, since the clarity of portraits is perceived
as the place where conversations with those no longer among us can
take place more clearly, more transparently, a direct connection to
those who have gone” (Moreno, 2021: 3).
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Photographs bring presence through an image, but not only this,
they are not only seen, but they are also touched, felt, cherished and
even smelled and therefore they become objects in themselves (Edwards and Hart, 2005). It is then that approaches that have shown interest in materiality gain interest, as pointed out by Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost (2010: 3) in their introduction on the perspective of
new materialisms. According to the anthropologist Michael Schiffer,
we are living in an undeniably material world and interaction with
the objects and artefacts around us may be the irrefutable empirical
reality of our species: what other animals do without any mediation,
humans do with the constant interference of artefacts (Infold, 2012).
On the basis of this premise, it is therefore hardly surprising that the
absence of those who have left us acquire a form of life that they were
denied while living, through the objects recovered by their relatives,
and these objects can also be touched, felt and handled (Rosón, 2021:
8). A rather poignant example of this is found in the research by Zoe
de Kerangat (2020) on exhumations carried out during the Spanish
transition period. At a time when DNA identification procedures had
not been developed, the simple fact of recovering and having some
bones, even if one was not sure whether or not they belonged to the
relative in question, served as some comfort for the relatives to bring
some type of closure to their mourning.
2. Objects are not passive items.
Objects are not merely passive items in which to store memory, but
rather they are artefacts that have to be relived so that those who care
for them can establish their specific link with the past that they represent from their specific present (Jones, 2007: Chapter 1). In this
sense, objects are also important because they are not simple inert,
external things, but rather they have agency insofar as they are able to
demand and question whoever approaches them whilst also affecting
and conditioning the lives and actions of the people who conserve
them. Use of the verb “affect” is common in work on new materialisms, attempting to emphasise with that word that the world affects
us, hurts us or heals us, for example, and it does so materially (Bennett, 2010; Labanyi, 2021).
The agency that the objects of the victims of Franco’s dictatorship
show have perhaps reached their maximum expression through the
emotions that they invoke in the people who safeguard them. If
the relationship by Cristina Rivera Garza with the belongings of her
murdered sister was outside her ability to retrieve them, what feelings
does one have after having now recovered them so long after the tragedy and knowledge about the tragedy? That was something she asked
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
116
Postcard written from
prison by José Morató.
The writing is now illegible, washed away by the
tears of the person reading it; the tears represent
the pain of several generations of women. Loaned
by the Morató family.
regarding the testimonials of the relatives of the bodies in the graves,
compiled through different pieces of ethnographic work, highlighting the consolation that was found through them. And how now to
mourn in public what was denied to them in private, that intimacy of
defeat? to quote Francisco Ferrándiz (2014: 70), which worked as a
catalyst for feelings (Cate-Arries, 2016: Garcia Hernandorena and
Gadea i Peiró, 2021).
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Objects act by transporting and invoking emotions, but also
reactions in families. It is interesting to see how the subject of custody
and possession has led to different behaviours and responses among
the different generations who have safeguarded the objects. Whereas
it caused silence due to fear and pain in the first generation, namely
the widows, mothers or sisters, who initially collected the objects,
in more contemporary generations, namely granddaughters and
great-granddaughters, the objects have led to a wish to finally place
the memories that were kept in private for so long, in a public space
(Aragüete-Toribio, 2017). In the intermediate period, the generation
of the daughters of the victims inherited the silence of their mothers,
but from a position outside of direct pain, but rather a pain that was
passed on by their mothers. It is consequently a generation in a rather
vague position, as poignantly highlighted by the film director Chantal
Akerman (2020) in her short monologue “Family in Brussels”, a
soliloquy written to give a voice to her Jewish, Polish mother who
survived Auschwitz, in an attempt to give words to something that
had until then been shrouded in silence, by describing her childhood.
1
The concept of sexualised
violence is a subject that
has been discussed by the
French scholar of Hispanic culture Maude Joly
(2008) to showcase the
different forms of violence
that men and women
were subjected to during
the war and Franco’s dictatorship. Joly’s research
has mainly focussed
on the violence against
Republican women.
3. Objects tell us about the gender of memory
“The Gender of Memories”, is how Elizabeth Jelin (2002) titled one
of the chapters of her book “The Work of Memory”. In that chapter,
the Argentinian sociologist points out that gender has not only been
present in repression of the Southern Cone dictatorships, there being evidence that violence did not have the same impact on men and
women, and also different specifics, but remembrance and how the
atrocities are remembered is also different: whereas men were more
prone to showing it in public, women mostly channelled their memories within the scope of family relationships, taking on the role of
“living for others” and “bearers of memory” in the family circle, as
per the commonly used expression.
Jelin points out that the Argentinian or Chilean dictatorships
were not much different from Franco’s dictatorship. Indeed, just as
in our case, there is evidence that violence was sexualised,1 and a gender dimension can also be established in regard to memory: whereas
the mass graves were mostly filled with male victims, the cemeteries
and conservation of memory was essentially something for women
(García Hernandorena & Gadea i Peiró, 2022).
The foregoing claim entails the understanding that it was mainly
women who safeguarded the memories of the victims, as mentioned
earlier. In regard to this, the objects are once again a key factor to
rebuild those stories of mourning and pain, dictatorship and repression of women, and which run the risk of being sidelined, along with
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
A woman’s high-heeled
shoes. Individual 23,
Grave 115, Paterna. ETNO
Democratic Memory
Collection. Photo: Eloy
Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
the memory of the victims. The moving of these objects therefore
becomes important again, because they help us to understand and
delve into “the many lives that the powers at large made invisible and
silenced”.2
The fact is that the objects invite us to listen to the silences of
those widows or sisters who held on to the little that was left of their
loved ones inside the protective walls of their homes. As described
by Jo Labanyi (2009) following the investigations into fascism by
the Italian historian, Luisa Passerini, those silences were not a form
of forgetting nor did they entail any form of conformism, but rather
they revealed how veiled, subversive mourning was lived which impels us to acknowledge the agency, understood as the ability to decide
and act, by a generation of downtrodden women who were more than
just victims.
The idea of “subversive mourning” is wonderfully set out in
the detailed ethnography by the anthropologists Maria Jose Garcia
Hernandorena and Isabel Gadea i Peiro (2021) on mass grave 100
in Paterna cemetery. Through interviews with the victims’ relatives,
the authors stated that: “Since in public areas any form of grievance
or mourning related to those who were killed was denied, forbidden
and annihilated, the homes were the only place where this form of
2
The quote is from the
foreword written by the
Mexican author Valeria
Luiselli for the novel “The
Colour of Milk” by the
British author Nell Leyshon. The novel is about
Mary, the daughter of
an English farmer in the
early 19th century, where
she sets out her counterfactual situation, and as
Luiselli suggests in the
foreword, which histories
we would have had if so
many voiceless women,
poor, illiterate women,
had been able to tell their
stories.
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resistance could be carried out, where the women tried to keep, know
and converse. Letters, photographs and objects were key elements in
those silent, dissident rituals”.
“Subtle resistance” was the term used by the historian Zoe de
Kerangat in her research to underscore elements similar to those
observed by Garcia Hernandorena and Gadea i Peiro. Actions such
as wearing mourning attire, religious traditions such as All Saints’
Day or keeping items belonging to the victims became their form of
resistance to the brutal power that denied them almost everything.
Acknowledging that memory is genderised therefore helps us to understand the resilience of the subordinate groups, not only women,
whose memories are kept in the interspace of power (Leydesdorff et
al., 2017).
The fact that thanks to what the objects belonging to the victims
are able to express, we can see the aforementioned ability of agency
that the downtrodden women had within the context of the dictatorship in the war and then shed light on something that historians
have been insisting on for a long time: that beyond the binomial of
submission/resistance or assumption/transgression, those women
showed an array of much more complex behaviours than would be
apparent at first site, because all the structures, even the harshest
such as authoritarian systems, show a certain flexibility when accommodating them. In regard to this, the ethnographic work by Francie
Cate-Aries (2016) on mourning by the relatives of the victims of the
Dictatorship in Cadiz, is significant, precisely because it is based on
the work by the historian Ana Cabana on Galicia, using her concept
of “symbolic resistance”.
4. Inter-generational and intra-family objects.
One of the questions that the studies on memory deal with is how to
create and recreate the past in the different sociocultural contexts,
and this question is closely linked to how memories are passed down
and communicated. From this point of view, as discussed by Astrid
Erll (2011) in her work on the subject, taking families into account is
fundamental, as proved by the fact that since the early 1920’s in work
by Maurice Halbwachs, research on memory has considered the institution of the family as a fundamental agent of transmission.
Objects play a key part in the role of the family in conserving and
keeping memory alive: those remains, photographs or belongings
of the victims materialise their absence and give life to memory that
comes about in an inter-family way, as mentioned earlier. This has
been proved in the work performed on mass grave 100 in Paterna,
and also the work by Francie Cate-Arries on the victims in the Sierra
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
de Cádiz. When the researcher describes the memory that Ana Venegas has of her grandmother, Isabel, placing a white flower next to
the photograph of her grandfather who was killed in Ubrique on 15th
August 1936, or when Garcia Hernandorena and Gadea i Peiro quote
Irene Domenech, the great-granddaughter of one of those murdered
in the mass grave of Paterna, remembering how her great-grandmother slept with the letters written by her husband under her pillow.
This shows the irreplaceable role of the “bearers of memory” in conserving memory, and it also shows how memory is passed down from
mothers to daughters within the family circle.
Studies on how memories are passed down have confirmed
that the success of this transmission does not exclusively depend
on the consistency or effectiveness of what is actually passed down,
the symbolic power of the objects or the coherence and consistency
of the narrative, for example, but rather the contexts in which this
takes place are also important, i.e., the opportunity the family has to
receive the past. It is here where the detailed analyses on changing
circumstances and biographical contexts of the different generations
within the same family become important, because although the
symbolic power of letters or photographs is always the same, the conditions and possibilities that families have to integrate them in their
own lives are different.
In the above lines reference was made to the silence of the people who experienced the violence, and far from being interpreted as
passiveness, that silence should be interpreted as mourning. The subsequent generations were also referred to. First of all, reference was
made to the “daughters of mourning”, those who lost their fathers
and inherited silence, fear and the social stigma that accompanied
growing up in a dictatorship with the absence that still pained their
mothers. This was a generation which, despite not always knowing
what to do and how to face a loss for which there were no words,
several papers have referred to the confusion of that generation that
at the same time knew and did not know (Valverde Grefaell, 2014),
and took over from their mothers to take charge of the objects containing the memories of the victims. To quote García Hernandorena
and Gadea i Peiró (2022: 18), that generation of women, socialised in
the first two decades of Franco’s dictatorship in accordance with the
strict gender codes, they took it on themselves to look after the memories of their loved ones in their families: taking on the “dol” (a word
in the Valencian language that means grieving and mourning) was a
part of the “dot” or dowry and inheritance.
This was different in the case of granddaughters and great-granddaughters, a generation referred to as the “post-memory generation”
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A number of objects that
belonged to Blas Llopis preserve his memory. Loaned
by the Llopis family.
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
in line with the pioneering approach by Marianne Hirsch. As is
known, the aforementioned author coined the phrase to refer to
those who inherited an indirect memory that they did not experience first-hand, and therefore it would be mediated by the subjectiveness of those who passed it down. In the case of the third and
fourth generations of the victims of Franco’s repression, their own
reality, that of living in a democracy and their relationships with the
“bearers of memory”, the fact that access to the memory given to
them by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers was carried
out in a democratic context, and therefore one where fear no longer
reigned, thus made it possible to engage in dialogue that would have
been impossible in the intermediate generation. On the other hand,
both in the public sphere and among civil society, leading to the rise
of the memorial movement from year 2000 onwards, many women
belonging to the post-memory generation brought their grievances
out of their private lives to reclaim the bodies of their relatives buried
underground, and also as mentioned earlier, to bring the silent family
archives out of the cupboards in their homes (Garcia Hernandorena
and Gadea i Peiro, 2021).
5. Objects transmit information.
In a recently published book coordinated by the historians Adrian
Shubert and Antonio Cazorla (2022), a small group of experts explained the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship through
one hundred objects, images and places, with the stimulating aim of
dissemination. Objects such as the microphone used by Queipo de
Llano to broadcast his violent tirades during the first few months of
the uprising in July 1936, or the helmet of a fascist volunteer soldier
that the authors use to describe the furious fighting. Others, such as
the letter written by Julia Conesa in a chapel, who was executed in
August 1939, one of the 13 Roses, or the rationing vouchers for food,
are described as the signs of pain and suffering that the population
underwent.
The aforementioned collective work approach helps us to contemplate the latter aspect that the authors of the text want to underscore in regard to objects: how they are able to tell the stories and
narrate part of history. We have already discussed that the belongings
kept by the families that are used to pass down memories, tell of histories that help us understand what Franco’s regime was like from
other viewpoints. Nevertheless, in conjunction with the above, the
objects are able to express even more. The fact is that when we pay
attention, not only to the families who kept the objects, which talk
about how they affect those who survived the victims in that case, but
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to the objects themselves, both the questions and the answers vary.
This is the case of the objects found in the mass graves that were exhumed along with the bodies of their owners, a subject that Aitzpea
Leizaola discusses in this volume: they give a different insight into
the opening question of this chapter “What to do with them?, since
on this occasion the objects appeared at the moment of exhumation,
and therefore are dealt with differently in regards to bureaucracy and
the legal system, in order to establish who they belong to and what
is to be done with them (Jiménez and Herrasti, 2017). At the same
time we are given different answers, since they no longer talk to us
about families, but rather dead victims, providing valuable historical
information working as an “instant photograph of those people”
that “allow us to analyse the nature of their death and some aspects
of their lives” (Moreno Martín et al., 2021: 220). For example, when
bandages and ropes are unearthed from the mass graves, the violence
the victims were subjected to in the prisons and at the moment of
their execution can be reconstructed. By revealing their clothing and
personal items, we can delve deeper into the social class the victims
belonged to and how their different professions were carried out in
the 30’s and 40’s: by examining their personal hygiene objects we can
get an insight into the conditions of the prisons. In short, by exhuming the bodies we are also exhuming the violence they were subjected
to, and revealing the faces of the victims, to quote an expression by
the archaeologist Laura Muñoz-Encimar (2019: 762), thus corroborating the idea once again that the objects found when exhuming the
mass graves do actually matter.
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
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[page-n-127]
Exhumed braid of hair, found in the pocket of Miguel Cano
Grave 128, Paterna Municipal Cemetery
The family of Miguel Cano and Maria Navarrete
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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The past, present and future
of the objects in the mass
graves
Aitzpea Leizaola
ANTHROPOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY (UPV/EHU)
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The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
For nearly two decades, the materiality of the bone remains in the
mass graves of the Civil War and the repression by Franco’s regime
has been posing questions to society, forcing it to face up to a past that
is increasingly less present, in a complex scenario that is not lacking
tensions, and where the duty to remember is built, “between vigilance
and updating of memory” to quote Marc Augé (1998). The duty to
remember lies with the descendants struggling between being forgotten, the disappearance of the survivors and handing the past down to
future generations in which exhumations have played a central role.
Despite the enormous number of images of the remains of bones
(Ferrándiz, 2005), the objects or remains thereof that have been
found in the mass graves have played a minor role in the extensive bibliography that has been written about these exhumations in the last
two decades. The nature of those objects, their status, and their
future destination are the central theme of this text discussing the
material side of memory, the need for a heritage framework to tackle
the subject of transmission of those objects within the context of exhumations. Therefore, this text is based on multi-site, ethnographic
field work regarding the exhumations of the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War and repression under Franco’s regime by the Aranzadi
Science Society between 2005 and 2011 in towns of the regions of Navarre, Gipuzkoa, Burgos and Cantabria.
In the period between 2000 and 2017 the Ministry of Justice recorded a total of 2457 mass graves (Serrulla y Etxeberria Gabilondo,
2020), from which over 9000 bodies were exhumed, 89% of which
were identified as republican civilians (Herrasti et al., 2021), and
this figure continues to increase over time as new exhumation work
takes place1. A wide variety of other objects have been found along
with this huge number of exhumed corpses, from almost complete
deterioration of the remains, such as the case of the mass grave in
Iragorri-Katin Txiki, to intact complete items of clothing recovered from the saponified bodies in the Paterna mass grave (Moreno
Martín et al., 2021). The technical exhumation reports follow a systematic pattern to record the findings. Photographs of skulls or other
relevant bone remains are displayed on the same pages as photographs of personal items such as glasses, buttons, toothbrushes, folding cutlery, and even bullet casings, all of which are displayed next to
a reference for scale over a neutral background. This is what forensic
archaeologists and anthropologists call “material culture” or “associated objects”.
1
On balance over the two
decades during which
exhumations from mass
graves has been carried
out, experts claim that
20,000 individuals could
still be recovered from
mass graves that have
not yet been exhumed
(Serrulla & Etxeberria
Gabilondo, 2020).
[page-n-130]
129
Decayed bone remains
from seven individuals,
as well as fragments of a
beret and footwear found
in the Iragorri Grave in
Oiartzun, 2007. Photo by
the author.
Aitzpea Leizaola
[page-n-131]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
130
[page-n-132]
131
Aitzpea Leizaola
Registration of associated
objects and a photo of a
skull with a bullet entry
hole. Report of the exhumation of the grave in
Altable cemetery, Burgos
(2006). Aranzadi Science
Society.
Non-bone materiality
Since exhumations began in the year 2000 employing scientific
methods in Priaranza del Bierzo, following a request by the grandson of Emilio Silva Faba, his body along with twelve others and objects with the bodies were recovered. They are described in detail and
photographed at scale in the first report. This exhumation process,
with participation by a multidisciplinary team employing archaeological, forensic pathology and anthropological techniques, became
a benchmark for the subsequent processes (Herrasti et al., 2021),
while establishing the foundations for a working methodology that
was presented three years later (Etxeberria, 2004) and then defined
as an exhumation protocol endorsed by the Spanish Government
(Order PRE/2568/2011).
In view of the votive offerings linked to the cult of death in the
excavations of the necropolis known as “grave goods”, the objects
found in the mass graves holding the victims of the Civil War and
Dictatorship, insofar as they are crime scenes and places to hide
corpses, remind us of the circumstances surrounding the violent
deaths of the people buried there. Compared to other warring contexts prior to WWII, most of the bodies that have been recovered
from the mass graves are civilians, which to a large extent determines
the nature of the materials found with them. Unlike the corpses of
soldiers often buried in their uniforms and with their combat gear,
the objects in these mass graves are mainly everyday items, fragments
or items of clothing, prosthesis and other personal items belonging
to the victims (see Herrasti, in this paper). In addition to this, there
are bullets, casings and remains of lime, which mean we are able
to determine the causes of their deaths and the circumstances surrounding their burial.
Other singular objects have been used to identify the buried
corpses. Such is the case of the glass bottles, which were carried
with a document inside to identify the person, following the order
of 22nd January 1937 signed by Franco pursuant to burials in battlefields. This use of bottles has been recorded at Paterna cemetery
(Moreno Martín et al., 2021), and also at the Fuerte de San Cristóbal
prison cemetery in Ezkaba, converted in a prison hospital, where the
cemetery is known as the “Bottle Cemetery” with 131 bottles having
been found between the legs of the dead prisoners (Herrasti & Etxeberria, 2014).
[page-n-133]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
132
A volunteer from the
Aranzadi Science Society
shows a block of quicklime to local residents and
family. Fustiñana, 2005. by
the author.
Exhumation as a revealing process
After finding the site and delimiting the area of the mass grave, the
exhumation process begins. During the course of this meticulously
slow process in which the remains start to take shape through the
archaeologists’ tools, there is a constant transit between the area of
exhumation, cordoned off by tape, or the bottom of the grave separating the team of experts from the rest of the people attending the process. Outside of this delimited area where the members of the team of
experts carry out their work, relatives and/or those behind the exhumation lobbying process, members of memorial associations, investigators (historians, social and psychological anthropologists, among
others), students, journalists and photographers all wait expectantly.
[page-n-134]
133
Aitzpea Leizaola
Exhumation of the Cemetery of the bottles. Fuerte
de San Cristóbal, 2007.
Photo by the author.
They all comprise the social life of the exhumation process and take
part in it in different ways.
Exhumation can take several hours, days or even months, and
is carried out in a rather peculiar atmosphere, one that is serious, although with an air of great anticipation, and it usually takes place in
silence only broken by the sounds of the experts’ tools and work and
questions by the public. Occasionally, at least in exhumation in the
field, there are murmurs of banal conversations, which remind us that
life goes on outside of the exhumation process. As progress is made in
the excavation and the bones are uncovered, the interaction between
those who are inside the grave and those who are outside of it increases. It is common practice to show the skulls to the congregated public
so that they can see the entry and exit hole of the coup de grâce, but also
other items of clothing such as buttons, buckles, footwear or other
items. This interaction between the team of experts and the attendees
accompanying the unearthing of bones brings about emotive reactions. This is the affective side to exhumation (Renshaw, 2010).
[page-n-135]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
134
Several generations of
family members participate in the sifting tests,
under the supervision of
members of the scientific
team. Fustiñana, 2005.
Photo by the author.
The forensic scientist F.
Etxeberria describes a
discovery made during
the exhumation to the
participants, among them
a group of UEU students.
Altable, Burgos 2006.
Photo by the author.
[page-n-136]
135
Aitzpea Leizaola
Sensory aspects are central to the process: the gradual revealing of skeletons that contrast with the photographs of the victims in life, the noise
of the tools scraping away at the earth, the feel of the bones or objects
that are placed in the hands of the relatives for a few short moments.
Looking at a photograph of a skull with a bullet hole in it in the
press is not the same as actually seeing it with your own eyes, while
the archaeologist or forensic anthropologist explains the trajectory
of the bullet, or holding a button in your hands still covered in soil
after recently being uncovered along with the bones of a wrist. The
objects mean that a form of dialogue can be established between
archaeologists, relatives and attendees, and materiality is given to
the buried individual beyond what are strictly the remains of their
bones. Although some body parts are easily identifiable, such as the
femur, ribs or skull, not all the human bones are so easily recognisable for the general public. On the other hand, as mentioned by one
of the relatives “boots speak louder than a few bones” (Renshaw,
2011). The soles of shoes, a wedding ring or a simple shirt button humanise the individual whose skeleton is being uncovered.
The archaeologist shows
the remains of a pocket of
a cotton shirt, holding a
folded sheet of newspaper, to relatives and attendees at the exhumation.
Fustiñana, 2005. Photo of
the author.
[page-n-137]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
136
Relatives of a man shot by
firing-squad observe the
remains of a foot inside a
shoe found in the grave of
Altable cemetery, Burgos
2006. Photo by the author.
The archaeologists at Aranzadi who had taken part in the exhumation process at Peidrafita de Babia in León, one of the first scientific exhumations (2003), spoke to me about the distress by some
of the attendees when they saw a pair of red soles appear under the
archaeologists’ instruments. For the then young archaeologists at
Aranzadi struggling with the excavation of the grave, exhumation was
something entirely new to them, not because of the procedure itself,
but rather because of the conditions under which it was taking place
and the emotional toll it had on them. One of the archaeologists, who
I interviewed in 2003, described it as follows: “One of the people attending the exhumation process became very agitated when the soles
were revealed, and jumped into the grave and I almost had to restrain
physically restrain him. He turned out to be the nephew of one of the
victims, who knew that his uncle was wearing footwear like that when
[page-n-138]
137
Objects returned to the
grave before the final
photographic record
of the grave was made.
Exhumation in Fustiñana,
2005. Photo by the author.
Aitzpea Leizaola
he was taken away”. Those soles meant that one of the men buried
there could then be identified.
After being shown to the people attending exhumation, the objects are returned to the place where they were found in the same
position to be photographed before proceeding to remove the remains. The fact that they are mostly common, everyday items makes
the scope of this drama even more tangible. Unlike the military gear
uniformly standardising them, the everyday items of the victims on
the “sacas” or execution lists and the summary executions, often by
other armed civilians, remind us of their circumstances at the time
of their arrests or their professions, mainly the clothes and footwear
they were wearing at the time they were taken prisoner. Beyond the
potential to help identify them (García-Rubio, 2017) the objects help
to humanise the bodies and to individualise them.
[page-n-139]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
The remains of bones invoke the notion of a corpse and necessarily entail a task of rebuilding to invoke the notion of a person
(Delacroix et al., 2022). The way a body is identified, either by means
of a code number or provisional identity, by the team of experts in
the exhumation context, which needs to be subsequently verified via
a laboratory analysis, helps to connect the remains of the bones to
the individuality of each victim, along with the vision of the objects
in situ. Objects such as dentures or glasses help to establish the age
range, ruling out or provisionally indicating one identity or another
when the graves contain people whose identities are known beforehand. In the context of exhumation, the objects play a central role to
individualising the bodies for their relatives, since it means that they
are somehow able to claim the bodies, even without a name.
From one limbo to another
Too recent to be considered as archaeological remains, yet too old to
be processed as a crime in current legislation (A. Leizaola, 2007), the
legal limbo meant that from year 2000 the first exhumations could
be carried out using scientific methods. Those first exhumations
established the foundations for the memorial movement thanks to
the willingness by the owners of the land where the mass graves were
located. Nevertheless, this situation with no legal regulations, was no
guarantee: the landowner could simply refuse to give permission and
exhumation would therefore be rendered impossible. We would have
to wait until the passing of Law 52/2007, otherwise known as the “Ley
de Memoria Histórica” [Historical Memory Act], for relatives and the
memorial movement to be able to act under the protection of the law.
Although administrative and legal measures have been implemented since then regarding exhumation, how the materials and
bones have been assigned or destined has been and still is very variable.
To date, they have not been assigned to any type of heritage that is not
strictly individual. Since the crimes are no longer covered by the legal
system, as they were committed over eighty years ago, there are no
measures to guarantee their integrity other than the need to safeguard
the chain of custody of the remains and other evidence regarding documentation and identification of the exhumed individuals (Herrasti
et al., 2021). According to the forensic protocols that are applied to exhumation processes in the last decade (Order PRE/2568/2011), when
nobody claims the bodies, the items recovered from the mass graves
must be buried along with the bones. This does not guarantee their
preservation (Moreno Martín et al., 2021), nor does handing them
over to relatives. The recently approved Democratic Memory Act (Ley
20/2022) has not included any changes regarding this matter.
138
[page-n-140]
139
2
Guzmán’s chilling documentary on disappearances in Chile during
Pinochet’s dictatorship,
makes a parallel comparison to the extermination
and disappearance of the
indigenous people. Translated from the original
in the Galician language
“O lapis do carpinteiro”.
The novel was adapted
to a screenplay by Anton
Reixa in 2003.
Aitzpea Leizaola
When materiality is set in other media
The latest film by Pedro Almodovar, “Parallel Mothers” echoed the
discovery of a rattle in a mass grave. It is interpreted as homage to
the memorial movement and is considered a as one of the Spanish
director’s more specific nods to politicians. The film is based on a
true case, that of the exhumation of Catalina Muñoz Arranza in Carcavilla, Palencia. Including a reference to an object of memory in a
fictional work of art is nothing unusual, A long time before the film
director Patricio Guzmán took the discovery of a shirt button embedded in a metal beam recovered from the bottom of the Pacific ocean
in his acclaimed film “The Pearl Button” (2015), the Galician author,
Manuel Rivas, had published the “The Carpenter’s Pencil”2 in 1998.
Nearly twenty years separate these two pieces of work, and much
has transpired in between, but both of them share the fact that they
are based on a common object to elaborate narratives on the effects
of past political violence and to question today’s society. Other than
serving as a title for the novel and the film, the objects allow the authors to define the elements on which their respective cinematographic and literary narratives are built. To achieve this, they put the crude
reality of a common, everyday, family item at the centre of a story of
political violence. The three cases remind us of how objects have the
power to evoke beyond their simple materiality (Appadurai, 1991).
The pencil and the rattle remind us of the impact of repression
through their very materiality. Both of them are objects that are directly related to the moment of execution, although in different ways.
The pencil that the jailer pulls out of the painter’s ear after shooting
him is reminiscent of the items stolen from the victims, a common
practice in the context of the execution lists and extrajudicial executions: items of value such as jewellery and watches that the aggressors
shamelessly wore, or clothing and footwear, even everyday items
that changed hands after execution. There are many testimonials in
which the sons and daughters of the victims of the firing squad saw
their fathers’ watches on the wrists of their executioners. There are
other shocking cases, such as that of Ramón Barreiro from Barro in
Pontevedra, whose body was riddled with bullets and subsequently
mutilated by his executioners to remove a ring. In addition to the
common practice of confiscation of land, possessions and property
belonging to the victims and their families during the war, the everyday sight of these objects worn by their executioners was a crude
reminder for the relatives of the victims of their absence, and the
impossibility of knowing where their bodies had been buried. This all
took place in a climate of absolute impunity for the aggressors. Those
are the items that never actually made it to the graves.
[page-n-141]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
In 2011, exhumation of a mass grave in the old Palencia cemetery,
later converted in La Carcavilla Park by the Aranzadi Sciences Society, uncovered 108 bodies out of a total of 310 that were buried there,
among them a young women, initially identified as skeleton 10 211,
the only female skeleton found in the grave and one of the few cases
in that exhumation process where “potential identification” objects
were found next to the body (García-Rubio, 2017).
Nearly eight years later, the El País newspaper published a graphic report in 2019 about the rattle found next to the body of Catalina
Muñoz Arranza, shot in Palencia in September 1936. The photograph
of the rattle, an emblematic object of infancy, invoked tenderness, in
stark contrast to the crudeness of the resting place of her skeleton in a
mass grave. The woven shape of the rattle, with a modern appearance
similar to plastic, and its bright colours, led to doubts about whether
it was actually an object dating back to the 1930’s. Further analysis
of the material (Leizaola 2012) verified that it was an old celluloid
object, which was a common material in the manufacture of a large
number of everyday items at that time. The passing of time had not
dulled the bright colours of the rattle, which she probably had in her
apron pocket to keep the youngest of her four children entertained,
who was barely eight months old. Beyond the exceptional nature of
this specific object, and other objects found in other graves, the rattle
has the power to probe us from its resting place.
140
[page-n-142]
141
Aitzpea Leizaola
Conclusion
In addition to being inter-generational and intra-family (see Box in
this paper), the objects take part in activating memory, as is evident
in the study of their role in other warring contexts (Saunders, 2004).
Analysing the status of the objects found during exhumation, and
that of those who enabled identification of mass grave sites and identification of the remains after exhumation in terms of belonging,
preservation and conservation, leads us to reflect further on the materiality of memory and the different ways it has declined, both inside
and outside the graves.
The legal provisions currently governing exhumations in response to the demands by relatives and memorial associations, mainly
focus on how the bodies are managed. Along with the bone remains,
the teams of experts hand over the objects and other material remains
that they find. If the decision about what to do with the bodies is not
always an easy task, and nor is there consensus about it, as we can see
in some of the cases analysed by Ceasar (2016), this not only affects
the bones, but also the other items found along with them. That is the
“dual life of objects”, before and after exhumation (Baby y Nérard,
2017), once again linking the dead to the living. Conducting a detailed
study on the work of memory of different generations is rather revealing in this sense, such as the case of the ethnography of Mass Grave
100 in Paterna (García Hernandorena y Gadea, 2021).
In the absence of any significant museum pieces and a heritage
policy to provide for showcasing these items and ensuring their
safeguard, their future lies in the hands of relatives once the teams
of experts have handed over the items. They do not necessarily have
the means to properly conserve those items, whose significance in a
museum or an exhibition would go far beyond the fact of belonging
to and representing the memories of a family or a specific individual, and would stimulate the collective memory. In this sense, it is
interesting to observe the increasing amount of cover in the media
focusing on those objects, or the publication of books such as Voces
de la tierra [Voices from the Earth] (Robés, 2020) which discusses a
selection of 25 objects found in different mass graves. All of those
items contribute to setting a material dimension to the mass graves
in other media. The photographs by the teams of experts will be the
only proof of the existence of the objects found in the mass graves in
the future, owing to a lack of a general heritage policy encompassing
the context of the Spanish Civil War and all other aspects of violence
during the dictatorship, including conservation and preservation of
those objects.
[page-n-143]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
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con restos humanos de la Guerra Civil española de 1936. En E. Silva & A. Alvarez (Eds.), La memoria de los olvidados: Un debate sobre el silencio de la represión
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Valcuende del río & S. Narotzky, Eds.; pages 109-132). FAAEE, Fundación
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García Hernandorena, M. J., & Gadea i Piró, I. (2021). Etnografía de una exhumació. El cas de la fossa 100 del cementerio de Paterna. Diputación de Valencia, Delegación de Memoria Histórica.
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la Carcavilla, Palencia. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
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botellas: Las botellas. En F. Etxeberria Gabilondo (Ed.), El Fuerte de San
Cristóbal en la memoria: De prisión a sanataorio penitenciario. El cementerio de las
botellas. Pamiela.
Herrasti, L., Márquez-Grant, N., & Etxeberria, F. (2021). Spanish Civil War: The
recovery and identification of combatants. Forensic Science International, 320,
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Ley 20/2022, de 19 de octubre, de Memoria Democrática., Pub. L. No. «BOE»
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Leizaola, A. (2007). La mémoire de la guerre civile espagnole: Le poids du silence. Ethnologie française, 37(3), 3.
Leizaola, F. (2012). Informe pericial sobre una pieza hallada en el cementerio de la Carcavilla (Palencia). Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi Zientzia Elkartea.
Moreno Martín, A., Mezquida Fernández, M., & Ariza Jiménez, E. (2021). No
solo cuerpos: La cultura material exhumada de las fosas del franquismo en
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Robés, J. A. et alt. (2020). Voces de la tierra. Alkibla.
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Sunglasses
Individual 83, Grave 111, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-146]
145
A look at Paterna to revisit
the contemporary exhumation
process: possibilities and
tensions in the fight for
memory(ies)
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MADRID
[page-n-147]
146
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Introduction
Prior to being invited to contribute to this volume, I had never been
to Paterna Cemetery, and although I was aware of its existence, I
had never stopped to thing about its details. I knew that exhumation
processes of people murdered by Franco’s regime was taking place,
although I had not stopped to think about the context, to think
about whether the victims were victims of reprisals or firing squads,
if there was just one mass grave, several or many, whether they were
actually inside or outside the cemetery, if they had been integrated in the cemetery in subsequent extensions or if they had always
been there. Neither had I considered the number of people we were
talking about, or whether they were mostly men or women. I had
also forgotten about the role the city of Valencia played in the Spanish
Civil War, and the exemplary and fierce repression there must have
been following the end of the war... One thing is true though; despite
the contemporary exhumation process and the memorial practices
being my subject of study, I had considered Paterna to be “just another
place of repression” on the map of mass graves of people murdered by
the dictatorship around Spain. An interesting place perhaps, but “just
another one”, and nevertheless when I actually went there and saw it
closer, its particularities were evident and the things it had in common with other places of repression and memory, quickly making it
an interesting subject matter for analysis that would permit reflecting
on some of the aspects that would enable and limit the exhumation
process in Spain in the 21st century, and on the disputes regarding
the memories encompassing it.
Exhumations of the mass graves from the Civil War and post war
period have undergone different stages over the eighty years of history separating us from the coup that took place between the 17th and
18th of July 1936, making those of the 21st century only the last in a
long line of succession contrary to the narrative on many occasions,
and which did not begin in the year 20001. Even so, it is only fair to
acknowledge the exhumation on 20th October 2000 in Priaranza del
Bierzo (León) as a milestone in contemporary exhumation, where
the bodies of thirteen civilians murdered by paramilitary supporters
of Franco’s regime were unearthed from a mass grave at the roadside,
as this was the first time that some of the features marking this latest
memorial process were included. Archaeologists and forensic scientists converged at the grave to apply the specific knowledge of their
respective disciplines to retrieve the bodies of those civilians who had
been summarily executed, with the discourse and practices beomg
marked by the discourse of human rights, a fundamental characteristic of exhumations in the 21st century.
1
For further reading
about the pre 2000
exhumations with a
multidisciplinary, compared perspective which
furthers the analysis and
interrelates the stages,
Dueñas & Solé (2014) is
recommended, for those
carried out during the war
on Republic territory;
Saqqa (2022) for those
carried out by Franco’s
regime in the early years
of the dictatorship; De
Kerangat (2020) for those
carried out during the
transition and Ferrándiz
for the contemporary
exhumations.
[page-n-148]
147
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
Another of the particularities of this process is that it took place
within the framework of the information society. Indeed, the images,
claims and discourses surrounding those who were killed, with visible marks of violence on their bodies haphazardly buried in the mass
graves, ran through society in Spain causing distress among the relatives and the onlookers. Among others, the paths taken by those images that were tangible proof of the violence the “vencidos” (losers) had
been subjected to, evident even for non-experts, with shots to the head
and wires tying their wrists, and that the comparative aggravation of
abandonment over decades was recognised, compared to the bodies
of the “vencedores” (victors), and it now could no longer be denied. In
view of those images and exhumation practices, part of the population
started to ask about the possibility of recovering the remains of their
relatives who were buried in the mass graves, in order to give them a
“dignified burial”.
Nobody is indifferent to the subject of exhumations, and the
visibility of the bones as evidence of crimes committed eighty years
earlier drew much attention and collective recognition, although that
visibility was not exempt of criticism due to the indiscriminate exposure of the remains of the victims, now once again brought out into
the limelight. Therefore, in the expert work by the archaeologists
and forensic scientists, those bodies were not only unearthed from
their resting places, but attempts were made to identify them and
establish their causes of death, and also an “authorised discourse” was
made (Bourdieu, 2008) which conferred legitimacy and reliability
for society where science worked as a “regime of truth” (Foucault,
1989:187). This was how, within the context of exhumations, the
practices by the experts, working under the framework of human
rights and transitional justice, brought about an “unquestionable”
discourse, charged with highly effective symbolism and accompanied
by a very persuasive scenario (Ferrándiz, 2015:14), playing a central,
active role in the recognition of those dead bodies. Political deaths
and narratives that they found in the exhumation process as a whole,
from the obtained materiality, recognition and legitimacy that was
previously unknown until that moment.
In relation to Paterna Cemetery, I therefore propose recognising
some aspects that have become fundamental in the collective imaginary and in the memorial practices related to the recovery of historical
memory and the mass graves in this text.
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and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Paterna: repression and contemporary exhumations
Paterna is not “just another place” as I said earlier, among other reasons because it is one of the places where most bodies have been
exhumed in recent years. Since October 2000, around 9700 corpses
from over 785 mass graves have been exhumed in Spain (Herrasti,
2020:24), and somewhere between 10% and 12%2 were unearthed
in Paterna. Between 2012 and 2021, 1163 individuals from 27 mass
graves and 7 niches were recovered (Moreno, Mezquida & Ariza,
2021:2016).
Contemporary exhumations have undergone different periods
of (de)regulation and funding in these two decades. Indeed, during
the early stages, exhumation was financed by associations and relatives, and it was not until 2006 when state subsidies granted by the
Ministry of the Presidency were first awarded. Those subsidies were
maintained until 2011, and were discontinued in 2012 when the PP
political party took over government from the PSOE party. In turn,
an incipient regulation was brought in through Law 52/2007, and
publication in the Official State Journal of the “Action protocol for
exhumations of victims of the Civil War and Dictatorship” in 2011.
The exhumations took place during those years under a “self-contracting model of human rights” (Ferrandiz, 2013) in which, even
though the State had committed to facilitating support and funds,
it delegated the responsibility for the investigation, identification,
chain of custody and reburial work to the relatives, associations and
teams of experts. Although direct state funding ended in 2012, some
regional authorities and councils took over the funding and management of exhumation through different procedures. This was the case
of Paterna, where most of the exhumations took place after 2016:
initially funded by the Valencian Regional Council and afterwards by
the Council for Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality of the Valencian Regional Government, which to a
large extent replicated the self-contracting model through subsidies or
public tenders.
Hence, in 2017, out of the 601 individuals who were exhumed in
Spain, 151 were unearthed from the mass graves in Paterna. In 2018,
out of a total of 609 exhumed individuals, 197 were recovered from
three graves in Paterna, and in 2019, 209 individuals were exhumed
in Paterna out of a total of 668 people exhumed in Spain (Herrasti,
2020:22-23). These figures speak volumes about the significance of
the repression and its continuity, and also the intense exhumation
work in the last decade.
It is estimated that at least 2238 people were buried in the mass
graves in Paterna cemetery and niches as a result of the repression
2
That figure is not exact,
because at the time of
publication access to
the updated totals was
unavailable.
[page-n-150]
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María Laura Martín-Chiappe
exercised by Franco’s regime, out of a total in the entire Region of
Valencia of 4714 people (Gabarda, 2007). Executions began on 3rd
April 1939, four days after Franco’s troops entered the city that had
been the Republican capital, and ended seventeen years later, in November 1956. Those people who were mainly taken from the Modelo and San Miguel de los Reyes prisons, were summarily executed
collectively before firing squads against the Terrer wall, a site of repression next to the Cemetery where their bodies were moved afterwards, leaving a total of 154 documented graves (Moreno, Mezquida
& Ariza, 2021:216). Their relatives were sometimes able to take the
bodies of their loved ones away in secret in the moments following
their death, and bury them in individual niches or graves, and on occasions were even able to take them to other cemeteries (Gadea and
García Hernandorena, 2022:210). The 450 people who were executed by the Republican rearguard in the initial months of mayhem of
the war between June 1936 and January 1937 however, were buried
in Paterna cemetery and the General cemetery of Valencia, but they
were subsequently exhumed and identified in the early postwar period only to be publicly buried and honoured by the State (Gabarda,
2007; Gadea and García Hernandorena, 2022:209). As can be seen,
the type of repression and how the bodies were dealt with differs
significantly depending on the moment in history, the victims and
which side the aggressors fought on.
As pointed out earlier, along with the technical and scientific
practices, the images of mass grave exhumations containing murdered civilians have led to one of the potential disputes on the historical narrative and the fight for a place in the official memory by
serving as evidence of repression. There have been some powerful
arguments exposing how successive regimes have abandoned and
neglected the matter, relegating the victims to oblivion and disrespect. Powerful too, because we are led to believe that in many roadsides, fields and wells in Spain there are mass graves containing the
bodies of thousands of murdered civilians, who were buried away
from the places designed for the laying to rest of the dead, i.e., cemeteries. In fact, one of the reasons motivating public claims to justify
and promote recovery of those bodies is to undo the “undignified
deaths” and “undignified burials” that took place in those graves and
to give the victims a dignified burial. Nevertheless, despite the fact
that those powerful roadside images are the ones that have stuck in
the collective memory of repression by Franco’s regime, thousands
of people executed under the regime were laid to rest inside the cemeteries rather than outside them. Moreover, the mass graves with the
highest number of victims are, or at least were, inside the cemeteries.
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and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Let us consider the case we are dealing with, namely Paterna,
where over 2000 individuals were/are found in around 150 mass
graves, but also the example of the San Rafael cemetery (Malaga),
where 2840 people were exhumed between 2006 and 2009, or the
Pico Reja grave in San Fernando Cemetery (Seville), where work is
being carried out to exhume the bodies, with a provisional result of
869 bodies who were victims of repression by Franco’s regime3. Paterna, and the mass graves in the cemeteries there, invite us to stop
thinking about mass graves and repression in a reductionist manner
as evidence of the “heat of the moment terror”, the moment at the
start of the war in the summer and autumn of 1936 which followed
the taking of a town by “both sides” (Casanova, 1999:159-160),
when the rearguards were out of control and committing crimes, but
rather to reflect on the evidence of the existence of complex cemetery spaces dotted all over with mass graves filled with victims of institutionalised, legalised repression over a significant period of time,
the period of “legal terror” (Rodrigo, 2008).
The analysis accompanying the exhumations not only provides
important information based on the legal files and the corresponding
sentences, ,with regard to accusations, investigations and “serving
justice” that the regime carried out, but also based on the cemetery
documents when such are available, among other information,
concerning the identities and places of burial (mass grave number)
of the victims4. Furthermore, exhumation work in itself has highlighted how methodical and well-planned the burials were in order
to make the most of the available space. An example of this is one
of the sides of the Guadalajara cemetery where a row of 15 mass
graves containing the bodies of executed people after 1st April 1939.
The three graves were exhumed by ARMH between 2016 and 2021,
which measured approximately four metres deep and one and a half
metres wide, each one containing over twenty bodies. Deep, narrow
graves, where the bodies from different “sacas” (execution lists) were
buried together. The mass graves in Paterna are located in the first
quadrant to the left on entering the Cemetery, duly laid out one next
to one another, measuring approximately two metres by two and a
half metres wide in a rectangular shape, and some of them are up to
six metres deep, such as the case of grave 128 (Moreno, Mezquida
and Ariza, 2021:217). Furthermore, as is the case of other cemeteries, the layers of bodies are interspersed with layers of soil and lime
“the stratigraphy of Francoism”, as pointed out by the archaeologist
González-Ruibal (2022). The information from these exhumations
allows us to glean a better idea of the violence that was perpetrated by
the rearguard and how it continued throughout the Dictatorship, i.e.
3
Figures by Aranzadi in
February 2022 (https://
www.aranzadi.eus/
pico-reja) although
press sources pointed at
1200 in June the same
year (https://www.
publico.es/politica/
historia-huesos-fosa-pico-reja-mineros-querian-parar-golpe-fascista.
html).
4
In fact, to a large extent,
this information highlights the systematics and
impunity of the process.
[page-n-152]
151
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
it was not just punishment in the heat of the moment, but it was rather more “cold, paralegal terror, sanctioned or directly implemented
by the authorities” (González-Ruibal, 2022) which was planned and
carried out over several decades.
In a complex process of adopting and translating concepts
linked to the language of human rights by adopting the figure of the
“desaparecido” (disappeared) over the years, the “fusilados or represaliados” (executed by firing squad or punished) became victims of
Francoism too (Ferrándiz, 2010). Although this made them publicly
visible and legitimised the reappearance process, it also removed
the political agency from them, thereby displacing other narratives
such as that of the “resistente” (resistant) (Gatti, 2011; Montoto,
2019). Mass graves such as those in Paterna shed light on deaths
that are even more uncomfortable, guilty in the eyes of illegitimate
justice, decades ago whose reference framework still needs to be
broken down.
5
These figures are from
telephone conversations with the forensic
scientist, Javier Iglesias, a
member of ArqueoAntro,
a scientific association
working at Paterna
Cemetery.
Paterna: a place of memory(ies)
Clandestine burial in mass graves is a post mortem punishment that
is imposed on the dead and the living in an exercise of symbolic and
funerary violence. The perpetrators’ decision to deny burial in a place
socially designed for this purpose clearly shows the intentionality of
imposing an undignified burial. The cemetery is the place par excellence where the dead become visible as such, and those who are not
buried there are not a part of the legitimate community of the dead
(De Kerangat, 2019:78). As De Kerangat (2019) points out though, in
that place inclusion and exclusion can also take place, so we can ask:
what has happened to those people who, even though they are buried
inside a cemetery, have not been included in the community of the
dead? What has happened to those whose method and place of burial
is a planned punishment ongoing over time, those whose clandestine
burial is a grievance, not necessarily regarding the victors, but regarding those who are laid to rest in individual graves or niches, or family
pantheons around them? It is interesting to highlight how upsetting
it is to see the bodies mixed together in a jumble of bones, without any
recognised burial, and how, within the framework of the contemporary corpocentric exhumations in Paterna, that feeling and the focusing
on repair and “dignified burials” has brought hundreds of families
together joined by their wishes to recover the mortal remains of their
“badly buried” relatives, with this number increasing from around 30
or 40 in 2016, to over 300 today5.
As mentioned earlier, the idea of a mass grave in a ditch or verge
leads us to think of an abandoned, inhospitable place, although as
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A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Ferrándiz (2014) points out, the mass graves were an open secret from
when they were created, known, yet deliberately forgotten and ignored. When entering Paterna cemetery though, it is hard to forget
the many items that mark out the location of the mass graves.
There are marks of the different stages of the memorial process,
dating back to the moment of execution. Graves cared for over decades
by the relatives of those whose records and hearsay claim they are buried there, and this is interesting because memory does not start in year
2000 as is the case of the exhumations. Hence, just as the monument
built during the Transition period with its white columns is striking,
along with its flower garden depicting the colours of the Republican flag, and a plaque stating “To all those murdered in the name of
freedom, democracy and social progress - Paterna 1981”, we also find
graves covered with ceramic slabs –which is a material that was historically used in the area, with different dates, ranging from the date of
152
[page-n-154]
153
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
execution and names, to the places the victims were from and their
ages, including messages such as those in the lower part of the following picture “Your family will not forget you”. In some of them the passing of time and successive layers of memorial work are evident.
6
This invites us to reflect
on the reasons why a family would put the name of
their relative twice on the
same grave.
Photographs of some of the executed victims have been attached to
some of the older slabs, and even small black marble headstones (referring to more modern funerals), which repeat the names of some of
those who were executed6.
We can also see some areas where the bodies from the mass
graves have already been exhumed, which are marked out differently,
sometimes just with a lump of cement, or, as in the case of grave 100,
a ceramic slab over cement stating the number of the grave which appears to be provisional. On other occasions individual grey or black
marble headstones have been erected on the ground where the bodies were, in no apparent order adding to other funeral ornaments,
[page-n-155]
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
as evidence of the people who were once there. Texts bearing
messages referring to the unfairness and intentionality of hiding
those deaths can be seen on several of the sites where bodies were
exhumed, also featuring transitional justice language, the international justice language or the innocence of the victims, signed by
associations of the relatives of each of the victims of the graves. A
black marble mausoleum is also found on grave 113, which is there
for the bodies of any victims who have not been identified or claimed
from that grave. In turn, on retracing our steps towards the entrance
to the cemetery, we find an enormous steel monument, erected in
the last decade, which features a man in chains and the names, ages,
places of origin and dates of execution of the victims.
154
[page-n-156]
155
7
http://www.fosacomun.
com/comunicado.htm
8
In the case of Paterna,
there were only 20
women compared to 2218
men. For a reflection on
the presence of women
in the mass graves, the
dominant narratives on
violence against women,
their possible political
commitments and
how women conceived
and represented, see
Martín-Chiappe (2019)
and Martín-Chiappe and
De Kerangat (2019).
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
In his first analysis of contemporary exhumation processes,
Ferrándiz (2014, 62-63) highlighted two different types of disputes,
those “above the ground” related to how exhumation and reburial
were managed, where the battle related to what type of symbology
should or should not form a part of that moment of dignification,
and disputes “under the ground”, dealing with the decision of
whether or not to exhume a mass grave. From the start of the process different memorial associations were opposed to exhumation,
whereas others, in favour of it, have changed their views over time,
highlighting that carrying it out outside of a legal process contributes to destroying evidence, and indirectly contributes to covering
up the crimes perpetrated by Franco’s regime. They also claim that
exhumation destroys “historical heritage”, precisely related to the existing monuments, and propose signing and “dignifying” the graves
instead of exhuming them7.
There is an awareness in Paterna about the processes of the fight
by previous generations to keep these places of memory alive, and
one of the arguments put forward by some of the people who oppose
exhumation is that the site is a part of the biographies of their relatives, and exhuming the graves would destroy a part of their legacy
(Gadea and García Hernandorena, 2022:212). On the other hand,
some people want to recover the bodies, concerned about how the
relics of previous memorialisation could be conserved (García Hernandorena and Gadea, 2020). The relics of memorialisation also
permit paying tribute to those who conserved the memory of the
dead, who also built and maintained those places of memory over
generations through their actions, i.e., the women.
Isabel Gadea and Mª José García Hernandorena suggest thinking about the mass graves from a holistic, feminist perspective, with
the graves themselves as spaces for masculinised memory, while the
cemetery itself is a feminine space. As mentioned earlier, focusing
attention on the graves has favoured the memories of the experience
of masculine violence, resistance and repression, since it is mostly
men who were buried in these graves, compared to the feminine
memories, even though there are also women buried in those graves,
although at a much lower proportion8. Nevertheless, conducting a
biographical analysis of the cemetery permits revealing the decisive
roles of women in passing down and conserving memories, and also
in the contemporary repairing practices (Gadea and García Hernandorena, 2022:214). The fact is that it is women who have passed down
the family memory (Jelin, 2002), and through the roles assigned to
their gender and the (re)productive role, they kept the memories of
men alive, and those of the women who went before them, whilst also
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A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
performing small and large subversive practices. By caring for the
graves, and through such, marking out the burial sites, women displayed their private memories in public areas to ensure that this act
eventually made political sense and represented an act of resistance
and counter-discourse (Martín-Chiappe and De Kerangat, 2019). It
is interesting to give a feminist perspective to the analysis of the practices of resistance and not to consider them in terms of heroic acts of
enormous repercussions, a definite intentionality or awareness, and
extending the analysis to the everyday actions of women. This perspective of the practices carried out in private permits understanding
them as part of the many forms of transgression against the established order, and recognising the collective actions of the women who
performed them (Martín-Chiappe and De Kerangat, 2019), thereby
allowing memories of repression to be passed down to our day.
Concluding thoughts
Getting to know Paterna Cemetery meant I was able to revisit the contemporary exhumation process of the victims of Francoism, describing some of the layers of memory that link the memorial stages and
the practices inherent to each of them, but also the possibilities
and limitations, continuities and tensions that surround them.
Exhumations and reburials have broken down a systematic, ruthless way of domination imposed by Franco’s regime. The bodies that
have been recovered not only channel mourning, but they also have
life and play a role in politics, while moving them to a legitimate burial place involves a change to the visibility of the person whose body
is moved and the ideas attributed to it (Verdery, 1999), which is even
more evident when it is carried out under technical/scientific practices and in line with the discourse and the human rights that socially
legitimise such actions. The revealing, visibility and transfer of those
bodies broke away from the “official memory”, paving the way for
“subterranean memories” (Pollak, 2006), which in turn also caused
“memorial disputes” within those memories (disputes above and below ground), producing privileged visibilities and neglect. Looking
in more detail at the role of the mass graves in cemeteries allows us to
shun the idea that heat of the moment terror was an exception in the type
of repression imposed by the regime, and to recognise that it continued throughout the regime through cold terror, a planned, organised
repressive practice that was maintained over time.
The “historical memory recovery” process was closely linked to
the “recovery of bodies” and ignored the existence of any previous
memorial practices. It did not necessarily ignore the personal narratives and histories, but it did ignore the prior collective practices
156
[page-n-158]
157
9
It also built up expectations and needs that could
not always be reached or
fulfilled, such as genetic
identification.
10
Although we must admit
that subsidies have also
paved the way for other
types of activities, not just
exhumations.
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
such as those in cemeteries, where the graves had not only not been
forgotten, but they had in fact been cared for over decades. The scientific discourse9 we mentioned earlier also contributed to the aforementioned corpocentrism, since the figure of the “body evidence” and
the figure of the “disappeared” while opening up an array of opportunities, attracted (almost) all the attention at the expense of memorial
practices10.
On the other hand, looking outside of the graves, but inside them
too (Martín-Chiappe and De Kerangat, 2019), allows us to get to
know and report life stories, resistance and repression of women,
whose stories had not been “spoken about” (Pollak, 2006). On occasions, when their stories and actions were recognised, it took place
within the framework of an interpretation that downplayed the resistance in the spaces and practices socially assigned to women in their
social role of (re)production, by reading them with the same mindset
as masculinised heroics and resistance. Hence, the subterranean memories of women also have to contend for the spaces inherent to other
subterranean memories in which they were apparently included.
[page-n-159]
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and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
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CRATIC
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Graves and Democratic Memory
Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
175
The right to truth with regard to the human rights
violations during the Franco regime
Mauricio Valiente Orts
189
First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
Baltasar Garzón Real
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International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory:
The Case of Spain
Carmen Pérez González
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162
Postcard
Vicente Roig Regal, Grave 128. Paterna
Roig Tortosa family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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163
List of names of people shot, by José Peiró Grau
Grave 112, Paterna. Donated by the Peiro family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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Pencil
Individual 3, Grave 94, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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Graves and
Democratic Memory
Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
OFFICE OF HISTORICAL MEMORY, DIPUTACIÓ DE VALÈNCIA
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Graves and Democratic Memory
In the wake of the restoration of democracy in our country, historical
memory appears as a policy and tool to put an end to the Francoist
version of events in Spain since the establishment of the Second Republic. Despite the vicissitudes of this memory since then, it has always been presented as a pillar to bring an end to the “memoricide”1
that exists around graves and repression linked to the Civil War and
Francoism. The UN’s definition of memoricide is “the wilful destruction of cultural heritage that cannot be justified for military ends”.
While it is true that graves are not repositories of memory or heritage comparable to museums or archives, they do represent something more than simply the place where the dead bodies of specific
enemies lie.
In this respect, we cannot forget that the etymology of the word
patrimony is to “inherit from one’s father” and that this legacy must
not necessarily be material and turned into assets or objects; it can
also be an attitude towards life, certain ideals… Graves are the end of
a process that looks for something more than just defeating an enemy. The objective is to make them disappear from history, and hence
the aim of a summary trial — faster and with fewer guarantees for the
accused, whose version of events lacks due validity — and executions
and subsequent burials in mass graves, where nameless bodies are
piled up with no notification sent to relatives. It is about executing
the vanquished after defeating them at war, when military interest
no longer remains and all that is left is punishment and an interest in
eliminating them from history’s equation. It is about laying to waste
the memory of the defeated, the enemy, their memories and identity,
about imposing a collective amnesia on families and survivors (not to
mention those shot away from home, those whose father was red…),
to create an identity that differs from the identity of the defeated: a
New Spain.
This repression does not stem from incidental actions but deliberate ones executed within a wilful memory policy searching for
objectives: to suppress, defeat and bring about the surrender of an
enemy already defeated by armed force, to snuff out any resurgence in
this ideology to ensure it interferes in no way with the new model of
the victors and their new culture.
To separate political prisoners from the rest of the convicted,
placing them before a firing squad and dumping them, nameless, into
mass graves and that these graves were piled one on top of another,
without distinction or that one grave would remain open over a number of days or was re-opened to throw in bodies from a new saca (the
removal of prisoners to execute) tells us of a process that dehumanises the victims, that separates them from their families and omits
1
A term coined by Croatian historian Mirto D.
Grmek to describe the
destruction of Sarajevo’s
National Library.
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
A different celebration of
the Day of the Dead in the
Paterna Cemetery, organised by the relatives of
those who were executed.
Drawing: Matías Alonso.
their name (the maximum expression of the individual) and buries
them alongside those accused of the same offence: being red. Each
of the deceased is simply a red. And so the individual identity of each
prisoner has been erased and the policy of terror seeks to mask the
group politics surrounding them. There is a fear of opposing the victors, of this difference being noticed in towns; ideology is not spoken
about outside the home, beliefs are dissimulated… Thus, the collective memory of those on the losing side is attacked for the purpose of
ensuring that only the victor’s survives, characterised by having eradicated the social cancer represented by the defenders of the Republic.
For the defeated, the rights that humanised them are snatched
away. For instance, prisoners may be forced to work in battalions to
reconstruct, at no cost, what “the reds destroyed” — essentially a
form of slavery. Pregnant women who are prisoners could also have
their babies stolen, because they might pass on this socialist, communist or anarchist disease. Wives or widows could also be made to work
for the local Falange, and so on.
It goes hand in hand with a policy of re-writing the Republican
era, a time when Spain was blighted by misfortune, in which the Civil
War was deemed necessary for saving Spain from the communists
and for dismembering their organisation. Consequently, the elimination of individual and collective identity, and memory — namely
amnesia — is complemented by action aligned with the re-writing
of history and building a new identity, in accordance with the ideals of
the victors to justify the new system, the need for a military uprising.
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Graves and Democratic Memory
This “historical cleansing” based on ideological criteria, and
still a form of genocide, sought to manipulate events or, more to the
point, the memory of what happened from the present of the victors
to ensure that the new discourse of the past evolved into a tool to consolidate the new regime.
Yet with the end of the dictatorship, this reading of the past was
dismantled, as R. Koselleck highlights (1997, p. 239): “In the short
term, perhaps history is made by the victors, but in the long term the
historical gaining of knowledge comes from the vanquished”.
The slow but inexorable advance of democratic memory in Spain
has been delineated by specific landmarks, the most recent of which
is the adoption of Law 20/2022, of 19 October, on Democratic Memory. Taking its title as a starting point, of note immediately is a profound evolution in relation to its predecessor, Law 52/2007, which,
despite being known as the Historical Memory Law, was officially
defined as: “The Law by which rights are recognised and expanded
and measures are established in support of those who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and dictatorship”. This
development was largely reflected in different regional regulations
resulting from a path forged by international reports and condemnations.2 The new Law is underpinned by principles established by the
UN’s Human Rights Committee, even in its own articles, in which
there are chapters devoted to truth, justice, reparation and the duty of
memory.
Public memory policies must always be driven by general interest
and designed to bring about positive effects in society, which is why
the State must ensure that the relentless biological disappearance of
victims and those who witnessed events does not denote ethical and
moral annihilation. With the passage of time, the children of the victims of reprisals will disappear, as will their grandchildren, yet society
and citizens must remember, and it is the government’s responsibility to repair and acknowledge human rights violations.
This leads us to a tense setting between memory, history and politics, which in Spain must never be understood as exclusive. We find
similar situations in numerus other countries, for instance slavery in
the USA, the Indigenous population in Australia and the actions of
mother countries in repressing colonies’ independence movements.3
Memory is a faculty to understand the past and comprises impressions of past events, both individually and collectively. These
narrations of the past, that which correlates to group values, tend to
be stereotyped and passed down intergenerationally. When there is
a heavy conflict at the heart of the group, narrations begin to distinguish between victim and murderer.
2
Of note is the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe
condemning the Franco
regime (2006) and the
“Report by the Special
Rapporteur on the
promotion of truth,
justice, reparation and
guarantees of non-recurrence”, drawn up by Pablo
de Greiff for the UN’s
Human Rights Council
(2014).
3
A clear example of such
tensions can be seen in
the The New York Times’
1619 Project, which establishes how “the moment in
August 1619 when the first
enslaved Africans arrived
in the English colonies that
would become the United
States could, in a sense,
be considered the country’s
origin”.
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
An image of the website
of the Office of Historical Memory from the
Diputació de València.
Over time, victims demand reparation for these past events still
considered relevant and exhibited with a moral superiority stemming
from the unjust suffering inflicted upon them. Opposite these people,
the executioner speaks of a fading past, the result of extreme conditions set out by those who portray themselves as victims. The killers
believe that they couldn’t have acted in any other way, that there was
no alternative, and that under the circumstances no one is really innocent. Applying these principles to the coup d’état in 1936 is obvious, as
is the social utility the past has for the future. Traditionally in Spain,
national heroic deeds have been used as an element which binds and
strengthens a way of understanding the country and underpins national identity. The romantic and idealised vision of the past has been
employed for decades as a cognitive and affective anchor that identifies us with that and bolsters our sense of national belonging. This
past social utility is not negative per se. Rather, what is debatable is
the social and political model seeking to shape our identity.
The new Law signifies a qualitative jump in numerous aspects,
but I want to just pause on its setting, beyond reparation for victims…
because it has become a key tool for contributing to forming historical thought on this period.
In Article 1 of this Law it stipulates: “The present Law aims to
recover, safeguard and disseminate democratic memory, thereby
understood as the vindication and defence of democratic values and
fundamental rights and freedoms throughout contemporary history
in Spain, with a view to advocating coherence and solidarity among
different generations with respect to constitutional principles, values
and freedoms”.
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Graves and Democratic Memory
The Law cites a broad chronological framework, evident in the
sentence “throughout contemporary history in Spain”, because in our
country the 1812 Constitution signalled the start of the struggle for
State sovereignty in the nation, for the implementation of suffrage and
other rights. Yet in practice, almost all of its articles made reference to
the consequences of breaking away from the democratic route in 1936
as a result of the illegal coup towards a government voted for freely by
the Spanish people. The Law looks to equip every citizen with instruments and tools (maps of graves, a census of victims, DNA banks, the
subject included in secondary education syllabuses…), enabling them
to independently understand and interpret this recent past in context.
It understands that historical memory as a way to comprehend the
past must serve a democratic citizenry, who in history find a key tool
for interpreting the current world and for better managing the future.
In these terms, we can understand the assertion of historian
Josep Fontana (1982), for whom the whole view of history constitutes
a genealogy of the present. Therefore, the Democratic Memory Law
starts from the current situation, a State with a democratic system, to
trace its origins in the past, which is why it focuses on the chronological period spanning the birth of the Second Republic to the adoption
of the current 1978 Constitution. Undeniably, this objective has a
social purpose since it attempts to show the existence of a natural and
positive evolution from the past that has taken place in the present.
Everything in the past that has opposed this evolution advocating the
establishment of freedoms and rights is considered negative and regressive, and, moreover, this evolution is deemed unfinished and thus
looks for citizens to project their ideal society in the political proposal
entailed in democracy.4
Hence, past, present and future are interwoven in such a way that
a whole vision of one involves a new version of the other two. Furthermore, the past, as well as explaining what took place, offers us
keys to understand the present, with both together seeking to lead us
towards a future that this past and present consider suitable.
The power of the present over the vision of the past and future
that must come is more than apparent and we only need to pause on
the image of the Second Republic and road the State should have travelled down under the Franco regime with regard to what is set forth
today as a victory of freedoms and democratic ideals in Spain, ideals
that have been reconquered and developed in today’s society and
travel unequivocally towards an intensification of democracy that will
lead to a better and fairer society.
This future we attempt to travel towards can be understood
as a profound foresight which submerges its roots in the past and
4
On these ideas applied to
the field of teaching, see
Santiesteban (2010, p. 35).
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
present, those that show us a possible social evolution. There is not
one sole future — there are different possible, probable and desirable
futures — and our Democratic Memory Law seeks to portray a positive image to society on its capacity to mould the future on the basis
of past knowledge. The key lies in managing to get citizens to inherently buy into the desirable future and to make it real to ensure they
do so consequentially. This is the line along which G. Steiner (2008)
proposes to “remember the future” and thus invites us to conceive of
places of memory, of the past, as spaces from which to learn of possible futures and make the correct decisions in the present to arrive at
that which we desire. Along the same line, the preamble to the 2022
Law states: “The processes of memory are an essential component
in the configuration and development of all human societies, and the
effects range from daily gestures to major State policies. The deployment of memory is particularly important in building individual and
collective identities, for its huge potential for cohesion is comparable
to its capacity to cause exclusion, difference and conflict. Therefore,
the State’s main responsibility in developing democratic memory
policies is to promote their capacity for reparation, inclusiveness and
pluralism”.
Only with an inclusive, tolerant and diverse present is a fully
democratic future possible, and to achieve that we must move towards building a new “master narration” that responds to who we
are, what we want to be and how we must behave to achieve that. This
involves deconstructing the decades-long narratives we have received
and looking for new reference points which support inclusion and
the transformation of the distinction between victims and aggressors
with an “us” that makes room for everyone.
Hence the importance of the State, and this new Law, fulfilling its
role and providing means and carrying out actions to avoid the loss of
critical thinking and a disregard for human rights violations.
This recent past, occupied by democratic memory, is not only
affected by the political polarisation of the present, but also posttruth. For that reason, the means must be provided to prevent a deliberate distortion of reality and a loss to the value of objective data
to foster opinions and emotions which elicit this past, and which
are employed to consolidate confrontation in the present day. We
all have to convey the existence of adversaries, not enemies, and our
political adversaries must not lose any of their rights given that they
are the figures we compete with to defend opposing projects to deal
with social problems, but always within the regulations of fair confrontation and conserving the possibility of understanding (Arnoletto, 2007).
[page-n-173]
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Graves and Democratic Memory
Democratic memory seeks to nurture critical thought and the
search for social justice, and thus shows us the need to transform conflict resolution and manage to reduce violence, preparing us to advance on the path to co-existence and respect for ideas. Accordingly,
the 2022 Law also strengthens, along with the memory owed to victims, the fight for democracy. For the War of Spain, no longer viewed
just as a civil war, is presented as the first link in the fight democracies
took on to be free of fascism. The Republican defeat specifically, owing to the scant support it received from its environment, facilitated
the ensuing momentum of fascism. And so, in a globalised world, the
Spanish defeat is connected to the global fight for democracy.
Therefore, the Law sets 31 October as a day of remembrance
and in homage to all victims, a day on which Spanish Parliament
approved the Constitution, a constitution that was later endorsed
by the vast majority of Spaniards and which opened up a period of
pacific and conciliatory co-existence. Further, it establishes 8 May as
a day of homage to the victims of exile, the day the Second World War
ended. For the Allies fighting against Nazism and fascism, 8 May is
the Unconditional Surrender of Germany, or VE Day. For victims
of the Nazi regime — jews, homosexuals, Romany people, communists, social democrats, liberals, Spaniards from the resistance and
all enemies of Nazism — 8 May 1945 was Liberation Day: liberation
from the concentration camps, the prisons, from life in inhumane
conditions.
I can find no better coda for these words than the verses written
by Vicent Andrés Estellés:
«Mentre la terra invoca en va
la mort principi de les morts
criminals tongades de morts
collites de morts els morts
de la postguerra els morts els morts
mentre la terra es tapa els ulls
terra universal de Paterna
terra dels morts oh amarga terra
terra de la calç clivellada
terra martiritzada…»5
While the land invokes
death begins deaths
criminals layer upon layer of deaths
deaths harvesting deaths
deaths of the post-war deaths deaths
5
Versos 28 to 34 of Poem
III (Estellés, 1998).
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
while the land covers her eyes
the universal land of Paterna
the land of the deaths oh bitter earth
land of cracked lime
martyrised land…
Bibliography
Arnoletto, E. J. (2007). Glosario de Conceptos Políticos Usuales. Available at:
www.eumed.net/dices/
Estellés, V. A. (1998). Ofici permanent a la memòria de Joan B. Peset, Tres i Quatre,
València.
Fontana, J. (1982). Historia: análisis del pasado y proyecto social. Grupo Editorial
Grijalbo, Barcelona.
Koselleck, R. (1997). L’Expérience de l’histoire. Editions Seuil, Paris.
Santiesteban, A. (2010). “La formación en competencias de pensamiento histórico”. Clio & Asociados. La historia enseñada, 14, 34–56.
Steiner, G. (2008). Recordar el futur. Arcadia, Barcelona.
[page-n-175]
Rope used to tie victims’ hands before the execution
Individual 119, Grave 127. Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
[page-n-176]
175
The right to truth with regard
to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
Mauricio Valiente Ots
PHD IN LAW FROM THE UNIVERSITY CARLOS III IN MADRID
[page-n-177]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
During the historical episodes in which massive violations of human
rights have taken place, there has been a deliberate intention to conceal and manipulate the facts. Practices such as the “disappearance”
of people and their burial in mass graves form part of a pattern that
evidences a preconceived desire for impunity. In these circumstances,
the right to the truth, a basic concept in international human rights
law, is not only an essential instrument to redress the damage caused
to victims and their families, but also a requirement in the necessary
clarification of causes and responsibilities. The case of Spain, one
of the countries with the highest number of disappeared people according to United Nations data, as a result of the coup d’état and the
Franco dictatorship, is a clear example of the relevance and practical
significance of the right to the truth.
The right to the truth in international law and its reception
in Spain
Although the right to the truth has not been explicitly recognised in
human rights declarations, which has caused it to have diverse definitions and interpretations, after a long process of doctrinal elaboration and inclusion in various international treaties it now has a solid
basis in international law.
Article 32 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, adopted in 1977, recognised the right of
families to know the fate of their relatives. The following article
of the protocol, as a consequence of this recognition, defined the
obligation of states to carry out an active search for missing persons. This was a first step which, in the context of the social and
legal reaction to the grave human rights violations in Latin America
in the following decade, would prove to be insufficient. The Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights played an
important role in the process of broadening and clarifying the legal
concept, the former of the two organisations noting, in the 1986
report referring to events during the Argentine dictatorship, that
“society as a whole has the inalienable right to know the truth of
what happened, as well as the reasons and circumstances in which
aberrant crimes were committed, in order to prevent such events
from happening again” (Garretón, 2003: 121-2). This added a social
or collective dimension to the individual dimension of the victims’
right to the truth.
In the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on 16
December 2005 on basic principles and guidelines on the right of
victims of gross violations of international human rights law, access
176
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177
Mauricio Valiente Ots
to information was expressly provided for. More specifically, it was
stated that affected persons have the right to request and obtain
information on the “causes of their victimisation”. Given the uncertainty about the firm establishment of the right to the truth, a process
of consultation with experts and specialist entities was initiated in
preparation for the future work to be undertaken by the international
bodies of the United Nations system (Naqvi, 2006: 4-5; Rodríguez,
2017: 303-39).
There is no doubt that a qualitative leap was made when the right
to truth was explicitly recognised in the International Convention
for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance of
20 December 2006. In particular, article 24 obliges states to take
effective action to guarantee that each victim has “the right to know
the truth about the circumstances of the enforced disappearance, the
progress and results of the investigation and the fate of the disappeared person”. In line with this process of progressive recognition,
the United Nations General Assembly, by resolution 65/196 of 21 December 2010, established 24 March as the International Day for the
Right to the Truth, in memory of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero,
who was assassinated on that day in 1980.
One of the instruments created to promote the extension of this
right in member states was the appointment by the Human Rights
Council, in 2011, of a special rapporteur to promote truth, justice,
reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. It is worth noting that
the jurists who have held the position so far, Pablo de Greiff and
Fabián Salvioli, have paid great attention to the Spanish case, severely
criticising the shortcomings with respect to the right to truth suffered
by the victims of the Franco regime.
What has been the impact of this right in Spain? The Spanish
transition to democracy – “the transition” – which was presented as
a model, especially for Latin American countries, was based on a discourse that insisted on consensus and reconciliation, which involved
officially shelving the most problematic issues, such as seeking the accountability of the officials of the dictatorial regime who, meanwhile,
had for the most part allowed the agreed evolution to a constitutional
regime to take place. The consequence of this was an enormous deficiency in terms of the right of victims to clarification regarding what
had happened during the harsh repression of the Franco regime and
an absence of public policies on memory. It was thirty years before
Law 52/2007 was passed on 26 December 2007, recognising and
broadening rights and establishing measures in favour of those who
suffered persecution or violence during the civil war and the dictatorship (hereinafter, the Historical Memory Law).
[page-n-179]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
The official name of the 2007 law already gives a clue as to the
inadequacy of its content. At least in its explanatory memorandum
it was proposed that the public authorities should promote “knowledge of our history” and foster “democratic memory”, albeit in the
spirit of “the rapprochement and concord of the transition”. Even so,
the application of the law has been very limited. This shortcoming,
precisely when the right to the truth was becoming more clearly defined and gaining greater importance in the international arena, has
been redressed by what Professor Rafael Escudero Alday has called
“the autonomous route for the recovery of historical memory”, with
ambitious legislation that has directly addressed the objective I am
analysing in this article (Escudero, 2021).
As was to be expected, the autonomous route generated resistance. Several pronouncements by the Constitutional Court opposed
the creation of truth commissions in the autonomous communities
of the Basque Country and Navarra, arguing that the judiciary had
exclusive responsibility for the investigation of crimes (Escudero,
2021: 175-177). Leaving aside the criticisms that have been made of
these rulings, what was evident was the absence of a regulatory implementation of the right to the truth in Spain. This shortcoming could
be extended to the European regional sphere, although a detailed
analysis of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights has
allowed Luis López Guerra to establish the existence of a right, with
an ill-defined ownership but which goes beyond the victims and their
families, of access to information of public importance and especially
in cases of human rights violations (López Guerra, 2018: 24-26).
Spain’s ratification of the International Convention for the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance on 14 July
2009, and the recent approval of the Democratic Memory Law make
way for a new scenario in Spain, consistent with the developments I
have summarised in the international sphere. The explanatory memorandum of the new law is very significant, in that it gives citizens
“the inalienable right to know the historical truth about the process
of violence and terror imposed by the Franco regime”. This principle
is specified in Article 15 of the enacting terms, which proclaims the
right of the victims, their relatives and society in general, to the verification of the facts and the full and public disclosure of the motives
and circumstances in which violations of international humanitarian
law or serious and gross violations of international human rights law
occurred during the civil war and the dictatorship. I will now analyse how this right is established within the text that came into force
in October 2022, in comparison with the Historical Memory Law
of 2007.
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Mauricio Valiente Ots
The right to the truth of the victims of the Franco regime
The 2007 Historical Memory Law sought to recognise and extend
the rights of the victims of Francoism, but it did not include a detailed description of the different types of persecution suffered, a
general procedure for their recognition or a method for their quantification. In order to make up for these shortcomings, the new law
involves a wide-ranging attempt to characterise and describe the
situations that led to victimisation, while at the same time contemplating the creation of a register to guarantee “the effectiveness of the
principles of truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition”. The register will record the circumstances of the repression suffered, as well
as the place and date on which the events occurred, and the source
of the information. From this register of victims, a public census will
be drawn up, complete with names and surnames. This is essential to
avoid inaccuracies, manipulation and exaggeration which, as Francisco Espinosa reminds us in a recent work, even when carried out
with the best of intentions, generate confusion and discredit memory
policies (Viñas, Espinosa and Portilla, 2022: 42-5).
The new law significantly modifies, improves and extends the
provisions of the Historical Memory Law with regard to the mapping
of graves, the exhumation protocol and the authorisation procedure
for carrying out exhumations. Despite being the issue that attracted
the most attention in this precarious first Spanish formulation of the
right to the truth, its approach has proven to be flawed and clearly
insufficient. It is flawed because it places the burden of locating and
identifying the victims on the relatives and the social entities that protect them (first paragraph of Article 11). The general state administration only appears in the second part of the article with the mandate
to draw up work plans and approve subsidies to cover the expenses of
the individuals in question. Given such a message, the meagre result
in terms of the number of exhumations and recovered remains is not
surprising (Viñas, Espinosa and Portilla, 2022: 48).
On the other hand, by incorporating the recommendations
of various international bodies, the new law brings necessary and
radical changes. It expressly establishes the search for missing persons as being the responsibility of the general state administration.
In addition, it is stated that this work will be carried out “without
prejudice to the competences of other public authorities related
to this activity, reinforcing collaboration between them”, which is
not a mere precaution in the light of regional and local sensitivity
to the possible undermining of their competences, but rather the
confirmation of a situation established by the “autonomous route”
to which we have already referred. It is worth noting that this route
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The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
180
[page-n-182]
181
Press report of one of
the first exhumations
of the people executed.
The person in question is
Basilio Serrano, known as
El Manco de la Pesquera
(December, 2005).
Mauricio Valiente Ots
anticipated the change of approach set out in the new law (Escudero,
2021: 174).
It is now proposed to put in place several instruments that will
be key for the transition from the legal formulation of the right to its
effective implementation. Firstly (Articles 16, 17 and 19), multi-annual plans are envisaged for the search, location, exhumation and
identification of missing persons, which will be supported by location
maps and new protocols. This will take the form of an integrated
map for locating missing persons covering the whole of Spain, which
will incorporate the data submitted by the different public authorities. These measures do not represent a great novelty with respect to
what was contemplated in 2007, except the final provision, which is
very relevant for the effectiveness of the right to the truth and which
establishes that, in contrast with the aim of the Historical Memory
Law to make information only “available to interested parties”, from
now on the annual exhumation data – which will include the number
of requests registered, the number of graves and remains of persons
located, as well as the number of searches without a positive result –
must be made public.
Secondly, the creation of a state DNA bank is planned. Its function will be to receive and store the DNA of victims of the war and the
dictatorship and their relatives, as well as those affected by the abduction of newborn infants, with a view to their genetic identification.
The provision of biological samples by relatives for DNA profiling
will be voluntary and free of charge. In view of the banks that already
exist, close collaboration is foreseen between the state bank, the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, the institutes
of forensic medicine and the laboratories designated by the different
autonomous communities. The DNA database will contain samples
of skeletal remains from the different exhumations carried out.
These instruments represent a great step forward that will allow
progress to be made in the identification of the victims. More dubious in its scope and more controversial in its formulation is the wording of the new law regulating the authorisation of activities for the
location, exhumation and identification of disappeared persons, as
well as the management of the results of these interventions.
The fact that the activities of location, exhumation and identification of missing persons require prior administrative authorisation
is not a novelty with respect to the previous law. However, what is
crucial is the provision that the procedure will be initiated ex officio
by the autonomous community in whose territory the remains are
located or, where appropriate, by the general state administration in
a supplementary capacity, which will make it possible to combat the
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The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
inactivity of the former, something which has unfortunately occurred
on too many occasions up to now. Local bodies, family members
and memorialist organisations, providing proof or evidence, will be
able to request the initiation of proceedings. Controversy has arisen
in the processing of the new law due to the establishment, prior to
authorisation, of a public information period in which “the existence
of opposition to the exhumation by any of the direct descendants of
the persons whose remains are to be transferred, if any, must be taken
into account”. It seems clear that, in the case of a massive violation of
human rights and possible crimes against humanity, the resistance
of relatives should not be a determining factor under any circumstances, which demonstrates the complexity of the right to the truth
and the necessary collective or social dimension of this right.
Another controversial issue has been the reference to the result of
the investigations, since, although it is established that the discovery
of remains will be immediately brought to the attention of the Public
Prosecutor and the competent judges, the memorialist movement
has insisted that the latter should direct the entire process, given that
it involves possible crimes. This relates to the issue of how the judicialisation of the crimes of Francoism is addressed, which I cannot
discuss here in the depth that it deserves.
The collective dimension of the right to the truth
The 2007 law ruled out any kind of truth commission. Article 56 of
the new law provides for the creation within the Council of Democratic Memory (a newly created consultative body in which memorialist organisations will participate) of an independent, temporary
and non-judicial commission, academic in nature and with the aim
of contributing to the clarification of human rights violations during
the civil war and the dictatorship. It will be made up of people of
recognised prestige in the academic world and in the field of human
rights practice.
This is a further example of the practice of truth commissions implemented at the international level, which will have to be specified in
the implementing legislation, but which draws on the experience accumulated in other countries. As María Saffon and Rodrigo Uprimny
point out in a study, the extrajudicial truth of this type of commission
is not free of limitations and weaknesses, so rather than regarding
them as an exclusive instrument, it is a question of seeking their
complementarity with judicial truth and what these authors call the
“non-institutionalised social truth” (Uprimny and Saffon, 2006: 31-3).
In accordance with this non-exclusive intention, the new law is
not limited to this initiative. With the aim of fostering the scientific
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Founding act of the
National Platform for a
Truth Commission at
Julián Besteiro School, in
Madrid, in March 2013.
knowledge that is essential for the development of democratic
memory, the government is mandated to promote research into all
aspects relating to the civil war and the dictatorship. In this regard,
comparative research will be promoted to make connections between the Spanish case and similar European and global processes.
This is a vision that is in line with the repudiation and condemnation
of the coup d’état of 18 July 1936 and the subsequent dictatorship, a
regime which, as the law’s explanatory memorandum recalls, UN
General Assembly resolution 39 (I) declared to be fascist in origin,
nature, structure and general conduct, which did not represent the
Spanish people, and which was imposed by force with the help of the
Axis powers.
The fact that the law aims to promote historical research and that
it indicates the subjects it considers necessary to consolidate the policies of democratic memory does not imply, as is expressly pointed
out, that it ignores “the inherent uncertainty” of historiographical
debate, which derives from the fact that it concerns “events in the
past about which the researcher can formulate hypotheses or conjectures under the protection of the freedom of scientific creation recognised in Article 20.1b) of the constitution. In this regard, as the law
itself points out, the Constitutional Court has made it clear (in particular in Judgement 43/2004, of 23 March) that scientific freedom
enjoys greater protection than that which applies to the freedoms
[page-n-185]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
of expression and information. This conclusion is reinforced by the
analysis we have already mentioned of the case law of the European
Court of Human Rights” (López Guerra, 2018: 25-29).
Of particular significance is the new law’s provision for the Spanish education system to include among its objectives the knowledge
of democratic memory, the struggle for freedoms and the repression
that took place during the civil war and the dictatorship, something
which will be reflected in textbooks and curricular materials. To make
this provision effective, the curricular content for compulsory secondary education, vocational training and the baccalaureate will be
updated, and the subject will be included in initial and ongoing teacher training programmes.
Truth in the public space
A key perspective and one that has a major social impact is the presentation of the truth in the public space. This has both a corrective
component that targets any vestigial reminders of the exaltation of
the coup d’état and the dictatorship, and another that entails giving meaning, based on the values of democratic memory, to certain
places that are symbolic of the repression and the social struggles for
freedom and justice. Continuing with the comparative approach that
I have adopted in this article, with reference to the 2007 law, the new
regulations involve an extension of the instruments to put an end to
symbols, elements and acts contrary to democratic memory.
It also adds a reference to civilian and military units involved in
collaboration between the Franco regime and the Axis powers during
the Second World War, a clear allusion to the Blue Division. Similarly,
the names imposed by the Franco regime on places, streets and public
centres of any kind will be considered to be contrary to democratic
memory.
The drawing up of a catalogue of symbols and elements contrary
to democratic memory, to be published with annual updates, incorporating the data supplied by the autonomous communities and local
bodies, will serve as a permanent and public reminder of the elements
that must be removed or eliminated. It may include those elements
denounced by the victims, their relatives or memorialist organisations, in defence of their right to honour and dignity, or those which
are the result of studies and research work. The most important novelty is that, if the removal or elimination of the elements included in the
catalogue has not taken place voluntarily, the competent authorities
will initiate the procedure for the removal of these elements ex officio.
With regard to protection, it is established that the public authorities that own property declared places of democratic memory
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will have the obligation to guarantee their “durability, identification,
explanation and adequate signage”. In any event, they will avoid the
removal or disappearance of any remains erected as remembrance
and recognition of events representative of democratic memory and
the struggle of Spanish citizens for their rights and freedoms in any
era. In cases where these are privately owned, the same objectives will
be pursued by means of agreements. This will avoid losses, in terms of
democratic memory, such as the complete disappearance of the former Carabanchel prison.
In defence of the documentary heritage
The new law devotes ample space to archives and documents, far exceeding the scant reference in the 2007 law on access to public and
private archives. In addition to the consolidation of the Documentary
Centre of Historical Memory in Salamanca, the criteria for archival
policies in defence of human rights drawn up by UNESCO are incorporated into this legislation in detail. The right to open, free and universal access to public and private archives is generally recognised as
an essential component of the right to the truth. Any person will have
the right to consult all the information contained in the documents
that accredit their status as a victim, and may also consult the personal details of third parties appearing in these documents. The right to
obtain a copy, free of charge, of all documents in which the victims
are mentioned for any claim for reparation to which they may be entitled is also recognised.
Similarly, within a period of one year, among the assets making
up the documentary heritage, it is planned to create a specific section
called the “Census of Documentary Collections for Democratic Memory”, which will include everything related to the repression and violation of human rights. This will include the data corresponding to the
archives and documentary collections in public or private ownership
with documents produced or collected between 1936 and 1978. The
census is intended to be an instrument for the dissemination of democratic memory and will be made available online in its complete form.
The great novelty of the Democratic Memory Law with respect
to the previous law is the establishment of a system of penalties that
clearly defines offences and sanctions, which will be applied in accordance with the ordinary administrative procedure, providing the
type of guarantees that were sorely lacking in the law of 2007 and
limited its effectiveness. With regard to the issue under discussion in
this section, the destruction of public or private documents related to
democratic memory, or the misappropriation of documents of a public nature by individuals or private institutions that held public office
[page-n-187]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
during the civil war, the dictatorship and until the entry into force of
the constitution of 1978, is considered a very serious offence. Failure
to comply with the legal obligations of protection and conservation
with regard to the documentary heritage described above is also classified as a serious offence.
Conclusions
Spain is at a decisive moment for the consolidation of the right to
the truth with the entry into force of the recent law 20/2022 of 19
October on Democratic Memory, which represents a substantial
advance in this area. Political impetus for its application, adequate
regulatory development and effective coordination between all
administrations is required to guarantee the effectiveness of the
proposed measures. The focus of the law and the specification of
what it calls the “duty to remember” represent a novel approach and
it will be very important to monitor its implementation. As Carlos
Villán Durán and Carmelo Faleh Pérez point out, international human rights law is an unfinished, living work that must respond to
the demands of the international community through a continuous
updating of its material and procedural content (Faleh and Villán,
2017: 33). Following the singling out of our country for its repeated
non-compliance with the right to the truth, the successful implementation of the new law represents the best possible contribution
to this progressive development.
The consolidation of the right to the truth in the international
arena makes it difficult to imagine taking a step backwards as a consequence of a political change. It cannot be ruled out, but both international law and regional regulations will make a lasting reversal of
policy difficult. In any event, in the Spanish case, the commission and
the rest of the measures that accompany it should not be considered
as an instrument of transitional justice, but rather as a constituent
element of public policies on memory. Contrary to the common
misrepresentation, the right to truth is not the establishment of an
official historical narrative, the imposition of a kind of unquestionable official truth. This is precisely what the Franco dictatorship attempted to do. It is a question of establishing a democratic identity
and embedding it firmly in the history of a country such as ours which
has suffered serious human rights violations. There will continue to
be debates and controversy, and conflicting political and historiographical perspectives, but the victims and society as a whole have an
established right to know, so that the truth about the causes of and
responsibilities for what happened are known and remembered, so
that it will never happen again.
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Bibliography
Escudero Alday, R.: “La vía autonómica para la recuperación de la memoria histórica en España: leyes, derechos y políticas públicas”, in Revista Catalana de
Dret Públic, number 63 (2021), pp. 166-184.
Espinosa, F., Portilla, G., and Viñas, Á.: Castigar a los rojos. Acedo Colunga, el gran
arquitecto de la represión franquista, prologue by Baltasar Garzón, Crítica, Barcelona (2022).
Faleh Pérez, C., and Villán Durán, C.: El sistema universal de protección de los Derechos Humanos: Su aplicación en España, Tecnos, Madrid (2017).
Garretón, R.: “Alcance y eficacia de los instrumentos legales internacionales”,
in Comisiones de la verdad. Memoria del seminario internacional ‘Comisiones de la
verdad: tortura, reparación y prevención’, pp. 119-127, Comisión de derechos
Humanos del Distrito Federal, Mexico (2003).
López, L. (2018). «El derecho a la verdad: ¿la emergencia de un nuevo derecho en
la jurisprudencia del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos?». Anuario
Iberioamericano de Justicia Constitucional, 22, 11-30.
Naqvi, Y. (2006). «El derecho a la verdad en el derecho internacional: ¿realidad o
ficción? International Review of the Red Cross, 862. https://www.icrc.org/es/
doc/assets/files/other/irrc_862_naqvi.pdfRodríguez Rodríguez, J.: Derecho
a la verdad y derecho internacional en relación con graves violaciones con los derechos
humanos, Berg Institute, Madrid (2017).
Saffon, M.P., and Uprimny Yepes, R.: “Verdad judicial y verdades extrajudiciales.
La búsqueda de una complementariedad dinámica”, in Pensamiento Jurídico,
number 17 (2006), pp. 9-36.
[page-n-189]
Pipe belonging to Ramón Egea Benavent
Grave 112, Paterna. Donated by the Egea family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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First and foremost, the victims.
Principle of Justice
Baltasar Garzón Real
JURIST. PRESIDENT OF FIBGAR
[page-n-191]
First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
The Multinational Commission of Responsibilities, meeting in Paris
on 29 March 1919, identified the category of crimes against the Laws
and Customs of War and the Laws of Humanity. With reference to
these laws, they examined the beginning of what was then known as
the Great War (before we had to start numbering them), as well as the
acts committed during its course. This was in accordance with Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles of 28 June 1919, which expressly
ordered the prosecution of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern for
crimes of this nature, as later occurred with the Treaty of Sèvres in
1920, concerning the prosecution of the Ottoman military for the Armenian genocide of 1915. In its report, it stated: “The Commission
concludes that, having examined a multiplicity of crimes committed
by those powers which shortly before and at The Hague had professed their reverence for the law and their respect for the principles
of Humanity, the conscience of the people demands a sanction which
will make it clear that cynical disregard for the most sacred laws is
not permitted”.
I included a reference to these historical paragraphs in the order
of 16 October 2008, by which I declared myself competent to investigate the crimes of Francoism. Further on, in the same order, I concluded: “[...] therefore, and with the support of international law, the
action taken by the persons who rose up and contributed to the armed
insurrection of 18 July 1936 was entirely unlawful and they attacked
the form of government (crimes against the Constitution, in Title Two
of Spain’s Penal Code of 1932, in force at the time of the uprising), in
a coordinated and conscious manner, determined to put an end to the
Republic by de facto means by overthrowing the legitimate government of Spain, and thereby laying the groundwork for the implementation of a preconceived plan that included the use of violence as the
basic instrument for its execution”.
I wrote this order after a lengthy and exhaustive investigation of
the allegations made by a group of lawyers who, on behalf of memorialist collectives, attended Court 5 of the Audiencia Nacional (Spain’s
National High Court), of which I was the judge, in December 2006.
They were later joined by associations of relatives and an MP from
the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party). They called for an
investigation into the disappearances, torture and forced exiles that
took place after the 1936 coup d’état.
The victims
As a jurist and judge and with a focus on human rights that I have
cultivated from the very early stages of my professional career, I could
not but investigate. The reason: the victims, to whom I gave priority.
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I was guided by the principle of justice which establishes that all people, by the mere fact of being human beings, have the same dignity,
regardless of any circumstance, and are therefore worthy of equal
consideration and respect. The principle of justice, recognised as an
overriding principle of the legal system, encompasses the values of
reasonableness, equality, equity, proportionality, respect for legality
and the prohibition of arbitrariness.
The victims are the main focus of historical memory. The goal is
to gather their stories, personalise them, and investigate the circumstances that led their being subjected to crime or offence. Bringing
their cases before the court is the beginning of a process which also
involves setting out on the road to truth and reparation. Testifying
before a judge brings into the light events which have been concealed
for years.
I will never forget María Martín López, 81 years old, who testified before the magistrates of the Second Chamber of the Supreme
Court of Spain, showing a tremendous strength which belied her
small stature. With the conviction of someone telling the truth, she
said: “My mother was brought to testify, but they killed her on the
way; they killed twenty-seven men and three women...”. She told
the judges that the last time she had seen her mother she was only
six years old, and that she and her family had been engaged in a protracted and gruelling battle to recover her remains from the Pedro
Bernardo cemetery in Avila. She was the first witness in the proceedings before me, and after her, other people came forward, humble,
calm, eager to tell of the enormous burden they carried, and to have
judges who dispensed justice do something to support them in their
quest for the truth to emerge. They expressed their enduring disbelief at what had happened, overcoming the fear imposed by silence.
Those days stand out in my memory in a unique fashion, as if all
the people who had been imprisoned, tortured and executed were
taking shape as flesh-and-blood individuals; as if they were being
given new life as they were named with warmth and affection by the
witnesses; as if these words opened a portal to a past which was still
alive somewhere in time, and the portal remained open for the duration of the testimony. These men and women from the past came
alive through the memory that gushed forth after long years of imposed silence, reaffirming their existence and shedding light on the
injustices committed against them by the executioners of Franco’s
regime. These stories and these names spoken by those who testified
before the highest court of justice of a society still fearful, so many
years later, were proof that the fascists had not achieved their goal of
wiping these people off the face of the earth, nor the ideals and hopes
[page-n-193]
First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
they had espoused during their lives. There they were again, hand in
hand with their wives, daughters and sons. Although the witnesses
were listened to with respect, we know what happened afterwards:
the Supreme Court granted impunity and no one else was allowed to
testify in court.
Justice
In around the year 211, the Roman jurist Cnaeus Domitius Annius
Ulpianus defined justice as the continuous and perpetual will to give
to each their due. This idea forms part of Plato’s philosophy and thus
the philosophy of the ancient world, although the concept of aequitas
(equity) was the most commonly used. That everyone should receive
their due is therefore the classical outlook, an outlook which was also
reflected, centuries later, in the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, who refers to it as: “the continuous and perpetual will to give to
each their due”.
Nowadays, jurists approach the principle of justice from a variety
of different perspectives. I myself am particularly interested in garantismo (a theory of constitutional guarantees or warrants), the manner
of understanding, interpreting and explaining the law that has been
developed and disseminated by the jurist, judge and philosopher Luigi
Ferrajoli who, since 1989, has been working on applying this theory
to penal law. The idea that mistrust of all kinds of power should form
the basis of the guarantee of rights is particularly applicable in the trajectory of the case taken by the victims of Franco’s regime, which is
inconsistent, bizarre and, on too many occasions, not in keeping with
the law. I share fully Ferrajoli’s scepticism as to whether the powers
that govern us are capable of providing complete and positive solutions when it comes to ensuring fundamental rights, and that they
tend to restrict these rights with the help of the legal mechanism. The
task of the legal administrator, the judge, or the prosecutor, in their
duty of independence, is to combat this spurious will by protecting the
rights that may be violated.
The philosopher Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre argues that we
need to have a conception of society and social relations in order to
have a conception of ethics and justice. In other words, he believes
that, in order to give everyone their due in terms of justice, we must
first determine what he or she contributes to the different social
spheres. However, for this to happen, our concept of society must be
of one which is just and free. John Rawls, for his part, considers justice
to be the primary virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of
thought. The American philosopher argues that, just as a theory must
be rejected if it is not true, so it does not matter whether or not laws
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and institutions are orderly and efficient; if they are unjust, they must
be reformed or abolished. He adds: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that not even the welfare of society as a whole
can trample upon. It is for this reason that justice rejects the idea that
the loss of liberty for some is made just by the fact that a greater good
is shared by others. It does not allow the sacrifices imposed on some to
be offset by the greater number of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore, in a just society, the liberties of equal citizenship are definitively
established; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
bargaining or the calculation of social interests”. This observation is
all the more pertinent in today’s world, when the judicialisation of politics is leading to situations of injustice for those affected, for citizens
and for society in general.
Francoism on trial
These prevarications and fudges regarding what justice should be
were also apparent in the trial to which I was subjected for the investigation into the crimes of Francoism. The trial began on 24 January
2012, which, as fate would have it, was the thirty-fifth anniversary
of the murders at the hands of the extreme right of Arturo Ruíz,
María Luz Nájera and the Atocha labour lawyers. In response to the
concept of the principle of justice, I remember The New York Times
describing it in a hard-hitting editorial as “an offence against justice
and against history [...]. It represents a disturbing echo of Franco-era
totalitarian thinking”.
“Is there no justice for these crimes?” read a large banner in
front of the Supreme Court, displayed by the Association for the
Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de
la Memoria Histórica). When the principle of justice is violated, the
doorway to impunity is opened and the demonstrations which took
place in Spain and abroad were against such arbitrary measures. One
only has to look at how the Second Chamber of Spain’s Supreme
Court acquitted the judge, but condemned the victims, closing off
the possibility of criminal investigations into these crimes of the
dictatorship. I have always been of the belief that no crime should
go uninvestigated and unpunished. I can only wonder as to which
powerful interests have the ability to bend the rule of law in a court,
so that it decides that so many murders remain unpunished. This is
an example of how the principle of justice can become muddied by
judicial rulings which are not in keeping with the principle of equity.
Moreover, the events which were the subject of the allegation I allowed had never been criminally investigated by the Spanish justice
system, and thus this impunity prevails to this day.
[page-n-195]
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
The fact that the lawsuit against me came from the rancorous
ultra-right says a lot about those interests which I mentioned earlier,
and which seem to have influenced the court in its subsequent decision to have any potential enquiry dropped, leaving the victims and
their families in the lurch. Ten years after that trial, it was clear that
things had not changed or that they had perhaps even worsened. In
cases such as these, time is not on the victims’ side, and their lives often
come to an end without them having been able to bury their loved ones
with dignity.
Reading Spanish Law 20/2022 of 19 October on Democratic
Memory, published in Spain’s Official State Gazette (BOE) No. 252 of
20 October 2022, which came into force on 21 October 2022, leaves
me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is joy that the victims
will be able to pursue legal means in their legitimate demands for
truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition; on the other hand, there
is a feeling of bitterness given the time wasted since my orders of 16
October and 18 November 2008. In these orders, I had argued, based
on many of the considerations now included in the law, that the investigation should have continued instead of being closed by the Spanish
justice system, which, moreover, prosecuted the judge, with the pain
and suffering that this entailed for those who were asking for their
right to be met.
The exhumation of the Francoist Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, remembered for his terrible deeds in Andalusia, one month after his
death, provides a clear example of what should be done. For this we
have to thank those who, then as now, have not ceased in their quest
for truth and justice. I am moved to remember the courage of these
people, all of them of advanced age, who came to tell their story before
the impassive and distant gaze of the Supreme Court judges, and that
of so many others who, following their example, fight day by day for
their rights, ignored for so many years. Now the law will force institutions to act - at last!1
Zero impunity
Milestones such as the exhumation of the dictator by Dolores Delgado, then Minister of Justice, or the efforts to push forward a law on
democratic memory, are small triumphs for all of us who wish to see
the principle of justice prevail in all areas, and even more so in those
where it has continually been denied. We must no longer grant impunity in cases of atrocious crimes such as genocide, crimes against
humanity, war or torture, as this would run counter to everything
that international law has managed to achieve. Impunity cannot be
allowed. Arguments which state that when revisiting the transition,
1
BOE.es - BOE -A-202217099 Law 20/2022, of
19 October, at: www.
boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2022-17099
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The boots of the victim of
reprisals, Basiliso Serrano,
el Manco de la Pesquera,
on the firing squad wall
in Paterna where he was
executed. Photograph:
Matías Alonso.
in reference to the Amnesty Law, “we should stick together”, or that
the aim is to “reopen old wounds”, are populist and false. They are
arguments which do indeed lead to confrontation, and which are in
the interests of the same people who have prevented justice from prevailing for so many years, knowing that those who use them do not
recognise the rights to which the victims are entitled.
In Spain’s transition to democracy, a leap forward, towards modernism, towards Europeanism, was sought, erecting a barrier of forgetting that cannot work. Imposed forgetting always fails. Officially
decreed pardons, too. Reconciliations, also. You forgive whom you
want to forgive and reconcile with whom you want to reconcile. MacIntyre sums it up well: “It is a condition of forgiveness that the offender accepts as just the verdict of the law with regard to their action
and acknowledges the justice of the appropriate punishment; hence
the common root of the words ‘penitence’ and ‘penalty’. The offender
can be forgiven if the offended person so desires”. As for forgiveness,
MacIntyre outlines a fundamental difference: “Justice is typically administered by a judge, an impersonal authority representing the community; but forgiveness can only be granted by the offended party...”.
I think that what is important is that if, at a historical juncture
such as Spain’s transition to democracy, it is not possible to deal with
certain issues, then this should happen afterwards. But to refuse and
to allow a situation where people in their eighties and nineties have to
continue asking for justice is so shameful, so ignominious, that it
is hard to accept. It is very difficult to explain to other countries,
when international organisations are demanding that we investigate
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
when the Supreme Court has closed down all avenues. The fact that
the victims of Franco’s regime are still not recognised in Spain today
shows that we have been unable to move on. Only on the day when
the name of a street is changed from that of a dictator to that of a
democratically elected leader without it causing an uproar will we be
able to say that we have done so.
Upholding ethics
The principle of justice must be upheld through accountability, because it is the basis of the Law and because it is the means by which
we can protect those who do not have a voice. Applying it entails tackling these issues in a combative fashion, in keeping with the conception of society advocated by MacIntyre. If you fail to move forward,
if you stand still, as a judge you may have a comfortable career, but
you will never be a fair and equitable one. Progress involves having to
meet challenges met and entails risks. It is a matter of upholding ethical principles and applying them, of holding on to your independence
and wearing it like a shield, of not being swayed by other principles
such as the interests of power or of the powerful, which only serve to
leave the victims exposed. I have never been able to understand how
people from the judicial world are able to enter politics, forgetting
that independence is one of the watchwords of the justice system
and one of its fundamental safeguards, and seeking to manipulate or
distort it in order to serve these spurious interests. This in turn leads
to public distrust of the institution, which is being done a disservice,
while undermining the rule of law, when, on the contrary, public service in the justice system, in politics or in any other sphere is essential
in order for democracy to flourish.
The principle of justice cannot be divorced from a sense of compassion, from the feeling of sadness caused by someone’s suffering,
prompting us to attempt to alleviate their pain, to remedy or prevent
it. Charity hovers on the fringes of the concept of justice, as a signifier
of concern for the other. I believe that if those who dispense justice
are oblivious to these sentiments, while their work may be faultless
from the point of view of interpreting legal standards, they will not be
adequately fulfilling their obligation to look after the weak. This is not
to say that we should bypass the law, but rather that the professional
who passes judgement on others must be trained not only in legal
postulates but also in social reality, and in the real world, compassion
and charity are elements the absence of which debases society; likewise, the judge must be aware of certain sensitivities which can make
the difference between ruling in a strictly academic manner or doing
so with an understanding of the situation and its broader context.
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
Obstacles
Serving those whose rights have been violated is not an exclusively
ethical matter, rather one must be compelled to do so by the principle
of justice. In his report in 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on transitional justice, Pablo de Greiff, reminded the Spanish
State of its duty to urgently take into account the demands of the victims of the Civil War and Franco’s regime, highlighting as priorities
the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) and the arbitrary sentences
handed out during the Civil War and Franco’s regime, calling for
their annulment. “The state has an obligation to attend to the rights
of the victims and their families and to put an end to the suffering of
thousands of people who still - in some cases eighty years after the
events, more than forty years since the return of democracy - do not
know where the remains of their loved ones are”, underlined the rapporteur, referring to the standards of international human rights law,
which are always binding.
Those of us who have been attempting to navigate our way
through the tricky terrain of democratic memory know that rightwing governments have put every imaginable obstacle in the way of
the principle of justice, with total disregard for the truth and no hint
of any reparation whatsoever. For the right, heir to the dictatorship’s
occultism, Pablo de Greiff ’s assertion amounts to nothing but so
many words: “The strength of a democracy is measured by, among
other things, its capacity to address valid claims from victims, regardless of political considerations or affiliation, and to guarantee the
right to the truth concerning events, no matter how painful it may
be”. The government of the Partido Popular (People’s Party) turned a
deaf ear. Even more so when Greiff pointed out: “There is a need for
a resolute State policy that does not fall prey to political tensions and
divisions, but which guarantees integrated, coherent, prompt and
impartial measures in favour of truth, memory and reparation [...].
This is a matter of human rights, not partisan politics.”
A textbook case
One example of such arbitrariness in government is provided by the
case of Teófilo Alcorisa. On 14 April 1947, Teófilo Román Alcorisa
Monleón was working in a vineyard in the village of Higueruelas, in
the province of Cuenca, dressed in corduroy trousers and wooden albarca shoes, when he was arrested by the Guardia Civil. The arrest was
made in the context of a major operation against the guerrillas of the
Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante y Aragón. The Guardia Civil was looking for Pedro Alcorisa, Teófilo’s son. When they did not find Pedro,
the Guardia Civil proceeded to arrest his father, an elderly man who
198
[page-n-200]
199
Baltasar Garzón Real
was not involved in any party or movement, supposedly so that they
could question him regarding the whereabouts of his son. Teófilo was
taken to the Arrancapins barracks in Valencia. His family was never
informed of the place of his arrest, nor of his death, nor of the place
where he was buried. A member of the civil guard took pity on Teófilo’s
wife and said to her: “Don’t look any further, your husband is dead.”
In the year 2000, the children, Pedro and Pilar Alcorisa, began to
investigate the whereabouts of their father through memorial associations. The burial site was located in the Valencia cemetery and in 2009,
the Valencia City Council, at the time led by Rita Barberá of the Partido
Popular, was asked to carry out the task of recovering the remains.
As a result of the administrative/political obstacles that they were
continually facing, the association and the relatives sought the help of
ILOCAD, the law firm of which I am the director. Thus, on 19 February 2014, the relatives filed a complaint with Valencia’s Court of First
Instance No. 7. A complaint was filed concerning an alleged crime of
unlawful detention without providing notification of location, for
the events that had occurred in 1947, and the ongoing nature of the
alleged criminal actions was emphasised. The judicial process was
guided by the Supreme Court ruling, i.e., the outcome was negative,
but the crowning touch was the rejection of the appeal by the Constitutional Court in an order dated 13 March 2015 on the grounds that
“there is no violation of any fundamental right”.
The situation changed with the election of the coalition of the
Compromís, PSPV and València en Comú parties and on 14 April
2016, Pilar and Pedro recovered their father’s body, receiving it from
Mayor Joan Ribó. The process had taken almost seven years and had
been marked by administrative red tape, official disinterest and a political mood more in line with the militant activism of the right wing
when it comes to anything that seeks to challenge their idealistic vision of Franco’s regime, ignoring the crimes committed, the 140,000
disappeared, the stolen children... facts which have not gone away.
Defending democracy
In that lengthy process, as with so many others that have met with a
stubborn institutional and judicial denial, justice was absent and continues to be so today. It did not carry out its duty, which was to support the victims, defend them and make reparations, failing to fulfil
its obligation to enforce the law.
During all these years, I have seen too many things that run counter to what I have held most sacred as a judge. Octogenarian orphans
crying because they have been prevented from digging up the remains
of their father; judges refusing to grant the right to a burial; I have
[page-n-201]
200
First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
followed closely as a law concerning historical memory was consigned
to oblivion by a right-wing government, with the president of the government himself, Mariano Rajoy, denying any support to the families,
and boasting that he would not spend “a single euro” to support the
victims in their quest. Meanwhile, the ultra-right has been growing in
popularity, feeding off a rancid nostalgia for the privileges of another
era. Disregarding justice entails ignoring the truth and leaving the
wounds open, unresolved, with the added insult of decorating the perpetrators, to the astonishment of the wronged parties. What’s worse
still is that hatred for the victims has remained. Faced with a progressive government that has dared to exhume Francisco Franco and
that is putting forward a law aimed at restoring this much-maligned
principle of justice, the right wing has announced that, if it succeeds in
regaining power, it will repeal the Law on Democratic Memory, just as
it will undo other advances that serve to consolidate freedoms. Their
goal is to return Spain to the darkness from which we managed to
emerge with so much pain and effort when we established democracy.
Recognising the dignity of all people, whatever their circumstances, and fighting for their rights, is the basis of the principle of justice
that must inform democratic memory and society in every situation.
Constructing truth and memory, as something both present and future, is essential and gives a society strength. Because let us never forget that the obligation of every democrat is to fight against impunity.
Bibliography
Ferrajoli, L. (2006). Garantismo penal. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mexico City.
Garzón Real, B. (2013). Auto declarándose competente para investigar los crímenes del franquismo. Available at: https://baltasargarzon.org/wpcontent/
uploads/2013/11/auto_memoria_historica.pdf
MacIntyre, A. (2004). Tras la virtud. Ed. Crítica, Barcelona.
Rawls, J. (2004). Teoría de la justicia. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Madrid,
Spain.
Sánchez, A. (29 January 2022). «Este tribunal condenó a las víctimas a la desesperanza». Infolibre. https://www.infolibre.es/politica/decada-acoso-garzon-investigar-crimenes-franquismo_1_1217869.html
Crutches
Stratigraphic Unit 1020, Grave 114. Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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International Law, Reparation
and Democratic Memory:
The Case of Spain
Carmen Pérez González
SENIOR LECTURER IN PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS AT UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III OF MADRID
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International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
1. Introduction
Designed as a tool that seeks to bring about, or at least facilitate,
the renewal and rebirth of societies grappling with a past of gross
human rights violations (Vasuki Nesiah, 2016: 779), transitional
justice poses a specific set of complexities in Spain. Diverse in nature
(historical, political, social), these challenges are also reflected at the
legal level, here largely stemming from the passage of time. This has
been clearly explained by the UN Human Rights Council’s Special
Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, who stated in 2014 that the Spanish case
“involves challenges which are characteristic of post-authoritarian
as well as post-conflict transitions, such as broad variations over
time and geographical factors in the patterns of violence, during
the Civil War (1936–1939) and the dictatorship (1939–1975), a long
dictatorship following a conflict, and major developments in the
national and international legal contexts since the initial violations
occurred”1.
These international developments to which the Rapporteur
refers serve as the point of departure for this paper. In the ensuing
decades since the gross violations of human rights were committed in
Spain, international law has steadily and undeniably moved towards
establishing certain obligations that States cannot ignore. In other
words, I believe that any legal approach to the plight of the victims of
these violations, to their rights, cannot today overlook the progress
that has been made in this respect under international human rights
law (IHRL) and international humanitarian law (IHL).
As the two cornerstones of this legal framework, the principles
that the UN’s work has established to date cannot go unmentioned.
Specifically, I refer here to the principles in the “Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through
Action to Combat Impunity (hereinafter Set of Principles)2 and
the “Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and
Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human
Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian
Law” (hereinafter Basic Principles and Guidelines) approved by the
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 60/147 of
16 December 20053. International human rights protection institutions have played an extraordinary role in specifying and updating
these principles and in establishing the content of the corresponding
obligations. Their efforts have consolidated the State’s obligation
to apply what has been called “the transitional template” (Ignacio
Forcada, 2011: 23) as a means of guaranteeing victims’ rights to
truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. At the
1
See paragraph 8 of the
Special Rapporteur’s
report of 22 July 2014 following his visit to Spain
(A/HRC/27/56/Add.1).
The visit took place from
21 January to 3 February
2014. The Report is
available at http://www.
ohchr.org/EN/Issues/
TruthJusticeReparation/
Pages/Index.aspx (all
electronic documents
cited throughout this
paper were accessed on 3
October 2022).
2
Available at https://
ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_s.aspx?si=E/cn.4/2005/102/
Add.1.
3
The resolution is available
at: http://research.un.org/es/docs/ga/quick/
regular/60.
[page-n-204]
203
4
See his report entitled:
Memorialisation Processes in the Context of Serious Violations of Human
Rights and International
Humanitarian Law: The
Fifth Pillar of Transitional
Justice, adopted on 9 July
2020 (A/ HRC/45/45),
available at https://
undocs.org/ es/A/
HRC/45/45.
5
However, the Democratic
Memory Law, which
I will discuss in more
detail below, assumes
that this will necessarily
be the situation in some
cases, for example, the
exhumations and transfer of the remains of the
victims buried in the Valle
de Cuelgamuros (Valley
of the Fallen). According
to Article 54.6 of the
Law, “in the event that
exhumation is technically
unfeasible, reparation
measures of a symbolic
and moral nature shall be
arranged”.
6
Law 20/2022, of 19 October, Official State Gazette
(BOE) No. 252, of 20
October 2022.
Carmen Pérez González
recommendation of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of
truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition, a fifth
pillar should be added to these first four: memorialisation4. As Margalida Capellà i Roig has noted, it is worth bearing in mind that the
State’s obligations in this sphere “are complementary and not alternatives, they cannot replace each other” (2021: 106)5. Truth, justice
and reparation are, in effect, a sort of system of communicating vessels, a single measure therefore capable of serving two of these purposes. Likewise, the absence of progress in any of these areas clearly
compromises the process as a whole.
In Spain, this process has been late, sluggish and intermittent.
Nevertheless, the Spanish State has made some truly significant
strides towards complying with its obligations under international
law in relation to the protection of the rights of those who were victims of gross human rights violations during the Spanish Civil War
and the subsequent Franco dictatorship. Against this backdrop, this
paper will draw particular attention to the obligation of reparation, to
which victims of gross human rights violations are entitled to under
international law. Principles 31 to 34 of the Set of Principles refer to
this right. More specifically, they refer to the rights and duties arising
out of the obligation to make reparation (Principle 31), reparation
procedures (Principle 32), publicising reparation procedures (Principle 33) and the scope of the right to reparation (Principle 34). Reparation should be comprehensive. That is, it should cover all injuries
suffered by the victims and include measures relating to restitution,
compensation, rehabilitation and satisfaction as provided by international law. To this end, the State should develop a system of redress
that is readily available, prompt and effective at the criminal, civil,
administrative and/or disciplinary levels.
The analysis I propose begins with a brief description of the way
in which Spain, particularly through its Democratic Memory Law
passed in October 20226, has complied with these obligations (2). I
will then discuss several pending issues (3). I will close the paper with
a series of conclusions (4).
However, there is one last introductory clarification that needs
to be made. The fact that it is the State, taken as a whole, that is the
subject of international law and the corresponding international obligations to which I refer should not obscure the fact that some autonomous communities in Spain have made more progress than others
in recognising and guaranteeing the rights of the victims of the Civil
War and the Francoist repression that followed, although their ranks
are growing. This also applies to reparations (de La Cuesta and Odriozola, 2018; Rafael Escudero, 2021).
[page-n-205]
204
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
2.The Spanish State’s compliance with its obligation
to make reparations
2.1. General issues
As far as Spanish law is concerned, the Democratic Memory Law is
without doubt a vital step in the process of designing and implementing a public policy in Spain that adequately protects the rights of the
victims of the Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship. Earlier legislation has played a significant role in this process, specifically
Law 52/2007 of 26 December 2007, which recognises and extends
rights and provides for measures in favour of victims of persecution
or violence during the Civil War and the dictatorship (known as the
“Historical Memory Law”)7. This law was the State’s initial attempt
to provide the country with a coherent policy that could meet the
obligations imposed by international law, including in terms of reparation, and it “joins other legal and regulatory provisions that have
been approved since the transition to democracy to compensate people who were repressed during the dictatorship” (Rafael Escudero,
2013: 320-321).
As mentioned, protecting victims’ rights has long been a matter
of concern for the UN’s human rights protection agencies. Therefore,
I find it useful in this analysis to consider two recent pronouncements by these bodies which, on the one hand, confirm some of the
Visit of the Platform for a
Truth Commission on the
crimes of Franco's regime
to the European Parliament, in March 2014,
to denounce the lack of
assistance provided to the
victims in Spain. Frame
from the video by Bruno
Rascão.
7
Official State Gazette
(BOE) No. 310, of 27
December 2007.
[page-n-206]
205
8
A/HRC/48/60/Add.1,
disponible en https://
undocs.org/es/A/
HRC/48/60/Add.1.
9
CDE/C/ESP/OAI/1,
available at https://
tbinternet.ohchr.
org/_layouts/15/
treatybodyexternal/
Download.aspx?symbolno=CED%2FC%2FESP%2FOAI%2F1&Lang=en.
10
Particularly through the
measures provided for in
Article 48.
11
According to the second
paragraph of this Article,
“the purpose of the law
is to recognise those who
suffered persecution
or violence for political
and ideological reasons,
thoughts or opinions,
religious conviction or
belief, or sexual orientation and identity during
the period between the
coup d’état on 18 July
1936, the Spanish Civil
War and Franco’s dictatorship until the Spanish
Constitution of 1978
entered into force, as
well as to promote their
moral reparation and the
recovery of their personal, family and collective
memory (…)”.
Carmen Pérez González
concerns that these same agencies have previously expressed and,
on the other hand, assess the progress that the Democratic Memory
Law would imply.
The first of these pronouncements is from the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees
of non-recurrence. He released his report on the follow-up visit to
Spain from 21 January to 14 February 20148 on 5 August 2021. The
report is critical and based on the assertion that many of the obstacles
to achieving the full guarantee of victims’ rights that were first identified remain. The second of the pronouncements that will serve as the
foundation for the brief analysis that I will make in this section are
the Concluding Observations of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances of 27 September 2021 on the complementary information
Spain submitted under Article 29(4) of the Convention9.
The Democratic Memory Law represents a step forward in terms
of reparation. Chapter III of the Law refers specifically to reparation
(Articles 30 to 33). The Law embraces the idea that reparation should
extend beyond economic reparation and couples this obligation with
the more symbolic10 obligation to restore dignity to the memory of the
victims, which is tied to the Government’s duty of memorialisation.
The moral redress of the victims thus constitutes one of the purposes
of the Law, pursuant to Article 111.
This reparation must also be comprehensive. As I have already
stated, this is an obligation of the State. Consequently, it should develop a set of restitution, rehabilitation and satisfaction measures
that are geared towards re-establishing the rights of the victims both
individually and collectively. For Pablo de Greiff, this comprehensive
nature is twofold: internal and external. Internal integrity (or coherence) refers to whether the various benefits distributed by a reparations programme relate to one another. Most of these programmes,
Greiff argues, provide more than one type of benefit. Thus, they can
include both symbolic and material reparations, each of these categories in turn including different measures that can be distributed individually or collectively. It is important that these reparation measures
be mutually supportive if the proposed objectives are to be achieved.
External coherence, on the other hand, refers to the idea that reparation efforts should be designed in such a way as to be closely linked
to other transitional justice mechanisms, for example, criminal justice, truth-telling and institutional reform (Pablo de Greiff, 2010:
10-11). As noted, we are not dealing with isolated issues, and different
types of reparation measures have been established bearing this in
mind. I will now discuss some of them, although this is by no means
an exhaustive list.
[page-n-207]
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
First, those reparation measures that have a collective dimension,
linked to “citizens” rights, are important to mention. In this sense,
Article 4 of the Democratic Memory Law recognises and declares all
convictions and sanctions for political, ideological, conscientious or
religious reasons during the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship to be
illegal and fundamentally null and void, regardless of the ruling used
to establish said convictions and sanctions. Subject to the limitations
discussed in the following section of this chapter, this entitles the victim to a declaration of recognition and personal reparation, pursuant
to the provisions of Articles 5 and 6.
The law establishes measures of a more personal nature, including specific measures that refer to property stolen during the Civil
War and the dictatorship, which translate into the obligation to conduct an audit of this property and to implement potential channels
of recognition for the victims (Article 31). Furthermore, the ninth
additional provision stipulates that property that was confiscated by
political forces during the dictatorship should be returned when it
was seized abroad through judicial or administrative proceedings.
Likewise, Article 32 provides for a series of measures of recognition
and reparation for the victims of forced labour. Beyond the obvious
personal dimension, it seems obvious that this type of measure has a
collective scope which is related to the right to the truth as well, also
on its collective scale – that is, linked to society’s “right to know”.
Finally, the Law also refers to granting Spanish nationality to volunteers who were members of the International Brigades (Article
33) and to those born outside Spain to parents or grandparents who
were exiled for political, ideological or religious reasons (eighth additional provision).
Lastly, certain reparation measures are envisaged for specific
groups. This is especially the case for women. Article 11 refers specifically to this group, the third paragraph establishing the public
authorities’ obligation to design specific measures of reparation for
the damages from the repression or violence women experienced as
a consequence of their public, political, trade union or intellectual
work, or as mothers, partners or daughters of those who were repressed or assassinated. Reference is also made to women during the
Civil War and dictatorship who were imprisoned or victims of other
punishments for the crimes of adultery and abortion.
2.2. Mass graves and reparation
The Democratic Memory Law links the issue of mass graves and the
exhumation of remains to the right to truth. While Law 52/2007
addressed this issue, it failed to do so in a way that would remove all
206
[page-n-208]
207
Artist’s impression of the
executions by firing-squad
at the Paredón de España,
“the wall of Spain”, in
the cemetery of Paterna. Drawing by Matías
Alonso .
Carmen Pérez González
the obstacles that the relatives of the missing were, and still are, facing. Once again, the Law incorporated measures in line with a model
that has been called the “privatisation of truth”, a model based on
“collaboration” between governments and the direct descendants of
the victims, who were granted subsidies that could be put towards
the task of exhumation. This model is lacking from an international
law perspective, the reasons clearly expressed by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of
non-recurrence in 2014. No real state policy was established on the
matter, but rather the responsibility for arranging complicated and
costly exhumation projects was delegated to the relatives and the organisations they had formed. In short, families and associations have
been doing the State’s job ever since.
[page-n-209]
208
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
I believe it can be argued that the Democratic Memory Law is a
significant improvement on this point. Taking these criticisms into
account, it outlines a model that can be considered more in line with
the requirements of international human rights protection bodies.
Beyond the obvious link to ensuring the right to truth, it seems obvious that allowing relatives to identify and exhume the remains of their
missing loved ones and to receive compensation, if applicable, is also
a way of guaranteeing their right to reparation. Some of the challenges in accomplishing this task have been underscored in the literature
(Margalida Capellà, 2021).
3. Pending issues: reparation without economic benefits
resulting from the annulment of convictions
In terms of reparation, the regulation in the Democratic Memory
Law is relevant in relation to the issue of annulling convictions,
an issue that was unsuccessfully addressed in 2007. Recall that the
“Historical Memory Law” only recognised and declared the “radically unjust” nature and the illegitimacy of the convictions and
punishments handed down for political, ideological or belief-based
reasons by the special courts during the Civil War and by any court
or criminal or administrative body during the dictatorship. The Law
also established that victims had the right to request the issue of
declarations of reparation and personal recognition. This was, as
has been noted, an insufficient solution (Jorge Errandonea, 2008;
Daniel Vallés, 2015). Article 5 of the Democratic Memory Law now
regulates in certain detail the annulment of resolutions and the illegitimacy of certain bodies. However, the fourth paragraph of the
article sets a limit to the effects that the annulment described in the
preceding paragraphs could have. Specifically, it states: “The annulment covered in the preceding paragraphs shall give rise to the right
to obtain a declaration of recognition and personal reparation. In
any event, this annulment shall be compatible with any other form
of redress established in the legal system, without it affecting the
recognition of the economic liability of the State, government or private parties, or giving rise to any financial or professional redress or
compensation”.
As the Special Rapporteur noted in his report of 5 August 2021,
this restriction contravenes international standards regarding the
obligation to provide full reparation to victims12. The “Basic Principles and Guidelines” are clear in this regard, providing for restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees
of non-repetition as forms of reparation13. As for compensation,
these guidelines establish that victims should, as appropriate and
12
See Section 33 of the
report.
13
See Section 18 of the
“Basic Principles and
Guidelines”.
[page-n-210]
209
14
Ibidem, Section 20. The
damages to be assessed
expressly include physical or mental harm; lost
opportunities, including
employment, education
and social benefits; material damages and loss of
earnings, including loss of
earning potential; moral
damage and the costs
required for legal or expert assistance, medicine
and medical services, and
psychological and social
services.
15
A/CN.4/L.602/Rev.1,
Available at https:// legal.
un.org/ilc/ses- sions/53/
docs.shtml.
Carmen Pérez González
proportional to the gravity of the violation and the circumstances
of each case, be provided with all economically assessable damages
resulting from gross violations of international human rights law
and serious violations of international humanitarian law14. Furthermore, the obligation to provide compensation results from the
international law on State responsibility. Thus, pursuant to Article
34 of the International Law Commission’s Draft articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts15, “full reparation
for the injury caused by the internationally wrongful act shall take
the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction, either singly or in combination”. Compensation is specifically referred to in
Article 36, which is exhaustive in stating in its first paragraph that
“the State responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under
an obligation to compensate for the damage caused thereby, insofar
that such damage is not made good by restitution”. And it adds in its
second paragraph that the compensation must cover any financially
assessable damage, including loss of profit insofar as it is established
(Christian Tomuschat, 2007).
4. In conclusion
Fighting impunity has been at the heart of the UN’s work in the context discussed in this paper. It is a goal that has encouraged the search
for and enhancement of adequate mechanisms for holding perpetrators of gross human rights violations accountable. It is, moreover, a
goal to which contemporary international law is firmly committed.
The fact that achieving this goal seems to be more complicated
when it comes to dealing with human rights violations committed in
the past during an armed conflict or dictatorship cannot be ignored.
However, only the objective of avoiding impunity for such conduct
is compatible with effective and adequate protection of victims’
rights. Both the “Body of Principles” and the “Basic Principles and
Guidelines” cited here specifically set out the obligation that States
have to adopt measures to address impunity. These measures should
adequately guarantee both the rights of victims of gross human rights
violations to truth, justice and reparation and the non-repetition of
such violations, even when these violations were committed in the
past. The State’s principle of continuity would serve as a basis for such
an obligation in these cases. Accordingly, “the essence of this principle can be summarised by stating that the State remains the same, for
the purposes of the international legal order, whatever the change or
changes that have occurred in its internal organisation. Consequently (...) a state must comply with all those international obligations
in order to, let us recall, “resolve the problems resulting from a past
[page-n-211]
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
of large-scale abuses”, whether or not it is immersed in any kind of
transitional process; although, we should at least qualify that these
obligations will likely have to be interpreted in such a way that, without breaching the permitted limits, they do not become impossible,
unfeasible, counterproductive and/or odious” (Javier Chinchón,
2009: 53-54).
The Democratic Memory Law and several of the regulations adopted at the autonomous community level in Spain are evidence that
the Spanish State is still willing to face some of the difficulties that, as
I stated at the start, are caused by the passage of time when it comes
to designing and implementing programmes that guarantee the
rights of victims of gross human rights violations.
210
[page-n-212]
211
Carmen Pérez González
Bibliography
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Chinchón Álvarez, Javier: “Justicia transicional: “Memoria Histórica”, y responsabilidad internacional del Estado: Un análisis general a propósito del cumplimiento de ciertas obligaciones internacionales en juego después de más
de tres décadas de inicio formal de la transición política española”, Revista de
Derecho de Extremadura, 2009, no. 4, pp. 53-54.
De la Cuesta, José Luis y Odriozola, Miriam: “Marco normativo de la memoria
histórica en España: legislación estatal y autonómica”, Revista Electrónica de
Ciencia Penal y Criminología, 2018, Vol. 20, no. 8, pp. 1-38,
Escudero Alday, Rafael, “La vía autonómica para la recuperación de la memoria
histórica en España”, Revista Catalana de Dret Públic, 2021, no. 63, pp. 165184.
Escudero Alday, Rafael, “Jaque a la Transición: análisis del proceso de recuperación de la memoria histórica”, Anuario de Filosofía del Derecho, 2013, no.
XXIX, pp.
Errandonea, Jorge: “Estudio comparado de la anulación de sentencias injustas
en España”, International Center for Transitional Justice. 2008, disponible en el
siguiente enlace: https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Spain-Amnesty-Justice-2008-Spanish_0.pdf.
Forcada, Ignacio: Derecho Internacional y Justicia Transicional. Cuando el Derecho se
convierte en religión, Editorial Civitas, Cizur Menor, 2011.
De Greiff, Pablo: “Introduction. Repairing the past: Compensation for victims of
human rights violations”, en de Greiff, P. (ed.): The Handbook of Reparations.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, pp. 3-18.
Nesiah, Vasuki: “Theories of Transitional Justice”, in: Orford, A. and Hoffmann,
F. (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016.
Tomuschat, Christian: “Reparation in Favour of Individual Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law”, in Kohen,
M. C. (ed.): Promoting Justice, Human Rights and Conflict Resolution through
International Law/La promotion de la justice, des droits de l’homme et du règlement
des conflits par le droit international: Liber Amicorum Lucius Caflisch, Boston,
Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2007, pp. 569-590.
Vallés Mañío, Daniel: “El TEDH no cuestiona la Ley de Memoria Histórica,
pero podría”, InDret, 2015, no. 4, 19 pp.
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[page-n-2]
[page-n-3]
[page-n-4]
MASS
GRAVES OF
FRANCOISM
ARCHAEOLOGY,
ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEMORY
[page-n-5]
MASS GRAVES OF FRANCOISM.
ARCHAEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEMORY
De julio 2023 a abril 2024
DIPUTACIÓ DE VALÈNCIA
President
Antoni Francesc Gaspar Ramos
Delegate for the Area of Culture
Xavier Rius i Torres
Delegate for Historical Memory
Ramiro Rivera Gracia
DELEGATION FOR HISTORICAL MEMORY
Head of the Delegation for Historical Memory
Francisco Sanchis Moreno
Specialist in Historical Memory
Eva García Barambio
Picture archive
María Jesús Blasco Sales
VALENCIA PREHISTORY MUSEUM / ETNO
Director of the Valencia Prehistory Museum
María Jesús de Pedro Michó
Head of the Unit of Dissemination, Education and
Exhibitions at the Valencia Prehistory Museum
Santiago Grau Gadea
Director of ETNO. Valencia Ethnology Museum
Joan Seguí Seguí
Exhibition Production Unit, ETNO.
Valencia Ethnology Museum
Jose María Candela Guillén and Tono Herrero Giménez
Administrative management
Ana Beltrán Olmos and Manolo Bayona Gimeno
Image design for the project “The mass graves of Francoism.
Archaeology, Anthropology and Memory”
La Mina Estudio
Based on the art work of Dionisio Vacas, Grave 126, Paterna
Cemetery
Photograph of the art work
Chisco Ferrer
Restoration of materials
Restoration laboratory of the Valencia Prehistory Museum:
Trinidad Pasíes, Ramón Canal Roca and Janire Múgica
Mestanza. Con la colaboración del Institut Universitari
de Restauració del Patrimoni - Universitat Politécnica
de València: Mª Teresa Doménech Carbó, Jose Antonio
Madrid García, Pilar Bosch Roig, Sofía Vicente Palomino,
Mª Antonia Zalbidea Muñoz and del Departamento de
Química Analítica - Universitat de València: Antonio
Doménech Carbó
Restoration laboratory, ETNO: Isabel Álvarez Pérez and
Gemma Candel Rodríguez. Con la colaboración de: IVCR+i
Institut Valencià de Conservació, Restauració i Investigació:
Gemma Contreras Zamorano, Mercè Fernández and María
José Cordón
Restoration of textile materials: Carolina Mai Cervoraz,
Núria Gil Ortuño, Carlos Milla Mínguez and Albert Costa
Ramon. Control biológico y conservación preventiva:
l’Institut Universitari de Restauració del Patrimoni Universitat Politècnica de València: Pilar Bosch Roig
Programme of complementary activities
Begonya Soler Mayor, Yolanda Fons Grau, Tono Vizcaíno
Estevan and Andrea Moreno Martín, Francesc Cabañés
Martínez, Ana Sebastián Alberola, Rosa Martí Pérez,
Ivana Puig Núñez, Amparo Pons Cortell, Albert Costa
Ramon, Isabel Gadea Peiró, Mª José García Hernandorena,
Francisco Sanchis Moreno, Eva García Barambio
Production and installation of exterior graphics
Simbols
Printing of the poster and the programme of activities
Imprenta Diputació de València
PUBLICATION
Authors
Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Xurxo M. Ayán Vila, Zira Box Varela,
Isabel Gadea Peiró, María José García Hernandorena,
Baltasar Garzón Real, Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri, Aitzpea
Leizaola, María Laura Martín-Chiappe, Miguel Mezquida
Fernández, Andrea Moreno Martín, Carmen Pérez
González, Francisco Sanchis Moreno, Queralt Solé i Barjau,
Mauricio Valiente Ots, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
Scientific coordination
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
María José García Hernandorena, Isabel Gadea Peiró,
Francisco Sanchis Moreno
Technical coordination
Eva Ferraz García
Design and layout
La Mina Estudio
Translation and correction in Valencian and Spanish
Joaquín Abarca Pérez and Sarrià Masià. Serveis Lingüístics
Images and photographs
Eloy Ariza Jiménez-Asociación Científica
ArqueoAntro, Albert Costa Ramon. Colección
Memoria Democrática L’ETNO, Isabel Gadea Peiró,
María José García Hernadorena, Xurxo M. Ayán Vila,
[page-n-6]
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri, Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi,
Aitzpea Leizaola, María Laura Martín-Chiappe, Matías
Alonso, Bruno Rascão, Colección particular València,
Colección Familia Roig Tortosa, Familia Pastor, Familia
Chofre, Familia Gómez, Familia Coscollà, Familia Peiró,
Familia Pomares, Familia Gomar, Familia Llopis, Familia
Morató, Familia Alemany, Familia Miguel Cano and María
Navarrete, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte - Centro
Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Agencia EFE,
Biblioteca Nacional de España.
© de los textos: la autoría
© de las imágenes: la autoría, archivos y colecciones
© de la presente edición: Diputació de València, 2023
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A la Plataforma de Asociaciones de Familiares de Víctimas
del Franquismo de las Fosas Comunes de Paterna, a las
Asociaciones de Familiares de las fosas 21, 22, 81-82, 9192, 94, 95, 96, 100, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120, 126, 127, 128, los
nichos 43-44 and la Agrupación de familiares de Víctimas
del Franquismo de las Fosas Comunes del Cuadro II del
Cementerio Municipal de Paterna.
A Enrique Abad Aparicio, Llorenç Alapont, Dolores
Albuixech Domingo, Montserrat Alemany, Vicente Alemany
Morell, Magdalena Almiñana Solanes, Matías Alonso,
Pedro Luís Alonso, Mercedes and Jaime Amorós Gómez,
Maruja Badia, Amparo Belmonte Orts, Pepa Bonet, José
Calafat Ché, Paz Calduch, Lola Celda Lluesma, Rosana
Copoví, Amparo Cortelles Raga, Rosa Coscollá, Fernando
Cotino, Celia Chofre Rico,Rocío Díaz, Francisco De
Paula Rozalén Martínez, Mireia Doménech Alemany,
Aure Escrivá Ferrer, Joaquín Esparza Morell, Fina Ferre,
Nati Ferrero, María Frasquet, Palmira Flores Carreres,
Palmira Ros, Sara Ros and Geles Porta, Vicent Gabarda
Cebellán, Daniel Galán Valero, Iker García, Vicent García
Devís, José García Martínez, María Gómez, Salvador
Gomar Pons, Carmen Gómez Sales, Carlos and Amparo
Gregori Berenguer, Tina Guillem Cuesta, José Guirao
Giner, Juan Guirao Ortuño, Josefina Guzmán Navarro,
Vicenta Juan, Amèlia Hernández Monzó, Eva Mª Ibáñez
Cano, Mª Rosa Iborra Gimeno, Charo Laporta Pastor,
Gloria Lacruz León, José Ignacio Lorenzo, Concepción
Llin Garcia, Pilar Lloris Macián, Mercedes Llopis Escrivá,
Paqui Llopis, Teresa Llopis Guixot, Ernesto Manzanedo
Llorente, Aurora Máñez, Matilde Martí Avi, Sonia
Martínez, María Asunción Martínez, Carolina Martínez
Murcia, José Ramón Melodio, Rafael Micó, Silvia Mirasol
Fortea, Laura Mollá, Paco Monzó y Toni Monzó Ferrandis,
Josep Joan Moral Armengou, Maria Morató Torres, María
Morió Gómez, José Vicente Muñiz y Helena Aparicio,
María Navarro Giménez, Miguel Navarro, Óskar Navarro
Pechuán, Mª Ángeles Navarro Perucho, Vicente Olcina
Ferrándiz, Roser Orero, Eduardo Ortuño Cuallado, David
Pastor, Josefa Peiró, Pepita Peiró, Vicenta Pérez Martínez,
Conchín Pia Navarro, Carmen Picó Monzó, Juan Luis
Pomares Almiñana, Eduardo Ramos, Jordi Ramos, Raquel
Ripoll Giménez, Verónica Roig Llorens, María José y Charo
Romero Ortí, Andrea Rubio, Benjamín Ruiz Martí, Juan
José Ruíz, Carmen Sanchis Bauset, Mercedes Sanchis
Bonora, Mª Carmen Sancho Albiach, Pablo Sedeño Pacios,
Núria Serentill y Julio Morellà, Laura Simón, Saro Soriano
Llin, Pilar Taberner Balaguer, Laura Talens, Silvia Talens,
Sergi Tarín Galán, Dionisio Vacas Cosmo, Progreso Vañó
Puerto, Fernando Vegas.
A ARFO-Asociación de Represaliados/das por el
Franquismo de Oliva, Ateneo Republicano de Paterna,
Museo de Cerámica de Paterna, Asociación Científica
ArqueoAntro, ATICS, PaleoLab, Museu Virtual de Quart de
Poblet, Cementerio Municipal de Paterna.
IN MEMORY OF ALL THE VICTIMS OF THE
FRANCOIST REPRESSION
[page-n-7]
VALENCIA PREHISTORY MUSEUM
Director
María Jesús de Pedro Michó
Head of the Unit of Dissemination, Education and Exhibitions
Santiago Grau Gadea
Exhibition: The Archaeology of Memory. The mass graves
of Paterna
Exhibition curators
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan, Eloy Ariza
Jiménez and Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Coordination
Eva Ferraz García and Santiago Grau Gadea
Museum project
Rosa Bou Soler and Kumi Furió Yamano. LimoEstudio
Scientific advisers
Associación Científica ArqueoAntro
Display coordination
Rosa Bou Soler, Kumi Furió Yamano, Eva Ferraz García, Laura
Fortea Cervera e Isabel Carbó Dolz
Registration and presentation of exhibits
Begonya Soler Mayor and Ramón Canal Roca
Teaching programme
Arantxa Jansen, Laura Fortea Cervera and Eva Ripollés Adelantado
Dissemination and social media
Begonya Soler Mayor, Lucrecia Centelles Fullana, Vanessa
Extrem Medrano and Francisco Pavón Tudela
Reporting and news
Gala Font de Mora Martí
Exhibition image design
Rosa Bou Soler and Kumi Furió Yamano. LimoEstudio
Translation and correction of display texts in Valencian and
Spanish
Sarrià Masià. Serveis Lingüístics
Translation of display texts into English
Michael Maudsley
Translation of display texts into Italian
Centro G. Leopardi
Translation of display texts into French
Christine Comiti
Families and institutions that loaned exhumed items
Colección Memoria Democrática - L’ETNO and las
asociaciones de familiares de las fosas 21, 22, 81-82, 91-92, 94,
96, 100, 111, 112, 114, 115, 120, 126, 128, los nichos 43-44 y la
fosa 2 del segundo cuadrante.
Colecciones particulares de Enrique Abad Lahoz, Manuel Amorós
Aracil y María Sánchez Gomariz, Manuel Bauset Tamarit,
Juan Bautista Solanes, Miguel Cano and María Navarrete,
Daniel Galán Valero, Regino García Culebras, Manuel Baltasar
Hernández Sáez and Gracia Espí Roca, Pepita Iborra, Lacruz,
Salvador Lloris Épila, Manuel Lluesma Masia, Gregori Migoya,
Vicente Muñiz Campos, Mª Ángeles Navarro Perucho, José
Orts Alberto and Asunción Granell Martí, José Peiró Calabuig,
Conchín Pía Navarro, César Sancho de la Pasión, Carlos Talens
and de las familias Carreres Duato, Ché Soler, Gómez Sales,
Monzó Cruz, Morell Pérez, Murcia-Ródenas, Ortí-Fita, Picó
Monzó, Roig Tortosa, Taberner Giner and Vañó Puerto.
Individuals and institutions that loaned
documents and photographs
Archivo ABC; Archivo Vicaría de la Solidaridad. Museo de la
Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Chile; Arxiu General i
Fotogràfic de la Diputació de València; Auschwitz- Birkenau
Memorial; Agencia EFE; Biblioteca Historicomèdica «Vicent
Peset Llorca» - Universitat de València; Biblioteca Nacional de
España; Biblioteca Valenciana Nicolau Primitiu. Fons Finezas;
Buchenwald Memorial Collection; Col·lecció particular Matías
Alonso; Colección particular Rosario Martínez Bernal; CRAI
Biblioteca Pavelló de la República - Universitat de Barcelona;
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site; Fundación
Sancho el Sabio Fundazioa (Vitoria-Gasteiz). Fondo Sociedad
de Amigos de Laguardia; Fundación Biblioteca Manuel
Ruiz Luque. FBMRL; GrupoPaleolab® and UNDERBOX;
Mauthausen Memorial; Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte.
Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica; Ministerio de
Defensa. Archivo General e Histórico de Defensa; Museo Sitio
de Memoria ESMA, Argentina; Museu Virtual de Quart de
Poblet; US National Archives at College Park. National Archives
and Records Administration.
Photographers
Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Paco Grau, Paloma Brinkmann, J. Cabrelles
Sigüenza, Santi Donaire, David Fernández, Maysun Visual
Artist, Bernhard Mühleder, Ahmed Jallanzo, Hermes Pato,
Joaquín Sanchis Serrano «Finezas», Pawel Sawicki and Nathalie
Valanchon.
© Stefan Müller-Naumann, Peter Hansen, Gervasio Sánchez,
Vicente Ballester, Wila, VEGAP. València. 2023
Illustrators
Flavita Banana, Manel Fontdevila, Eneko las Heras Leizaola,
Gema López «Kuroneko», José López «Lope», Ana Penyas,
Bernardo Vergara and Frente Viñetista. Asociación de
humoristas gráficos.
© Andrés Rábago «El Roto», VEGAP. València. 2023
Audiovisual resources
Genocidios y arqueología forense (audiovisual)
Script: Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Andrea Moreno Martín
and Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
Editing: Alicia Alcantud and Pablo Vigil
Paterna, la memoria de la represión y de los crímenes de
postguerra (audiovisual)
Script: Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Andrea Moreno Martín
and Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
Illustrations: Gema López «Kuroneko»
Photography and video: Eloy Ariza Jiménez
Editing: Alicia Alcantud and Pablo Vigil
Los sonidos de una exhumación (paisaje sonoro)
Script: Eloy Ariza Jiménez, Andrea Moreno Martín
and Tono Vizcaíno Estevan
[page-n-8]
Recordings: Eloy Ariza Jiménez
Editing: Marcos Bodi
Translation of display texts into English
Robin Loxley
Las voces de las familias (audio)
Script and editing: Santi Donaire
Families and institutions that loaned exhumed items
Colección Memoria Democrática - L’ETNO, Familia de Juan
Ferrer Vázquez, Familia de Miguel Galán Domingo, Familia
de Salvador Gomar Noguera, Familia de Vicente Gómez Marí,
Familia de Blas Llopis Sendra, Familia de Salvador Llopis
Sendra, Familia de Vicente Martí Ruiz, Familia de Vicente Mollá
Pascual, Familia de José Morató Sendra, Familia de José Orts
Alberto, Familia Peiró Roger, Familia de Juan Luis Pomares
Bernabeu, Familia de Federico Rico Cabrera, Familia de Germán
Sanz Esteve, Familia de Basiliso Serrano Valero, Familia de
Mariana Torres Esquer, Familia de Vicente Guna Carbonell,
Familia de Joaquín Revert Gilabert, Familia de Daniel Simó
Biosca, Familia de Luis Ocaña Navarro, Familia de Vicente Mollá
Galiana.
Resiliencia al olvido (motion graphics)
Pieza artística: Guillem Casasús Xercavins
and Gerard Mallandrich Miret
Motion: Àlex Palazzi Corella
Editing: Joan Campà San José
Production and installation
Rótulos Gallego & Burns S.L.
Carpintería paramentos: Sergio Carrero Melián
Pintura paramentos: Sebastián López
Suelo técnico: Pinazo Decoraciones
Framing
Marc-Imatge
Transport
Tti International Art Services
Image and sound
Sonoidea
Insurance
Allianz
Organization and production
Diputació de València - Museu de Prehistòria de València
ETNO-VALENCIA ETHNOLOGY MUSEUM
Director
Joan Seguí Seguí
Exhibition Production Unit
Jose María Candela Guillén and Tono Herrero Giménez
Exhibition: 2238 Paterna. A place of perpetration
and memory
Exhibition curators
Albert Costa Ramon, Isabel Gadea Peiró and María José García
Hernandorena
Museographic project
Estudio Eusebio López
Display coordination
Jose María Candela Guillén, Albert Costa Ramon and Tono
Herrero Giménez
Teaching programme
Sarah Juchnowicz Perlin and Sílvia Prades Moliner (Exdukere S.L)
Dissemination and social media
Francesc Cabañés Martínez, Ana Sebastián Alberola, Rosa Martí
Pérez, Ivana Puig Núñez, Francisco Alba Ros, Sandra Sancho Ruiz
Image design
Estudio Eusebio López
Translation and correction of display texts in Valencian
and Spanish
Jose María Candela Guillén and Carles Penya-roja Martínez
Audiovisuals
Mujeres Rapadas
Script: Isabel Gadea and Peiró, Mª José García Hernandorena
Photography: Archivo Art al Quadrat, Archivo Pura Peiró
Voice: Teresa Llopis
Editing: Pau Monteagudo Aguilar
Homenajes políticos
Photography and video: Archivo Pep Pacheco, Archivo Sergi
Tarín and Óskar Navarro
Editing: Pau Monteagudo Aguilar
Primeras exhumaciones científicoforenses
Fragmento vídeo: “Dones de Novembre. Les fosses clandestines
del franquisme”
Script and direction: Óskar Navarro, Sergi Tarín
Photography: Antonio Arnau Iborra, Esther Albert Navarro
Music: Jorge Agut Barreda
Movimiento asociativo y nuevos rituales
Images: Raúl Pérez López
Editing: Pau Monteagudo Aguilar
Creation of sound in the cemetery of Paterna
Edu Comelles Allué
Art work Patio 3
Anaïs Florin, Judith Martínez Estrada
Tiles production
Aacerámicas (Almàssera)
Production and installation
Art i Clar, Sebastián López Valero
Technical support
Collections and Restoration Unit
Jorge Cruz Orozco, Miguel Hernández Oleaque
and Pilar Payá Ferrando
Insurance
Allianz
Organization and production
Diputació de València – L’ETNO
[page-n-9]
ARCHAEOLOGY
17
35
Beyond exhumation:
Building Memory
through Archaeology and
Museums
The archaeology of
memory: the application
of forensic archaeology to
the graves of the Civil War
and the postwar period
Andrea Moreno Martín,
Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez
& Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
53
69
The forgotten bodies
of the war
This archaeology will be
the tomb of fascism, or it
will be nothing. The role of
community archaeology in
uncovering the common
graves of Francoism
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
ANTHROPOLOGY
91
113
Where does
memory live?
Objects and memories:
the material dimension
of the mass graves
Maria-José García Hernandorena
& Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Zira Box Varela
[page-n-10]
127
145
The past, present and
future of the objects in the
mass graves
A look at Paterna to
revisit the contemporary
exhumation process:
possibilities and tensions
in the fight for memory(ies)
Aitzpea Leizaola
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
DEMOCRATIC MEMORY
165
175
Graves and
Democratic Memory
The right to truth with
regard to the human rights
violations during the
Franco regime
Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
Mauricio Valiente Ots
189
201
First and foremost, the
victims. Principle of Justice
International Law,
Reparation and
Democratic Memory:
The Case of Spain
Baltasar Garzón Real
Carmen Pérez González
[page-n-11]
[page-n-12]
11
Toni Gaspar
PRESIDENT OF THE PROVINCIAL COUNCIL OF VALENCIA
La historia que no se escribe, prescribe: roughly translated, “the history
that is not recorded is lost”. The sentence in Spanish, with the rhyme
of “escribe, prescribe”, may sound like an advertising jingle, but I think
it actually has a political intent: to reflect the collective principle of a
people, the moral obligation of any free society. Reclaiming what was
concealed, talking about what was silenced, bringing to light what
was suppressed: this, in a nutshell, is historical memory.
The Valencia Provincial Council is proud to have established itself
in recent years as an institutional reference point in the recovery of
memories, testimonies, and remains of people who were hunted
down and shot for their convictions, or simply for not being part of
an undemocratic and repressive regime.
Thirty-five mass graves have been opened, more than 1,200
victims have been exhumed, and more than eight million euros has
been assigned to groups, associations and town halls over the past
six years. The Historical Memory section of the Valencia Provincial
Council has led the way in ensuring that the memory and dignity of
hundreds of families from the region is not forgotten.
The way to silence the ideology of oblivion is to develop projects
and allocate funding for institutions and associations engaged in
the recovery of memory, a mission that is so important for achieving
historical justice for a people.
I would like to thank all the experts from different disciplines
who have helped us in this task of recovering and identifying several
hundreds of the people who disappeared during the Franco dictatorship. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Provincial Council of
Valencia for their dedication to the project. We will continue our task
of recovering this memory, in the absolute conviction that to live life
we must look forward to the future, but that, to understand it, we
must look back to the past.
[page-n-13]
ARCHAE
[page-n-14]
13
EOLOGY
17
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through
Archaeology and Museums
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan, Eloy Ariza Jiménez
& Miguel Mezquida Fernández
35
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic
archaeology to the graves of the Civil War and the postwar
period
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
53
The forgotten bodies of the war
Queralt Solé i Barjau
69
This archaeology will be the tomb of fascism, or it will be
nothing. The role of community archaeology in uncovering
the common graves of Francoism
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
[page-n-15]
14
The front and back of a photograph with a farewell message
Vicente Mollá Galiana, Grave 94, Paterna
Mollà Galiana family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-16]
15
[page-n-17]
Clay dominoes
Salvador Lloris Épila, Grave 21. Paterna
Salvador Lloris Épila family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-18]
17
Beyond exhumation:
Building Memory through
Archaeology and Museums
Andrea Moreno Martín,
Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez
& Miguel Mezquida Fernández
CURATORIAL TEAM, “THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEMORY: THE MASS GRAVES OF PATERNA”
[page-n-19]
18
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
“With a steady hand and a clear conscience, I am writing my last words
because in a few hours I will have ceased to exist. I am going to be executed”.
Bautista Vañó Sirera, 15 July 1939.
On 15 July, 1939, Bautista Vañó Sirera was shot in front of the wall
known as the Mur del Terrer, in Paterna. The Franco regime accused
him of rebellion and, after a very short trial in which he had no legal
defence, a military court sentenced him to death. Bautista, born in
1898 in Bocairent and a weaver by trade, was married and the father
of four children. According to his descendants, he was devoted to the
culture and politics of his town and his times: under the pseudonym
of “Progreso” he published articles on social and political issues,
participated in the Sociedad Amanecer and was part of the Bocairent
Popular Executive Committee during the Civil War. His affiliation to
the anarchist groups the CNT and the FAI, and his campaigning for a
fairer, freer world, provided the dictatorship with more than enough
reasons for murdering him.
Bautista’s story is by no means unique. Like him, thousands of
men and women were victims of the structural and systematic violence perpetrated by the Franco regime.1 In Paterna alone, at least
2,237 people2 were shot between 1939 and 1956. Their bodies were
thrown indiscriminately into mass graves, of which there are thousands all over Spain. These murders sought the physical annihilation
of dissent and imposed a State policy to silence and erase the lives of
these people after their deaths, as well as the ideals they defended.
Even today, many of these bodies remain under the ground. The
stark reality is that many of the graves in Spain are still to be located
and exhumed. In fact, some will never be excavated because they
have been destroyed or because other structures have been built on
top of them.
Opening up the earth is a radical act of great symbolism, triggering a complex but necessary process that recovers bodies and
memories, breaks down silences, addresses traumas, and generates
conflicts. Above all, it represents an opportunity to do justice, and to
create a context for individual and collective reparation. In this process, archaeology plays a vital role: it makes it possible to locate, exhume, identify, analyse and interpret the material remains preserved
in the graves in a truly scientific way.3
The archaeological record is made up of the human remains of
the victims, along with the material items they had with them at the
time of their death: from personal objects (clothing, shoes, buttons,
rings, pencils, glasses, medallions), through the material evidence
of the crimes (bullets, cartridges, rope used to tie the hands), to the
1
According to Francisco
Espinosa, the figures
for Spain as a whole are
49,426 victims on the
home front and 140,159
at the hands of the
regime. In the province of
Valencia, Vicent Gabarda
sets the corresponding
figures at 6,415 and
6,386 respectively (2020:
20-21).
2
Although the most
recently published
number is 2,238, we are
trying to corroborate the
identity of a person whose
confirmation as a victim
of the post-war repression remains pending.
In this text we state that
at least 2,237 people
were killed; these are the
people whose names and
surnames and date of execution are known based
on the studies of Vicent
Gabarda (2020).
3
Archaeological practices
require the authorization of the Ministry of
Culture and Heritage
(Law 4/1998 and Decree
107/2017) and are subject
to the regulations set out
in the Democratic Memory Act (Law 14/2017).
Exhumations in Spain
must comply with the
Protocolo de actuación en
exhumaciones de víctimas de
la guerra civil y la dictadura
(Order PRE/2568/2011).
[page-n-20]
19
Glass bottle recorded
next to the body of César
Sancho de la Pasión
during the exhumation
of the mass grave. Photo:
Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association.
Grave 120, Paterna Municipal Cemetery.
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
evidence of the families’ mourning and remembrance (bouquets
of flowers, bottles with handwritten notes, panels bearing the
personal data of the victims as memorials). Apart from the objects
themselves it is important to understand where and how they appear, in order to be able to reconstruct the events and study their
value – symbolic, historical, scientific, social, and personal. Obviously, the scientific interpretation of this material culture must be
based on the context in which it is recovered.
Contrary to what many people may think, archaeology does
not seek to empty out the subsoil in search of objects, but rather,
as a social science, it studies these objects – and their contexts – to
learn more about the people behind them, whether they are from
remote societies or from the recent past. In the specific case of
mass graves, forensics is an important new dimension to add to
the spatial context. Since the aim of these procedures is to locate,
identify and recover people who were victims of human rights
violations, archaeology applies specific protocols and employs
[page-n-21]
20
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
interdisciplinary teams of anthropologists, forensic medicine specialists, historians, sociologists, psychologists and lawyers. The
field of forensic archaeology4 intends to shed light on crimes against
humanity, but also to understand the memory-building processes
around these events, to think about the mechanisms for dealing with
the trauma and the management of the conflicts in the family and
in the public sphere, and to encourage the creation of spaces for reflection and debate. Although neither the work of archaeology nor
any other discipline can ensure that crimes of this kind will not be
repeated, at least it offers tools for reflecting on them, with the aim
of raising public awareness of our history.
4
The purpose of archaeology is, therefore, to build and disseminate
knowledge of the past – a past that, we must not forget, begins yesterday – based on a firm engagement with the realities of the present. The
temporal dimension does not limit the practice of archaeology, as this
is a discipline that can be methodologically and epistemologically applied to any chronological context. And when it centres on the recent
past, archaeological research also has access to sources of other kinds
of a crucial importance, such as oral testimonies, historical documentation and personal records.
Families are key actors in
the exhumation processes, and often accompany
technical teams at the site.
Pepita Peiró in front of the
grave where her father lay
(Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association,
Grave 112, Paterna Municipal Cemetery).
Forensic archaeology is
associated with forensic
anthropology, legal medicine and humanitarian
law; thus, it differs from
funerary archaeology,
whose purpose is the
study of death (rituals,
burials, associated remains) in order to analyse
these practices in human
societies from a social and
cultural point of view.
[page-n-22]
21
Pepita Peiró holding the
photo of her family on All
Saints' Day, visiting the
grave of her father, José
Peiró. (Photo: Eloy Ariza,
Grave 112, Paterna Municipal Cemetery).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
Forensic archaeology is a key part of the study of recent times.
Unfortunately, in Spain it is still in its infancy. Although in the last
two decades some local governments have started to promote public
policies on memory, above all by providing funding for exhumations,
and although historical memory has attained a certain presence in the
media, we are still a long way from achieving an effective commitment
to the triad of “truth, justice and reparation” – at least not at institutional level, because the truth is that the citizens’ associations that
make up the historical memory movement have been claiming these
rights for decades. In fact, the families have never forgotten those that
disappeared, and have been the real drivers of these processes from the
very beginning – some even from the moment of the execution. This
is why, despite the control and repression imposed by the regime, the
transmission of memories in the private sphere has allowed many of
the stories of the victims of reprisals to come down to us today.
[page-n-23]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
Let’s turn back to the story of Bautista Vañó Sirera. A few hours
before the shooting, and fully aware of the crime that was about to
be perpetrated, he wrote his farewell letter. The words are a forceful
expression of his feelings: “in a few hours I will have ceased to exist”.
On that 15 July, 1939, they took his life. But, despite his loss, he never
“ceased to exist”, because Magdalena Puerto Mora, his wife, kept his
memory alive and transmitted it as a legacy to his children, who still
maintain and disseminate it today.
This is how the memory of the people who were shot or who
disappeared has usually been preserved, in the family sphere, where
women have always played the leading role (Moreno, 2018; García
Hernandorena and Gadea Peiró, 2021). Under the dictatorship this
form of resistance – the decision not to forget, and to speak out and
tell others – was a private survival mechanism, and after the return
of democracy it remained an intimate, low-key ritual, the result of
stigmatization and the lack of public recognition. Only recently have
these family stories been listened to attentively, and now they have
become part of the public dimension of memory. This “democratic
memory”, as it has come to be called, is built through the joint participation of institutions, professionals in the field, and civil society
(Baldó, 2021). As we understand it, memory is a right that goes beyond the private sphere and must take on meaning for all citizens.
In this reconceptualization of memory, archaeology has a great
deal to say. Once again avoiding the entrenched stereotypes, archaeology does not just describe the remote or recent past; it also has a place
in the present and future. The knowledge it provides of the past and
its material heritage enable us to rethink and transform our reality
and the reality to come. This is the idea behind currents such as public
archaeology, which proposes a change of perspective: namely, making
the people of the present the true protagonists.
This understanding of archaeology, together with an awareness
of the complexity of exhuming the mass graves of the Franco regime
and the need to enrich the public debate on democratic memory, form
the cornerstone of the exhibition The Archaeology of Memory. The mass
graves of Paterna.
The exhibition is based on the research carried out by the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association in the Municipal Cemetery of
Paterna. For more than a decade, the association has been working
on the recovery and identification of victims of the war and of the
Franco dictatorship in different parts of Spain, especially in the
Valencian region (Díaz-Ramoneda, et al., 2021; Mezquida, et al.
2021; Moreno et al., 2021). In Paterna, between 2017 and 2023,
more than twenty graves have been exhumed. In parallel to the
22
[page-n-24]
23
5
Saponification is a
process induced by a high
level of humidity in the
subsoil that favours the
body’s preservation. It
occurs through a process
of chemical change that
affects the body fat,
which is transformed
through hydrolysis into
a compound similar to
wax or soap. In Paterna,
saponification has been
documented in several
graves, at depths of more
than four metres, and has
allowed the exceptional
preservation of anthropological remains, clothing
and a set of other items
(Moreno et al., 2021).
6
Particular thanks to each
and every one of the
families and associations
that have accompanied us
in this exhibition project
for their enthusiasm and
commitment; for the care
and affection with which
they described their family objects; for the trust
they showed in us in
sharing their most intimate and personal memories, and for allowing us
to tell their stories.
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
field work, ArqueoAntro has brought the project to a wider public
through the publication of articles and the organization of conferences, courses, guided tours and exhibitions. In 2018 ArqueoAntro
collaborated in the exhibition “Prietas las Filas. Daily life and Francoism” in L'Etno, where some of the materials exhumed in the mass
graves of Paterna were exhibited for the first time (Moreno and
Candela, 2018).
With these precedents, the project for the current exhibition
was put forward in late 2019, with a specific aim in mind: to present the material culture exhumed in the graves of the Municipal
Cemetery of Paterna from an archaeological perspective, applying
a comprehensive approach that explains and contextualizes the scientific process of exhumation, and demonstrating the uniqueness
of Paterna in several areas: as a place of memory since the post-war
period; as a site of barbarism and horror, due to the numbers of victims and the use of the cemetery as a mass burial ground; and as an
unusual example of conservation, as some of the remains have been
preserved in an exceptional condition due to a process known as
saponification5.
To meet the multiple challenges posed by the project, it was
decided to form an interdisciplinary curatorial team, comprising
experts in exhumation processes, heritage management and public
memory policies, and museum management. Specialists from the
fields of photojournalism, art and design also took part. Most importantly, in an act of enormous generosity, the families of the victims
have loaned certain objects that they kept at home in memory of their
missing relatives (for example, photographs, letters, personal items)
and allowed the us to display some of the exhumed objects, enveloping them in signficance and affection with their personal stories.
The close relationship between the technical team and the families,
following years working together and meeting at the foot of the grave,
made this joint participation possible. To all the families, once again,
we express our most sincere thanks6.
Given the archaeological nature of the project, the curatorial
team felt that the ideal venue for the exhibition was the Museum
of Prehistory of the Provincial Council of Valencia. The museum is
a reference centre for archaeology in both Valencia and Spain as a
whole, and its geographical proximity to Paterna is another reason
for its choice. The project represented a major challenge for the
museum; there are hardly any precedents of analyses of the role
of archaeology in the construction of the historical memory linked
to the mass graves of the Franco regime, or exhibitions in which
exhumed materials constitute the central theme. This is why it
[page-n-25]
24
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
is important to emphasize the museum’s firm support and engagement in the project7.
The launch of the project had three main objectives in mind.
First, the exhibition is a tribute and a public recognition of the victims
of Franco’s repression and their families, and of the groups and individuals who, for decades, have fought for the preservation of their
memory. Second, to highlight the work of the scientific and technical
teams which have exhumed the graves, identified the victims and
recovered their life stories. And, third, to establish a dialogue with
society about the need for public policies of memory, in order to face
the traumas of the past, to raise public awareness of the issue, and to
address the challenges of the future.
The exhibition is structured in five large areas, and takes visitors
on a journey that moves intermittently between the present and the
past. The starting point is the celebration of the role of archaeology in
the study of contemporary world, in particular in the field of conflicts
and traumatic episodes around the world during the 20th and 21st
centuries. First, we situate our case study in the international context
of human rights, and connect it with the principles of forensic archaeology in its role in compiling expert evidence of crimes.
7
The exhibition The
Archaeology of Memory:
The mass graves of Paterna
owes its existence to the
dedication of María Jesús
de Pedro, director of the
Museum of Prehistory,
and Santiago Grau, head
of the Dissemination,
Teaching and Exhibitions
Unit, and the curators
and technical staff: Eva
Ferraz, Begoña Soler,
Ramon Canal, Trinidad
Pasíes and Yanire Múgica.
Their work in the field of
management, restoration
and museography and the
contributions that arose
in the work sessions and
informal conversations
were fundamental for the
success of the project.
[page-n-26]
25
Carolina Martínez, granddaughter of José Manuel
Murcia Martínez (Grave
94, Paterna Municipal
Cemetery) during the
process of transferring
objects for the exhibition. (Photo: Eloy Ariza,
Museum of Prehistory of
Valencia).
Rendering of the exhibition “The archaeology
of memory: the mass
graves of Paterna” at the
Museum of Prehistory of
Valencia. (Design: Rosa
Bou and Kumi Furió).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
[page-n-27]
26
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
From here, we begin our first incursion into the past so as to contextualize the ideological, political and social reality of the post-war period in which the crimes of the Franco regime took place8, and where
the duality between the victims and perpetrators is clearly defined.
Next, the Municipal Cemetery of Paterna and the Mur del Terrer
are presented together as a unique example of this repression. The
explanation proceeds diachronically, seeing the cemetery as a site of
violence in the past, but also of memory and resistance, and one that
takes on new meaning in the present. The families of the missing persons, the memorialist movement and the local government appear in
this passage through time, as do the technical teams. We then explain
the scientific procedures and multidisciplinarity inherent in the process of the exhumation of mass graves today.
8
With the recovery of the human remains and the objects we go
back once again to the past, in order to remember the people who
were killed and thrown into the graves. This area is the centrepiece
of the exhibition. It is presented as a dialogue between the objects
exhumed and the objects belonging to the families, which, together,
help to reconstruct the socio-political context and the links that were
Event held by the Platform of Associations of
Relatives of Victims at the
mass graves of Paterna
(Photo: Eloy Ariza, Paterna
Municipal Cemetery,
2018).
Our exhibition is limited
to post-war crimes: that
is to say, those committed
after the declaration of
the end of the war on 1
April 1939. The repression lasted until the death
of the dictator in 1975,
when the regime came (at
least officially) to its end.
We should not forget that
violence and repression
can take forms other than
murder, and are manifested in many spheres of
daily life (Rodrigo, 2008).
[page-n-28]
27
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
woven between the prison and the outside world, and between the
inside of the grave and outside. The exhumed materials bear witness
to the precariousness of prison life and to the constant threat of a
violent death, but they also tell us about personal identities and strategies of resistance. For their part, the family objects, accompanied by
the stories of their owners, help us to name and reconstruct the personal and political projects destroyed by the dictatorship. Together,
these objects constitute the elements from which the memory of this
past is built.
The family stories bring us back to the present, to connect with
the final section of the exhibition, which is an open space for individual and collective reflection on the historical events and on how memory is constructed. The journey closes with a final tribute projecting
the names of all the people shot in Paterna between 1939 and 1956.
In addition to the exhibition inside the hall, there is a small display in the museum courtyard, dedicated to the representation of
Franco’s graves in vignette illustrations. This display is designed specifically for the educational visits scheduled by the museum as part of
the exhibition.
Bearing in mind the role of the exhibition and the museum, we
also contacted archaeologists who work in the field of historical memory in different parts of Spain. Queralt Solé, from the Department
of History and Archaeology of the University of Barcelona, explores
in The forgotten bodies of the war the historical contextualization of
violence in the Republican rearguard and the violence of the Rebels
during the Civil War. Establishing the reasons for the deaths and for
the treatment of the dead during and immediately after the war is
essential in order to understand the ways in which human remains
appear in exhumations in Spain. Precisely, Lourdes Herrasti, from
the Anthropology Department of the Aranzadi Science Society in the
Basque Country, focuses on the methodologies and tools of forensic
archaeology in her text The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves of the Civil War and the postwar period used to
compile the information needed to restore the identity and memory of
those murdered. Talking about memory and identity inevitably raises the issue of the agency of the families of the disappeared, and also
the need to create spaces to prove that the crimes existed, and to deal
with the trauma. In a study based in Galicia, Xurxo M. Ayán Vila of the
Instituto de História Contemporânea of the Universidade Nova de
Lisboa defends the therapeutic, mnemonic, pedagogical and political
function of community archaeology in his paper This archaeology will be
the tomb of Fascism, or it will be nothing. The role of community archaeology in
uncovering the common graves of Francoism. The voices of Xurxo, Lourdes
[page-n-29]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
28
Handmade pendant
made in prison by Vicente
Roig, shot in Paterna,
for his son. (Photo: Eloy
Ariza, Roig Tortosa family
collection).
and Queralt help to reflect the plurality of ways of thinking and the
cross-sectionality that the archaeological perspective brings to a highly
complex subject of study.
Above we stated that this project has raised multiple challenges.
The most profound of all is, without a doubt, the extremely sensitive
(and chilling) nature of the subject matter and the material culture
that accompanies it. The exhibits, both exhumed and family items,
are sensitive in many ways. Unlike other materials in an archaeological museum, they constitute forensic evidence; due to their state of
preservation, they are particularly fragile; they recall a traumatic past;
above all, they are sensitive because they have an incalculable sentimental value for the families of the victims.
The emotional charge of these objects and stories has deeply
affected the museographic approach to the project. We understand
the museum as a space of negotiation and conflict, where reflection
and dialogue must be encouraged in a multidirectional sense that
abandons the idea of a single truth emanating from the institution.
By immersing oneself in the context, the museum can become a safe
[page-n-30]
29
9
The expression of these
principles in a museum scenario was made
possible by the work
of Rosa Bou and Kumi
Furió, the designers of
the exhibition, who have
scrupulously respected
our wishes and have responded to our concerns
with exquisite professionalism. We would like
to show our gratitude to
them here.
Anthropologists analysing
the piled-up bodies in a
mass grave, prior to the
start of their exhumation.
(Photo: Eloy Ariza ArqueoAntro Scientific Association, Grave 112, Paterna
Municipal Cemetery).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
space in which to talk about complex issues, conflicts, and controversies. This is why it was so important to gather together different voices from the professional field, the memorialist movement, and the
families. This is also why we wanted to think of the exhibition as an
experiment, testing the potential of museums to approach the memory of the traumatic past in a critical and reflective way (Arnold-de
Simine, 2013).
Based on these approaches, we decided to establish a series of
red lines when conceiving and designing the exhibition9. These
three red lines, with their particular derivations, have ended up constituting a road map that guided us through the entire process.
As a starting point, we were determined to avoid the twin traps of
making the display either excessively spectacular or excessively banal, in the light of the growing media interest in the subject and certain distortions in its treatment (Aguilar Fernández, 2008; Vinyes,
2011; Cadenas Cañón, 2019). The exhibits require a careful scientific contextualization in order to avoid the risk of their fetishization or
even sacralization. It is necessary to balance the need for social and
public dissemination with respect for the items and their owners.
[page-n-31]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
From the very first moment we ruled out the display of human remains (a widespread practice in archaeological exhibitions devoted
to other eras and cultures). Even the use of photographic material is
limited to cases in which the explicit presence of human remains in
the grave was necessary to illustrate the scientific process of exhumation, to bear witness to the systematic practice of mass murder,
or to show the gruesome nature of the graves of Paterna. The aim,
far from being to play down the brutality of a bloody and traumatic
reality, is to guarantee respect for the victims and families, many
of whom are still in the process of mourning. So the bodies of the
victims are not on display, but their presence can be felt through the
objects and their life stories; in the same way, from the outset their
deaths are described as criminal actions. The challenge is to be able
to stir people without upsetting them, to move without being sentimental, to cause a certain unease – based on a profound respect –
without generating overkill.
Secondly, in our story, we have avoided statistics. It is true that
numbers and figures are essential in scientific studies, as they help to
reconstruct the facts with empirical data. They also feature heavily
30
Consuelo Pérez Fenollar
with the photo of her father, Rafael Pérez Fuentes,
shot in Paterna. (Photo:
Eloy Ariza, ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association,
Grave 22, Paterna Municipal Cemetery).
[page-n-32]
31
10
An artistic creation
by Guillem Casasús
Xercavins and Gerard
Mallandrich Miret,
whom we want to thank
for their participation in
this project.
Fragments of a diary,
mounted on the original
document. This is a cartoon by the illustrator Bluff
(Carlos Gómez Carrera,
also shot in Paterna) that
was exhumed in Grave
111 of the Paterna Municipal Cemetery, associated
with Individual 79 (Photo:
Eloy Ariza ArqueoAntro
Scientific Association).
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
in the media and in political discourse, because they are straightforward and easy to understand: so many graves exhumed, so many
people identified. The reality, however, is that focusing on numbers
runs the risk of dehumanizing the story, by making the names and
life stories invisible, and by turning the people shot into a homogeneous mass of victims, into a mere statistic. Above all, we have cited
personal names wherever possible. In fact, one of the meta-narratives of the exhibition is the transition from anonymity to recognition: from the cardboard boxes containing human remains and the
use of scientific terms such as “individual” or “forensic unit”, the
identity of people is gradually defined – through their DNA, their
personal objects, or their family histories – until they can be named.
The exhibition culminates with the memorial Resilience to oblivion10
and with a book where visitors can consult the data available on all
the people shot by the Franco regime in Paterna. This may encourage
families who do not have information about their missing relatives,
or do not know that they existed, to explore further.
Thirdly, the need to humanize the story has also led us to rethink
the way we present the objects. Compared to the standard taxonomy-based displays usually found in archaeological museums, where
the objects usually appear classified as an inventory with identifying
placards focusing on technical aspects, we opted for more organic
compositions and descriptions that place the emphasis on the people
behind the objects. The exhibition’s discursive potential centres on
the objects and their ability to arouse empathy with the stories told,
and so it is vital that the museographical resources support this ambition. This approach, we think, opens up interesting reflections on
the potential of archaeology in the construction of new imaginaries
around historical memory.
[page-n-33]
Beyond exhumation: Building Memory through Archaeology and Museums
Obviously, in addition to the professional challenges referred
to above, any research process entails a whole series of personal and
emotional engagements that are not always reflected in the final result. In this case, however, we feel it necessary to mention them. From
the moment when we took the first steps to define the project until
right now, as we write these final lines, the object of study has moved
us, on a personal level, in a particularly intense way. No one can be
indifferent to the shocking experience of opening a grave containing
a heap of bodies piled up in a totally inhumane manner; or to sharing
in the anxieties, concerns and longings contained in the letters written by those who were in prison, and also of their families suffering
in their homes; or to noting the indefinable smell of the boxes where
the materials that have undergone saponification are stored; or to
holding in your hands a piece of clothing that the family has hidden
in a chest of drawers for so many years – a priceless treasure, the only
material memory of the missing relative; or to listening to the testimonies of people who have experienced in silence the loss of a parent
they never met or who were murdered when they were barely a few
years old; and to those of the new voices of the “post-memory generation” (Hirsch 2015), who, although they did not experience these
events first hand, have inherited the stories and now demand that justice be done.
The work process has been very demanding both personally and
professionally, but it has been exciting as well. It has required a firm
ethical commitment and a rigorous approach. It has not always been
easy to deal with the diversity of viewpoints and, above all, with the
interests that come into play (and clash with each other) when dealing
with such delicate and conflicting issues. Nevertheless, and despite
the dangers of politicization and opportunism, for us the commitment to the families of the victims and to scientific research prevails,
and the conviction that, as an exhibition organized by a public museum institution, The Archaeology of Memory. The mass graves of Paterna
will stimulate reflection on our traumatic recent past and invite us to
think about the scenarios of coexistence that, as a democratic society,
we would like to build for the future.
“I have a few hours left, I will never see you or our children again.
Keep this letter as a memento. Your husband Bautista Vañó.
Goodbye forever”.
32
[page-n-34]
33
Andrea Moreno Martín, Tono Vizcaíno Estevan,
Eloy Ariza Jiménez & Miguel Mezquida Fernández
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[page-n-35]
A model of a sandal carved out of an olive bone
Individual 144, Grave 115. Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-36]
35
The archaeology of memory:
the application of forensic
archaeology to the graves of
the Civil War and the postwar
period
Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
DPTO. ANTROPOLOGÍA, SOCIEDAD DE CIENCIAS ARANZADI
[page-n-37]
The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
In the mass grave of Priaranza del Bierzo in the province of León, in
the year 2000, a methodological approach combining archaeology
and anthropology was applied in the exhumation and analysis of
clandestine burials of victims of the Spanish Civil War for the very
first time. This intervention by archaeologists and anthropologists
launched a process that has now gone on for more than twenty years,
which has come to be called “the recovery of the historical memory”.
Over this period, the methods used have become more sophisticated,
but at all times the aim has been the recovery of the remains of the
people murdered, in order to record the information necessary to
restore their identity and their memory.
Now that more than twenty years have passed, it is time to take
stock of the process and to examine the contribution of archaeology
to the historical understanding of the repression perpetrated by the
Franco regime.
Nothing tells us more about the horror and injustice of an age
than the sight of human skeletons crowded together in a common grave.
Introduction
Forensic archaeology is heir to the branch of the discipline known
as the “archaeology of death”, from which it has adopted the methods needed to recover skeletal and other remains from individual or
collective burials. Archaeology becomes “forensic” when it focuses
on people who died not of natural causes but by acts of violence, and
provides evidence that can be presented in court or in legal debate.
In the English-speaking world this area of study tends to be
called “forensic anthropology”. The two disciplines are complementary: in archaeology the focus is on the process of recovery of remains
and documentary evidence, while anthropology studies the biological profile of the buried; in turn, legal medicine analyses the cause
of death. When forensic archaeology is applied to the analysis and
recovery of historical memory, it can be termed the “archaeology of
memory”.
The action protocol for the exhumation of victims of the Civil
War and the Dictatorship, dated 26 September 2011, describes it as
an interdisciplinary activity involving historians, archaeologists and
forensic specialists. The latter include anthropologists and forensic
odontologists, as well as specialists in legal medicine.
Archaeological methods unearth remains in mass graves, allowing
them to be collected and then sorted. First, drawings are made of the
positions of the bodies and of the graves themselves, and photographs
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
are taken of each individual and of all the features of interest. The results of this exhaustive documentation process are recorded with data
on each individual and the spatial relationships between them, in order to carry out the exhumation in an orderly fashion.
The testimonies of the people who lived through the events or
who heard accounts of what had happened are crucial, because they
provide information about the location of the graves. The same can
be said of the information supplied by witnesses who were children at
the time, and who saw the murders and clandestine burials from their
hiding places. A clear example is the mass grave in Barcones, Soria,
which serves as a model for the discussion of several key aspects.
Recording of testimonies
and information from
relatives at the grave. La
Andaya IV (Burgos).
Importance of the eyewitness offering testimony.
Grave of Barcones (Soria).
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
38
The procedure for the search, removal and exhumation of human remains is described in the article by Polo-Cerda et al. (2018).
The excavation exposes the skeletal remains by removing the soil
above and around them; using a technique known as the pedestal
method, the remains stand out in relief against the ground. Sometimes it is practical not to preserve the side walls of the grave, because
this makes it easier to access the remains around the entire perimeter, allowing a clearer view of the interior. In trench graves, however,
it is better to preserve the walls in order to highlight the grave’s use as
an improvised burial place.
Exhumation process at
the grave of Barcones
(Soria).
Types of grave
Mass graves are usually rectangular in shape, deriving from the depositing of one or several bodies lying on the ground. In general, the
bodies tend to be laid out in a fairly orderly way adapting to the space
available, regardless of who was in charge of the burial the corpses.
Thus, they might be arranged in alternate head-feet positions, with a
body in each corner, or aligned and overlapping. In the grave in Barcones, Soria, the six bodies were placed very close together, alternating heads and feet.
On other occasions the graves were dug into already existing
ditches, a practice that was much easier and particularly attractive
when the diggers were in a hurry or were frightened. The bodies
would be arranged in lines, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Grave of Barcones (Soria).
Arrangement of individuals in the pit.
A clear example of this type is found in Berlanga de Roa (Burgos),
where it is known that a road labourer, who may have known the
victims, buried the five men (among them a father and son); the
bodies overlapped and were arranged with care and respect. In other
cases, a wide ditch was dug that allowed the bodies to be arranged
cross-sectionally, as in La Pedraja (Burgos), where a total of 105 individuals were buried in 10 successive graves; in Fregenal de la Sierra
(Badajoz), with 47 victims in seven graves, and in Villamayor de los
Montes (Burgos), where 45 men were found in two graves. Elsewhere, the bottom of the grave was covered with several bodies and
then others were thrown on top of them. In the graves of Estépar
(Burgos), the bodies of 96 men who had been taken there from Burgos Prison were recovered.
The perpetrators, or the gravediggers, often made use of wells,
mines, and pit caves to get rid of the corpses. There are many examples
in Navarre, Extremadura, and the Balearic and the Canary Islands.
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
40
The placement of victims
in the pit. Grave of Berlanga de Roa (Burgos).
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Grave 2 of Estépar
(Burgos).
At the Sima del Raso in Urbasa, Navarre, the corpses of ten people
were thrown into the cave on three different occasions. This suggests
that it was the same people who murdered the victims at the mouth of
the cave then threw them inside.
But the commonest practice was to take the corpses to the cemetery. Bodies found in ditches by the side of the road, if they were not
buried nearby, would be loaded onto pack animals or carts and taken
to the cemetery where the gravedigger himself, perhaps with other
townsfolk, would bury them on the edge of the cemetery, or in the
civil cemetery so as not to contaminate the area where the upstanding
residents of the town were buried.
Many mass graves contain victims of extrajudicial killings in the
cemeteries, deaths that occurred during the first months of the war,
in 1936, but many others hold the remains of people sentenced to
death from 1938 onwards. Cemeteries attached to prisons and concentration camps have also been exhumed: at the prison cemetery of
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
Valdenoceda, Burgos, a total of 106 corpses of prisoners have been
recovered, and in Castuera, Cáceres, the bodies correspond to people who died or were murdered in the concentration camp. The large
cemetery of La Tahona de Uclés in Cuenca holds more than 570 bodies of combatants from the war hospital and others who died in prison. The frontline hospitals tended to have a space behind the building
that was used as a cemetery for those who died there. Examples in
Catalonia are Soleràs in Lleida, and Pernafeites de Miravet and Mas
de Santa Magdalena in Tarragona, with more than a hundred individuals in each one.
Belongings
The objects that the individuals had with them when they were killed
are often highly personal. The most numerous are items of clothing:
shirt buttons, belts, buckles, loops and trouser fly buttons, and even
zips and garters. Although these are simple, everyday items, they can
be transformed into objects of memory. In one instance in which
the remains of an identified person were handed over to family
members, they were interested in some buttons and the remains of
a buckle that appeared photographed in the report. One of the relatives asked to be able to keep a mother-of-pearl button because “I
am certain that it belonged to my grandfather”. In this way, a simple
button became a relic.
A good example of the variety of the objects recovered is found in
the grave of La Mazorra in Burgos: items of clothing such as berets,
zips and footwear; personal items such as earrings, a comb, a lighter
and a carpenter’s meter, and objects related to health such as a hernia
support and a dental prosthesis.
There are also more specific objects that might once have helped
in the identification of their owner. Objects such as rings, watches
and cufflinks could have been associated with a particular person;
but now, since so many years has passed, these memories have disappeared and the information has been lost.
Sometimes the objects retrieved are personalized. An example is
a silver belt buckle, found in the grave in Bóveda (Álava), belonging to
an indiano (a Spaniard who had made his fortune in Cuba) and which
bore an engraving of the initial of his last name. The historical data
provided strong indications of the man’s identity, which was then
confirmed by genetic tests. Other finds include rings with initials and
the dates of a wedding. In grave 3 at Estépar, for instance, a gold ring
was found bearing two initials, “P and E”, and a date; a member of the
team located a marriage certificate in which the two initials coincided, suggesting that the man in question was a teacher named Plácido
42
Objects recovered from
the grave of La Mazorra
(Burgos). The image
shows that the thirteen
victims in the grave had
their hands tied when
they were murdered and
buried.
The images show the
following objects (and an
injury); clockwise from
top left: woman's cap and
comb, dental prosthesis,
clothes worn, sweater zip,
notch where the projectile
entered the jaw, wick
lighter, reinforcements of
the ends of a carpenter's
measuring instrument,
hernia truss attached to
the left hip, beret, earrings
and shoes.
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
who was married to a woman called Emilia. From the genetic information, it has been possible to identify the group of the other 26 victims who were with him in the grave, all of them murdered on 9 September, 1936, after being taken to the site from the prison in Burgos.
One exceptional find was the discovery of an identification document preserved inside a bottle. In the prison cemetery known as Las
Botellas, where 131 people who died in the San Cristóbal de Ezkaba
prison in Pamplona were interred, each of the victims was buried
with a bottle placed between their legs, containing an official document with the prison’s own letterhead, Ezkaba Sanatorio Penitenciario
de San Cristóbal, which recorded the name of the deceased, their place
of birth, affiliation, offence and the sentence imposed, as well as the
cause of death – usually tuberculosis, an endemic disease in prisons,
especially in one that called itself a sanatorium. This process of documentation complied with the order issued by Franco in January 1937,
ordering the identification of those killed in combat and in prisons.
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
Biological profiles of the bodies exhumed
The remains of the victims in the graves are collected individually
with their associated belongings, in separate boxes, and are then
transferred to the anthropology laboratory. There, the analyses are
carried out with a standardized methodology for appraisal of the person’s sex, age, possible pathologies, dental features and injuries related to the cause of death.
The vast majority of the victims recovered in the graves of the Civil War are males. It is estimated that fewer than 3% are women.
Almost half of the men were young adults, between 20 and 40
years of age, and around 30% were aged over 40. The third group
were over 50 years of age, and a fourth group aged under 20. However, because of the poor state of preservation a more precise estimation of the age is often impossible, and in these cases the remains are
included under the generic category of adults.
44
Bottle placed between
the tibias. Inside was the
deceased's affiliation
document. Cemetery
of the bottles. Ezkaba.
Pamplona.
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Different graves for different types of victim
The graves can be differentiated according to the victims buried
there:
a) Graves containing victims of extrajudicial killings. During the first
months of the war, particularly between the months of July and
November 1936, the period known in Spanish as the “hot terror”,
thousands of extrajudicial killings took place, the product of indiscriminate and uncontrolled violence. This repression was particularly
harsh in the provinces where the coup d’état triumphed and gained
territory as the front line advanced. As the historian Francisco Espinosa emphasizes, these deaths were caused not by the war, but by the
repression. The regions most affected were Castile-León, Galicia,
Navarre, La Rioja and Cáceres.
The victims of this period were the civilian population, men and
women who were arrested for long periods before being taken to
their place of execution. These final journeys were euphemistically
known in Spanish as paseos, or “walks”. The victims were illegally detained, handcuffed, and often killed and buried with their hands tied.
An example is the grave of La Mazorra in Burgos, in which the bodies
of 13 people were buried, two of them women, all with their hands
tied. It is said that the bodies appeared abandoned on the roadside,
because they were seen by passengers on a passing bus. Several local
people collected the bodies and decided to bury them there in a rectangular grave, laid out in a relatively orderly fashion, still with their
hands tied.
Graves of this type constitute the most important and numerous
group. Examples are the cemeteries of El Carmen in Valladolid, with
more than 200 victims; Magallón in Zaragoza with 84, La Carcavilla
in Palencia, with 108; Porreres in Mallorca with 104; La Pedraja in
Villafranca Montes de Oca, Burgos, with 136, and four graves in La
Andaya in Quintanilla de la Mata, Burgos, with 96, and so on.
b) Graves containing victims of “legal” repression. From 1937 the authorities sought to legalize executions through summary trials in which
the sentence was nonetheless a foregone conclusion. These executions were carried out in specific sites such as the walls of the cemetery. The most notorious example is the wall of the Paterna cemetery
in Valencia, a place where, according to the documentation compiled
by Vicent Gabarda, 2,238 victims were sent for execution. When
death and murder became routine, the same pattern was repeated:
four people on one day, five the next day, seven, fifteen... all sent to the
wall to be shot. The chaplain Gumersindo de Estella describes that he
had to assist many of these victims who were about to be executed;
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
in his book he describes their last moments in the Torrero cemetery in
Zaragoza. There, too, more than two thousand were killed.
There can be little doubt that the large graves in cemeteries that
have been exhumed in recent years contain the victims of summary
executions. They include Paterna in Valencia, Pico Reja in the San Fernando cemetery in Seville, and the San Rafael cemetery in Córdoba.
c) Graves containing the bodies of combatants. A third type of victim
comprises those killed in the hostilities, both combatants and
non-combatants. These are, for the most part, individual burials of
bodies that were abandoned where they died at the front, and were
not collected and removed at the end of the war, or once the frontline
moved on. Many corpses were collected by the residents of the area to
prevent scavenging by dogs and the spread of vermin and disease. The
graves of a small number of combatants have been exhumed in the
area of the Battle of the Ebro and on the Northern Front. The ditches of the trenches at the front were also used to bury bodies quickly.
In El Rellán in Grado (Asturias), for example, more than 30 people,
combatants and residents of the region have been found. In Alcaudete de Jara in Toledo a total of 41 civilian victims were buried, who
had been subjected to reprisals after the war ended. On Mount Altun
in Zeanuri, Bizkaia the residents buried five militiamen from the Perezagua communist battalion who had died in the battle on the same
day. Based on the historical documentation, the exhumation, the discovery of soldiers’ dog tags and the confirmatory genetic analyses, the
remains have been identified and delivered to the families.
d) Graves containing victims who died in captivity: in prisons or in concentration camps. These people perished in deplorable conditions,
subjected to hunger, cold, damp, lice, neglect and abandonment. In
these dank, overcrowded places infectious diseases, especially respiratory diseases, were easily transmitted.
In the San Cristóbal prison mentioned above, which had been
converted into an anti-tuberculosis prison sanatorium, the high mortality rate forced the military authorities to build a cemetery to bury
the prisoners who died there. It was built on the north slope, on the
least visible area of the mountain.
e) Finally, graves containing guerrilla fighters. After the war, anti-Franco
fighting groups were formed, mostly comprising communists, who
took refuge in mountainous areas and sought to harass the Franco
regime using guerrilla tactics. The task of countering these guerrilla
fighters, known as maquis, was entrusted to the Civil Guard, which arrested, abused and tortured family members and contacts in order to
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obtain information. They also infiltrated the groups and created counter-guerrillas. The clashes took place in the mountainous areas of Galicia and León, Asturias and Cantabria, further east in Cuenca, Levante
and Aragón, and to the south in Sierra Morena, Cáceres, Toledo, and
Andalusia. In one of these graves, in Albalat de Tarongers in Valencia,
the bodies of nine guerrillas were placed with their heads to the sides
and their legs in the middle, opposite each other. It is a clear example
of a guerrilla grave because it combines several defining features: an
eyewitness report of the murder, documentation from the Civil Registry, autopsy reports, careful registration during the exhumation and
positive genetic identification of six of the nine individuals.
Identification
The main objective of the exhumation of a grave, comprising the
archaeological intervention and the subsequent anthropological
analysis of the skeletal remains, is to identify the victims through the
reconstruction of the historical account. However, the endeavour faces several major obstacles: the insufficient historical information and
documentation, the deterioration of the skeletal remains that makes
it impossible to obtain a genetic profile, and the lack of a suitable candidate from the family for comparison. All these factors reduce the
chances of obtaining a positive identification.
If the process is successful, the remains identified can be delivered to the family, either in private or in public. If an official event of
some kind is held, political institutions are represented. In recent
years, regional governments have played a more active role in commemorative tributes of this kind in which the remains are returned to
the families of the victims.
1
Order PRE/2568/2011,
of 26 September, publishing the Agreement of the
Council of Ministers of
23 September 23, which
orders the publication in
the Official State Gazette
of the action protocol for
exhumations of victims
of the Civil War and the
dictatorship.
The evolution of the exhumations over time
The exhumation of Priaranza del Bierzo in the year 2000 is considered to have been the first one to be carried out using archaeological
methods and with the participation of archaeologists, anthropologists and a forensic doctor. The exhumation of graves advanced very
slowly in 2001 and 2002. In the following year, 42 graves were uncovered, many of them individual. Until 2006, the number of exhumations from graves remained low, between 27 and 30, but in 2007,
the passing of the Historical Memory Act1 by Rodríguez Zapatero’s
Socialist government led to a notable rise in the number of graves exhumed and the number of victims recovered, which now rose above
300 for the first time, and in fact surpassed 600. The peak period of
exhumations was between 2008 and 2012, when between 60 and 90
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
graves were excavated and between 385 and 630 victims recovered per
year. In 2011, a protocol was published to establish the correct methodological procedure for performing exhumations. That year, 66
graves were intervened and the remains of more than 400 people recovered, and in 2012 the remains of 500 people were recovered from
65 pits. However, with the change in government in late 2011, financial aid for exhumations was suspended, and in 2013 the numbers fell
dramatically – only 14 graves were exhumed, containing 55 victims.
As of 2014, and particularly from 2016 onwards, the regional governments have taken on the responsibility for recovering the historical
memory. Since then there have been notable increases in the number
of graves exhumed and in the number of remains recovered, which
exceeded 600 each year and reached 1,000 in 2021. In fact, since
2020 the financing plan has been renewed by the Secretary of State
for Democratic Memory, either through the provision of direct aid or
through the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces.
Also in this latter period, an intense exhumation programme has
begun in cemeteries where the number of victims was very high, such
as Paterna in Valencia, with more than 2,000, and Pico Reja in Seville,
with more than 3,000, 1,500 of whom were victims of repression.
Since 2000, many groups and teams of archaeologists and anthropologists have led the exhumations. In all, up to the end of 2021,
a total of 850 graves have been exhumed and the remains of more
than 11,500 victims have been recovered.
Dissemination of the results
During the exhumations, the researchers gave talks informing relatives
and visitors of the progress made, with the idea of encouraging them to
engage with the project and feel part of it. In the grave of La Pedraja in
Burgos, in the years 2010 and 2011, a routine was established in which
at the end of the afternoon’s work the team would describe how the
exhumation was advancing. Every day, more people came to listen. The
team encouraged them to take part and to make comments and contributions. The exchanges of information were very valid and fruitful, but,
above all, they offered the public the chance to express and share their
feelings and responses to the project. The experience was repeated in
Estépar in Burgos and in the cemetery in Porreres in Mallorca, where
the team gave their descriptions of the exhumations live on local television. In this way, the archaeological process became a social event.
Media coverage of the development of the exhumations has also
increased. The presence of schoolchildren and students from nearby
schools and universities centers has played a key role. The Navarre
Institute of Memory, for example, has devised a Memory programme
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Nº of graves exhumed
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
0
Nº of victims exhumed
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
Evolution over time of the
number of graves excavated and the number of
victims recovered.
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
0
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The archaeology of memory: the application of forensic archaeology to the graves
of the Civil War and the postwar period
50
for schools with the aim of involving pupils directly in activities to
broaden their historical, social and political knowledge of the Civil
War and the dictatorship.
Conclusions
There is no doubt that the exhumations have meant a shift in the historical analysis of the repression against the civilian population exerted by the regime that came to power after the coup d’état of July 1936.
The sight of the skeletons piled up in common graves is testimony
to the violation of the right to life of the victims. The gunshot wounds
observed demonstrate beyond any doubt that they were murdered.
Through the process of recovering the historical memory and the
application of forensic archaeology, other objectives have also been
achieved: the exhumation itself, the return of the remains to the relatives, the confirmation of the history of repression and the events
that caused so many to disappear without trace; and, above all, the
recovery of a memory that has been hidden and silenced.
Descriptions of the
exhumation process to
the general public. Grave
of La Pedraja (Burgos)
(2010).
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Lourdes Herrasti Erlogorri
Bibliography
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los movimientos por la memoria. Hispania Nova. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, N. 6.
Espinosa, F. (2010). Violencia roja y azul. España 1936-1950. Barcelona, Ed. Crítica.
Etxeberria, F. (2017). «Antropología y patología forense como elementos de
prueba en las fosas de la Guerra Civil y dictadura franquista». Actes de la II
Jornada d’Arqueología y Patrimoni de la Guerra Civil al Front de l’Ebre. Tortosa,
79-107.
Etxeberria F (coord.). (2020). Las exhumaciones de la Guerra Civil y la dictadura franquista 2000-2019. Estado actual y recomendaciones de futuro. Madrid. Ministerio
de Presidencia, Relaciones con las Cortes y Memoria Democrática, Madrid.
Etxeberria, F. y Pla, K. (2014). El Fuerte de San Cristóbal en la memoria: de prisión a
sanatorio penitenciario. El cementerio de las botellas. Pamplona. Edit. Pamiela.
Etxeberria, F.; Herrasti, L.; Serrulla, F. y Márquez-Grant, N. (2015). «Contemporary exhumations in Spain: recovering the missing from the Spanish
Civil War». En: Forensic Archaeology. A Global Perspective, de Groen, W.J.M.;
Márquez-Grant, N.; Janaway, R.C. Edit. Wiley Blackwell, 489-497.
Etxeberria, F.; Serrulla, F. y Herrasti, L. (2014). «Simas, cavernas y pozos para
ocultar cadáveres en la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939. Aportaciones desde la Antropología Forense». Donostia-San Sebastián, Munibe (Antropologia-Arkeologia), 65: 269-288.
Ferrándiz, F. (2013). «Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War mass graves in 21st-century Spain». American Ethnologist 40 (1): 38-54.
Ferrándiz, F. (2015). «Exhumar la derrota». En: Políticas de memoria y construcción
de ciudadanía. Madrid: Postmetrópolis Editorial: 255-263.
Herrasti, L. y Etxeberria, F. (2014 ). «Exhumación y análisis de los restos del
cementerio del Sanatorio penitenciario de San Cristóbal en el monte Ezkaba
(Ansoain, Navarra)». En: El Fuerte de San Cristóbal en la memoria: de prisión
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Herrasti, L. y Jiménez, J. (2012). «Excavación Arqueológica de los enterramientos colectivos de la Guerra Civil». Boletín Galego de Medicina Legal e
Forense 18: 29-45.
Moreno Gómez, F. (2016). Los desaparecidos de Franco. Un estudio factual y teórico
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Polo-Cerdá M, García-Prósper E; Crespo Alonso S , Galtés I , Márquez-Grant
N, 8,9 6,10 11 García-Rubio A., Armentano N., Muñoz Hernández V.
(2018). «Protocolo de búsqueda, levantamiento y exhumación de restos humanos». Revista de AEAOF, 7-23.
[page-n-53]
Espadrilles
Individual 125, Grave 127, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
[page-n-54]
53
The forgotten bodies
of the war
Queralt Solé i Barjau
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
[page-n-55]
The forgotten bodies of the war
54
With the failure of the coup d’état in July 1936 and the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War, it was immediately clear that there would be
deaths, though few would have anticipated how many people would
die, or in what circumstances.
The initial widely-held assumption was that casualties would occur at the front, among the troops and the militiamen. Few thought
that there would be so many deaths in the rearguard, due to fighting,
bombing raids, starvation, disease and repression. At the end of
the war, it was common knowledge that tens of thousands of men
(and some women) had died at the front, and that tens of thousands
more civilians had been killed in the cities behind the lines. The ways
in which Republicans and Rebels died varied little. What differed
markedly on the two sides was the policy regarding the dead and
their treatment: the way in which they were buried and in some cases
exhumed, and thus the way in which their dignity and memory were
preserved in their families.
To understand the reasons for the exhumations of the Civil War
dead in the twenty-first century, an essential first step is to find out
how they died and how their bodies were treated, both during the
war itself and then later under the dictatorship. In fact, the exhumations of the dead began very soon, albeit with major differences in
the way they were carried out by the Republican and Rebel armies, or
by the Republican and Rebel governments. These differences would
become more accentuated with the establishment of the dictatorship
and its desire to emphasize the division between the victors and the
vanquished. In this regard, an important distinguishing feature was
precisely how the dead and victims were treated in the respective rearguards during and after the armed conflict.
Soldiers killed at the front
On 17 July 1936, the troops of the protectorate of Morocco rose up
against the government of the Republic. The Rebel commanders
were committed to the cause, but the army also had many recruits
who participated in the coup without having any choice in the matter.
Those who tried to oppose it, both in North Africa and from 19 July
onwards in the peninsula, were killed without ceremony (Villarroya,
2009). In an attempt to dismantle an army that proved largely hostile
to it, the Republican government ordered the factional units to be
disbanded. The Army of the Republic was not restructured again until
October, when the Mixed Brigades were created and incorporated
the volunteer militias that had sprung up since July. After almost
three months of war, it was clear that the conflict would be a long one,
and the Republic was aware that it needed a professional army. The
Inside page of LIFE
magazine, 12 July 1937,
with a report on the
Spanish Civil War. Private
collection, Valencia.
[page-n-56]
55
Queralt Solé i Barjau
[page-n-57]
56
The forgotten bodies of the war
Rebel army was in no need of restructuring: once the loyalty of the
majority of the military had been secured, they retained the classic
organizational hierarchy under direct command.
Immediately there were deaths. In the Spanish protectorate of
Morocco, where the coup started, the study of the graves of the victims
of reprisals (both military and civilian) began only recently (Ramos y
Feria, 2017). In the peninsula, the first to die were also military and
civilians who opposed the uprising. In the Spanish cities, where there
were street fights to preserve or gain control of power, the dead were
initially left lying in the gutter. After the first days, the killing of civilians continued: for ideological reasons, due to differences in class,
or for attitudes to religion. After a while, as will be seen, the Republic
started to investigate and prosecute these criminal acts in some of the
areas under its control; on the other side, in the areas where the uprising had triumphed, the structure put in place by the Rebels to act as a
government (known as the “government of Burgos”) not only failed
to prosecute these acts but actively encouraged them.
At the front the first deaths were recorded, although news of the
casualties did not reach the rearguard. In fact, attempts were made
to conceal them. In Catalonia, at the meeting of 10 September 1936
the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias ruled that the bodies
of those who died in combat at the front should not be moved: “Send
an order to the columns and organizations that form the Committee
indicating that the dead comrades, whatever their category and condition, should be buried at the front and that under no pretext should
they be moved to other places without the express agreement of the
Central Committee.”1 The order was not always heeded, but at another meeting on 25 September it was stressed that the remains of the
militiawoman Lina Òdena should not be sent to Barcelona: “Inform
the cruiser Llibertat which, according to the press, is bringing the remains of the heroic militiawoman Lina Òdena to Barcelona, of the
agreement made by the Committee that the dead comrades be buried
at the front and should not be moved without express agreement of
the Committee, and to warn it that in the event that the ship has already set out for Barcelona, it should dock and bury the body without
a public demonstration.”2 Even today it is not clear where Òdena was
buried3; in any case, she was immediately mythologized as a heroin of
the mobilization of the Spanish people against Fascism. Apart from
this order issued by the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, no other
order has yet been found indicating how Republican militiamen or
soldiers killed on the front were to be buried.
Neither the diaries nor the testimonies of those who participated
in the burials of comrades in the Popular Army refer to instructions
1
“Central Committee of
the Antifascist Militias
of Catalonia. Agreements
made at the meeting of
10 September, 1936”.
GC-35_E001_ D011
Montserrat Tarradellas
Macià Archive (Poblet
Monastery).
2
“Central Committee of
the Antifascist Militias
of Catalonia. Agreements
of the meeting of 25
September, 1936”. GC35_
E001_D018 Montserrat
Tarradellas Macià Archive
(Poblet Monastery).
3
In his article "Lina Ódena,
communist and militiawoman", José Miguel
Hernández López notes
that there is no record of
her burial in Montjuic
cemetery in Barcelona,
where she was presumed
to have been interred,
nor is there any way of
knowing whether she was
buried in Granada, since
the archives of the Registry between 1936 and 1939
were destroyed. El incorformista digital, periódico independiente del subsuelo, 25
September, 2021. https://
www.elinconformistadigital.com/2021/09/26/
lina-odena-comunista-y-miliciana-jose-miguel-hernandez/
[consultation August
2022. Unless otherwise
stated, this is the date of
consultation of all the
websites cited].
[page-n-58]
57
Queralt Solé i Barjau
of any kind, although some striking accounts of the coexistence with
death have come down to us. A soldier from the Leva del Biberón (“the
baby bottle levy”, so called because its members were only 17 or 18
years old when they were called up in 1938) remembered the number
of casualties after a battle on the Segre front. “It was ten in the evening when they gave us the order to withdraw. Horrible, monstrous.
After five hours, 120 of the 700 men – who were barely adults – remained. We didn’t understand. Between dead, wounded, prisoners
and missing we had lost 580 men. That operation was worse, far
worse for the members of the 224th Mixed Brigade than the Battle of
the Ebro!” (Portella i Massamunt, 2001).
Until the graves of Republican soldiers began to be exhumed in the
twenty-first century, the circumstances of their burial were unknown.
In their diaries or testimonies, the witnesses described experiences
that reflected the disorder, but also their ability to adapt to the circumstances. Pere Tarrés, then a young doctor, dug graves: “We buried them
in a field, on the side of the ravine. The captain and the paramedic and a
soldier from the 24th. All three of them were lying stretched out on the
ground. The moon shone its pale light on their faces, which made them
look even whiter. I dug a pit for each of them, very deep. Around twelve
o’clock at night, we buried them. One by one we placed them in the pit,
in a very dignified way. The moon had kissed them farewell. There was
a full moon that night. And then they covered them with earth using
spades. It was very moving!” (Tarrés, 2004).
The exhumations of Republican soldiers that have taken place
all over Spain since 2000 have made it possible to corroborate the
circumstances of their burial – that is, that there does not seem to be
any specific order, and the burials were adapted to the conditions of
the front and the terrain. Very often the bodies exhumed correspond
to soldiers who were buried where they had fallen. Graves of this type
have been found in places where there was fighting, such as the Basque
Country, Asturias, Extremadura, Catalonia in the area of the Battle
of the Ebro or along the XYZ line in Valencia (Muñoz-Encinar, 2016;
Herrasti, 2020; Ramos and Busquets, 2021).
But soldiers did not just die at the front; they also died in military
hospitals, many of which had been schools, spas, or convents converted to meet the needs of the conflict. In the cemeteries of the towns
that housed these makeshift hospitals, soldiers were buried – on the
Republican side, without following any particular order. The state of
the graves attached to the military hospitals that have been exhumed
suggests that the diggers acted in the same way as at the front, that
is, adapting to the circumstances. In Uclés in Cuenca, in Pernafeites
or Mas de Santa Magdalena in Tarragona and in El Soleràs in Lleida
[page-n-59]
The forgotten bodies of the war
58
[page-n-60]
59
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Poster for the 2nd National
Conference of Antifascist
Women. 29-30 and 31
October, 1937. Artist: Luis.
Source: Spain. Ministry
of Culture and Sports,
Documentary Center
of Historical Memory
PSCARTELES, 351.
Republican soldiers were buried in collective graves containing two,
three or four bodies or even dozens of piled up corpses, in stark contrast to the way the Francoists buried their dead.
In most of the graves where the bodies of Republican soldiers
have been exhumed, it has not been possible to establish their identity. In some cases, items such as bracelets with identification numbers
in graves in the Basque Country have allowed researchers to identify
of the remains4. Certain graves attached to military hospitals have
preserved documents from the doctors who attended to the dying soldiers, or lists of buried soldiers kept in town halls, as in Pradell de la
Teixeta (Tarragona) (Hervàs, 2014). In general, however, the identity
and the place of burial of Republican soldiers went unrecorded.
The case of Franco’s troops was very different. On 22 January
1937, Franco’s headquarters issued the following order: “To ensure
that the burials of personnel killed in action or in accidents are carried
out following the same rules on all fronts, and thus to facilitate proper
identification, show the respect due to those who have fallen in this
struggle and to allow the adoption of the necessary hygienic measures, the following instructions must be observed ...” The instructions for burying the soldiers ran for an entire page: “The burial will
take place in the cemetery close to the event, if it is not too far from
the battlefield or place of the accident. Should the distance or number
of deceased make it difficult to transport the bodies to the said place,
a burial plot measuring 15 x 24 metres will be made on soft terrain
and on a slope, for every hundred corpses, divided into one hundred
numbered graves correlatively from left to right and from top to bottom, and a drawing will be made indicating each one. In these graves,
which will be individual and in which the corpse will be covered by a
layer of tamped earth of at least 0.5 metre, once the burial has been
completed, a wooden cross will be placed at each head, with the vertical arm nailed at a height of 0.5 metre of tamped earth and protruding
0.3 metres which will bear, in black paint, the number of the grave,
and on the horizontal arm, on the front, the name and surnames and
on the back, the deceased’s post or capacity. The corpse will be buried
with the upper part of the regulatory identity badge; if the badge is
missing, a stoppered bottle will be placed between the legs and will
contain a concise description of the deceased’s parentage.”5
In general, this order was followed: when the graves of Francoist
soldiers began to be exhumed in 1958, to be moved to the Valle de los
Caídos, they were found lined up, in an orderly fashion, with bottles
between their legs or next to the skulls with a piece of paper that
recorded the dead man’s parentage. Although the regime belittled
its fighters, keeping them buried in cemeteries all over Spain and
4
Exhumations of the Civil
War in Euskadi. Gogora
library, Department of
Equality, Justice and
Social Policies and Aranzadi Science Society, s/d.
https:// www.gogora.
euskadi.eus/contents/
informacion/ gogora_dokumentuak/es_def/Exhumaciones-de-la-Guerra-Civil-en-Euskadi.pdf
5
General Military Archive
of Ávila, L8 R122 C100.
Document also referenced and reproduced in
Etxebarría et al. (2011).
[page-n-61]
The forgotten bodies of the war
later moving them like freight to the Cuelgamuros monument, the
families were officially informed of the place where their loved ones
had died and in most cases the deceased could be identified when exhumed. It should be noted, however, that some of the graves of Francoist soldiers that have been opened contained remains that were respectfully arranged but were not identified, for example in Figuerola
d’Orcau in Lleida (Armentano et al., 2020) and in Abánades in Guadalajara, the bodies were just piled up without any kind of identification (Martínez and Alonso, 2014).
The death of civilians
The number of deaths on the home front due to the war could not
have been anticipated – nor could the degree of violence unleashed
when the coup d’état failed in July 1936, and later once the military
conflict ended. Civilians died in bombing raids, from starvation,
while fleeing the front line, or were executed with or without a council of war sentencing them to death. Some of those on Franco’s side,
however, were honoured and remembered in perpetuity at the end
of the war. Their side had won and their victory had to be proclaimed
constantly, through the continuous presence of the memory of the
heroes and martyrs of the cause. The others, those who had lost, often
did not know where their loved ones were buried or, if they did, were
unable to honour and mourn them freely. The victors’ adulation of
their dead and the consequent contempt for all the others was an essential element in the shaping of the new Francoist identity.
Most of the victims in the Republican rearguard were buried in
mass graves, then called “clandestine cemeteries”. Studies carried
60
Boxes with remains exhumed and sent from different Spanish provinces
to the Valley of the Fallen,
near the town of San
Lorenzo de El Escorial,
Madrid, for burial there. In
the foreground, remains
from Castellón de la Plana,
Ávila, Alcora, Aldeaseca
and Suera 1959. Source:
Agencia EFE.
[page-n-62]
61
Queralt Solé i Barjau
out throughout Spain have shown that a total of 49,272 people were
killed in the cities of the Republic (Ledesma, 2010). The crucial role of
the trade unions in defeating the Rebel troops in many Spanish cities
meant that they took control of public order, and many saw in those
moments of chaos and violence the chance to achieve the longed-for
revolution. To change the world it was necessary to wipe the slate
clean, break with the past and eliminate the class enemy. By burning
notarial documents, revolutionaries felt that they were contributing
to the abolition of property, something that these papers officially
recorded; by burning churches and ecclesiastical buildings they were
helping to bring down an institution that they saw as the great ally of
the class enemy, the exploiter of the workers – an institution which,
at the same time, held society in its iron grip through the imposition
of religious beliefs. For some, killing priests and nuns, property owners and the wealthy formed part of the war that had to be waged if the
revolution was to succeed. The province where the most deaths on
the home front were recorded was Madrid, with around 10,000 victims (though this figure is not definitive, Payne, 2012), followed by Barcelona, with 4,713 (Solé and Villarroya, 1989). In the province of Valencia, however, Vicent Gabarda (2007) reports a total of 5,996 victims.
Already before the end of the war, when the Republican authorities had regained control of public order, they prosecuted the crimes
that had been committed in the home front. In Catalonia, a special
court was created to investigate clandestine cemeteries; the remains
of more than 2,000 bodies were exhumed and 200 people were prosecuted (Dueñas and Solé, 2014). Finally, due to the evolution of the
war itself and political confrontations, no one was tried, but the tasks
of exhumation and recognition of these victims by their relatives
were carried out in the middle of the conflict in an attempt to counter
the vision that Francoism was spreading of the Republic as a government which was out of control and which sanctioned murders. It was
important for the Republic to demonstrate its integrity to the international community and to show that justice was independent of any
political power, and it did so by resolutely prosecuting the crimes of
the first months of the war.
At the end of the war, the Francoist authorities ordered the exhumation of all the victims in the Republican rearguard. Paradoxically, therefore, it is impossible to know what methods the extremist
revolutionary groups used to kill and bury their victims during the
first months of the conflict. The regime controlled the graves that
were opened all over Spain from 1939 onwards, and from April 1940
through what was known as the Causa General, an investigation of
wartime atrocities that emphasized the difference between victors
[page-n-63]
The forgotten bodies of the war
62
Poster Bolshevism, social
injustice, politicians,
masons, separatism, F.A.I.
Spanish, anonymous. Ca.
1938. Source: National
Library of Spain.
and vanquished at all times. The losing side had no rights regarding
their dead; missing persons could not even be recorded in the Civil
Registry, as published in the Official State Bulletin of 10 August,
1939, which specified that registrations of missing persons could be
made “whenever they were persons who adhered to the Glorioso Movimiento Nacional”. For the Dictatorship, the physical disappearance of
the enemy was not enough: prohibiting the registration of the death
in the Civil Registry left a cloud of doubt about the very existence of
the person in question. With this order the regime provided an instrument of repression to the victors who wanted to use it, but in fact
many families on the losing side were able to record their dead in the
registers – something that they had to do, despite the regime’s stance,
[page-n-64]
63
Queralt Solé i Barjau
because otherwise many situations to do with inheritances or orphanhood or widowhood could not have been resolved. Interestingly,
historians have found registrations of Republican soldiers who died
during the war in the records of deaths in 1939, and then find them
again from 1976, when their relatives were finally able to record their
missing persons in the register without fear of reprisals.
The regime’s control over the management of the dead was so
strict that on 4 April 1940 (State Bulletin 5 April) another order was
published which in this case converted the graves of those “Fallen
for God and for Spain” into holy places, specifically specifying that
“the Town Halls must adopt measures that guarantee respect for
the places where the victims of the Marxist revolution are buried”
(Saqqa, 2022). The regime decided the graves that were opened, the
people who were to open them and the reports that were to be written, and encouraged each municipality to pay tribute to these victims
and rebury them collectively in the cemetery, under a monument
that denounced the memory of revolutionary violence. At the same
time, plaques were placed on the façades of all the churches in Spain
bearing the names of the dead who, according to the dictatorship,
deserved to be remembered – that is, those of the victors.
The regime glorified one side and denigrated the other, consigning it to oblivion. In the cities in the Francoist zone, orders to practise
extreme violence were followed from the beginning. General Mola,
one of the coup plotters, issued a reserved instruction (number 1, 25
April 1936) that specified all that needed to be done to establish a Dictatorship: “Point 1: The conquest of power must be carried out taking
full advantage of the first favourable moment and the Armed Forces
must play their part, together with the contributions made by political groups, societies and individuals who are not affiliated to parties,
sects and unions that receive inspiration from abroad: namely, socialists, freemasons, anarchists, communists, etc. Point 2 [...] The actions
must be of extreme violence in order to bring down the enemy, which
is strong and well organized, as soon as possible. Of course, all the
leaders of political parties, companies or unions not affiliated to
the movement will be imprisoned and will receive exemplary punishments so as to strangle rebellious movements or strikes. Once power
has been conquered, a military dictatorship will be established with
the immediate mission of restoring public order, imposing the rule of
law and reinforcing the army as necessary in order to consolidate the
de facto situation that will eventually become law.”
The application of extreme violence did not end with the termination of hostilities, but continued in the post-war period. There were
no longer home fronts: the dictatorship was a totalitarian regime
[page-n-65]
The forgotten bodies of the war
that sought full control over everything – including who should live
and who should die, and how. With the war over, from 1 April 1939
onwards there were few murders and most of the deaths were sanctioned by military justice or by the enforcement of the laws on fugitives (Fernández Pasalodos, 2021). While the victors exhumed mass
graves and praised their dead with ephemeral tributes and permanent
monuments, the losers had on way of knowing where their dead lay;
in addition, they continued to suffer “the actions of extreme violence”
championed by General Mola, since the summary trials sentenced
men and women to years in prison or imposed the death penalty. On
many occasions, the punishment endured, in so far as the families
were unable to mourn the person who had faced the firing squad.
In all the provincial capitals of Spain, people sentenced to death
were executed, and everywhere the procedure was similar: a trial,
without any legal safeguards, of multiple defendants which lasted
just a few hours and ended in long prison terms or death sentences.
Indeed, the process flouted the legal principle of presumption of
innocence; the accused were assumed to be guilty at the outset and
were obliged to prove otherwise. Those condemned to death awaited
the dictator’s authorization and, when it arrived, a day was set for the
execution. The families were not notified of the date of the execution
or the site of the burial. Usually the victims were buried in the cemeteries of the provincial capital (though there were exceptions, such
as Paterna) in mass graves in which identification was impossible.
64
Funeral procession for
the people murdered in
Paracuellos del Jarama
in November 1936. The
tribute was accompanied
by posthumous honours
and a military parade.
February 1940.
[page-n-66]
65
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Photographs of the bull
ring in Valencia, used as
a classification centre for
republican soldiers after
the occupation of the city
by Franco’s rebel army in
April 1939. Source: National Library of Spain
For the relatives of the victims, the punishment was multiple: the uncertainty as to whether their loved ones had been executed; the secrecy regarding the place of burial; and finally, once they had located the
cemetery, the impossibility of identifying a place to mourn. The Dictatorship wanted to control the life, death, memory and pain of the
vanquished, and it was not until the twenty-first century that the first
steps were taken to shake off this imposed inheritance.
[page-n-67]
The forgotten bodies of the war
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comuna de la Guerra Civil espanyola situada fora del cementiri de Figuerola d’Orcau (Isona i Conca Dellà, Lleida)”, Segones Jornades d’Arqueologia i
Paleontologia del Pirineu i Aran, Generalitat de Catalunya; Consell Comarcal del
Pallars Jussà; Institut Català de Paleontologia; Institut de Recerca de Cultures medievals, Lleida.
Aróstegui, Julio (1996), La Guerra Civil, 1936-1939, Historia de España, 27, Historia 16, Madrid.
Dueñas Iturbe, Oriol; Solé, Queralt (2014), “El juez Josep Maria Bertran de
Quintana (1884-1960): compromiso político y cementerios clandestinos”,
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Etxeberria Gabilondo, Francisco; Herrasti Erlogorri, Lourdes; Bandres; Antxon
(2011). El cementerio de las botellas: enterramientos de presos republicanos en el
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Feria Vázquez, Pedro y Ramos Toscano, Félix (2017), “Camino hacia la tierra
olvidada. Guerra Civil y represión en el Protectorado Español de Marruecos,
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internacional”, Historia social, Nº 101, p. 125-143.
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Publicacions de la Universitat de València, València.
Herrasti Erlogorri, Lourdes. (2020). Arqueología de la memoria: el método arqueológico aplicado a la investigación de la historia reciente. Tesi doctoral inèdita
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Arrizabalaga Valbuena.
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(1936-1939) Arxiu Històric de les Ciències de la Salut, Manresa.
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zona republicana.” En Espinosa Maestre, Francisco, Violencia roja y azul.
España, 1936 – 1950, Crítica, Barcelona.
Martínez Barrio, Candela; Alonso Muela, Andrea L. (2014), “Excavaciones
arqueológicas en los restos de la Guerra Civil en Abánades (Guadalajara). Campaña de 2012. Informe Antropológico” https://digital.csic.es/
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Muñoz-Encinar, Laura (2016), De la exhumación de cuerpos al conocimiento histórico:
Análisis de la represión irregular franquista a partir de la excavación de fosas comunes
en Extremadura (1936-1948), Tesis doctoral inédita. Universidad de Extremadura, director Julián Chaves Palacios.
Payne, Stanley G. (2012), The Spanish Civil War, Cambridge.
Portella i Vilanova, Sebastià; Massamunt i Marqués, Josep (2001), “Els biberons.
Els seus escrits, vivències, trobades i ofrenes florals”, (1938-2000), Editorial
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Saqqa, Míriam (2022), Cuerpos nación. Las exhumaciones de los “Mártires y Caídos por
Dios y por España” (1936-1951), Tesis doctoral inédita, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Directores Francisco Ferrándiz Martín y Jesús Antonio
Martínez Martín.
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[page-n-68]
67
Queralt Solé i Barjau
Ramos i Busquets, Jordi; Busquets Costa, Cesc (2021), “Les fosses dels camps de
batalla de la Guerra Civil de 1936-1939. Una aproximació arqueològica a les
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Lleida, pp.143-161.
Solé i Sabaté, Josep Maria; Villarroya i Font, Joan (1989), La Repressió a la reraguarda de Catalunya: 1936-1939, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat,
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https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/segleXX/article/view/9827/12643
[page-n-69]
Matchbox belonging to Vicente Ortí Garrigues
Grave 111, Paterna. Donated by the Ortí family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-70]
69
This archaeology will be
the tomb of fascism, or it
will be nothing. The role
of community archaeology
in uncovering the common
graves of Francoism
Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
INSTITUTO DE HISTÓRIA CONTEMPORÂNEA, UNIVERSIDADE NOVA DE LISBOA
[page-n-71]
This archaeology will be the tomb of fascism, or it will be nothing.
The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
Cemeteries are ideal places for destroying evidence. Burying the
dead in the cemetery guarantees that they will be covered up by
other dead; the victims of reprisals, mixed together with vagabonds and suicides; the graves, undone or disfigured. The people
who excavate these infernal graves today know this well.
The ditches at the side of the road are the memory of political
violence in war. But to understand the true nature of Franco’s
repression, you must also explore the cemeteries.
Alfredo González-Ruibal (2022)
The exhumations in the cemeteries of Paterna, Málaga and Seville
are the palpable proof of two defining features of the Francoist repression in the centre and south of Spain. The first is the elimination
of political opponents, carried out on a practically industrial scale,
which back up those historiographic claims that these actions constitute a genuine extermination. The second is the continuation of this
practice throughout the postwar period, supporting the notion that
the regime continued to wage an irregular war that persisted until the
early 1950s. Today, the infernal graves in the large cemeteries in
the cities of Andalusia and Valencia are the reflection of a specific
socio-political context that has prompted the efforts to revive this
memory – with regional governments devoted to the mission, the
creation of historical memory associations and the involvement of
teams of professionals with years of experience in the exhumation
of the victims of Francoism.
When the organizers of this exhibition suggested that I should
write a text, with the idea of highlighting the community aspect of
this cemetary archaeology, I decided to address the subject from our
experience in a geographical setting far away from Valencia – rural
Galicia. I could have chosen to describe the work done by our team
in cemeteries associated with concentration camps such as Castuera in
Badajoz, or on the frontlines of the war in Alcarria or the Ebro, but I
felt that the research carried out at the micro scale, in a rural context
like Galicia, with small graves in the cemeteries of peasant communities, would provide illuminating insights into the community archaeology carried out at the sites of memory of Fascist political violence.
This approach is all the more necessary given the Galician regional
government’s disregard for the need of a public policy supporting historical memory since 2009.
In 2007 I began to investigate a skirmish that took place in Repil,
next to my maternal village (Cereixa, Pobra do Bollón, in the province of Lugo) on 20 April 1949, between the Spanish Civil Guard and
a guerrilla detachment. Several villagers in Cereixa who had links to
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the guerrillas were tried and sent to prison. Many years later, in 2016,
we started archaeological excavations in Repil, and only then did the
extent of Franco’s repression in the landscape of my childhood begin
to dawn on me. As a historian, I had to reach the age of 40 to find out
that in the cemeteries of all the parishes adjacent to Cereixa (Fornelas, Abrence, Castroncelos, Saa) there were Republicans buried like
vermin in common graves. The Fascist pedagogy of violence and the
policy of oblivion appeared to have triumphed. The graves were invisible; the dead, dehumanized, did not exist. But their memory lived on
in the traumatic collective consciousness of these rural communities.
At the age of forty I realized that I had been brought up in the midst
of an absent, politically neutered landscape, marked by the communities of the dead but intentionally kept apart from the communities
of the living – a landscape that, nonetheless, could be exhumed via
the application of archaeology.
Just one yard more
The brothers José and Ricardo García Moral lived in the parish of
Montefurado (Quiroga, Lugo) when they were arrested by Fascist
gunmen on 6 September, 1936. After an interrogation in the Falange
barracks, the two brothers were put on a train that took them from the
station in Montefurado towards Monforte de Lemos. The Falangists
forced the prisoners to get off at A Pobra do Bollón, and then shot
them. José received three bullets, Ricardo four. The two bodies were
left on the road that leads to Quiroga, in front of the house of a certain Bernardino. In A Chá de Castroncelos the bodies were inspected
by the judge and the doctor. It is still surprising that this inspection
should have happened in the earliest days of the Franco period, and is
something that would be unthinkable in modern-day Spain: no judge
would make their way to a common grave bearing victims of Franco.
From there, the bodies were taken by oxcart (the great icon of repression in Galicia) to the atrium of the church of Santiago de Castroncelos. There, they were buried together, as described in the military
report: “next to the church in an open grave, close to the wall of this
church (and four yards away from the corner) on the northwest side,
measuring a yard and a half and two yards long, together without a
coffin and with the heads placed facing northwest”.
In July 2018, Pepe Ogando, grandson of one of the victims, requested help from the Association for the Recovery of Historical
Memory (ARMH) to exhume the remains of his grandfather, just as
he had promised his mother and grandmother. According to oral testimonies, the two brothers were buried under the altar of the church.
How would that have been possible? It transpired that, decades later,
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a parish priest decided to knock down the old church and build a new
one, in a style combining kitsch and gore, and oriented it from north
to south rather than from east to west. This crazed renovation work
changed the appearance of the site forever and meant that the indications in the document were no longer of any use.
Pepe Ogando shows us a
family photo on his tablet
during the exhumation of
Castroncelos. The women
in the family had kept alive
the memory of repression
in their grandmother’s
house in Montefurado.
This attempt to recover the bodies of these victims was not the
idea of the residents of Castroncelos. In fact, the exhumations performed have always been promoted from outside the local community, for instance by historical memory associations, or supported
by people who are politically committed to this cause. The brutal
repression, Franco’s propaganda, the imposition of the landscape of
the victors, emigration for political reasons, the control by local party
bosses and the new elite that usurped local power are all factors that
help explain why rural communities adopted silence and inaction
as their strategies for survival. Nevertheless, the culture of death in
the Galician countryside has a sufficient weight in the peasant moral economy to generate a collective need for reparation. The graves
of the victims are open scars in the community ethos. Although the
Galician right sidelined the Historical Memory Act of 2007, since
then, the media have followed and reported with great respect the
exhumations carried out. But that was all. This exhumation of Castroncelos exemplifies very clearly how an activist archaeology can
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
develop in this particular socio-political context. This would not have
happened without the involvement of Rafael Castillo, secretary of
the Town Council of A Pobra do Bollón, grandson of the Republican
Mayor shot in 1938, whose commitment to the project was vital. The
symbolic support of the municipal government was also vital, in this
case of the Galician nationalist party, which has promoted a range of
acts and events to honour the victims of Franco.
Just as our Valencian colleagues in Arqueoantro organized concerts with heavy metal tribute bands to raise money for DNA tests to
identify Civil War combatants in the hills of Castellón, our group sold
wine and t-shirts advertising the Castro of San Lourenzo archaeological project at local fairs to be able to buy a power shovel. For its part,
the ARMH team involved in this project also has an intake of foreign
volunteers. A Californian student from Duke University came here
to do the work that Spanish universities prefer to ignore, perhaps
because taking up a political position may have dire consequences for
the CV of an aspiring academic. While Galician public television has
not covered a single exhumation so far, Castroncelos welcomed the
team of the Spanish producer Newtral, with the journalist Ana Pastor
at the head, to record a piece about the recovery of historical memory. Two other audiovisual professionals who work for the US chain
HBO and were recording a documentary about the crimes of Franco
also covered the event. Although they knew that this exhumation was
very difficult and was very unlikely to be successful, they recognized
something that our research team has been stressing for some time:
namely, that the processes set in action when we dig are more important and more interesting than the results of the investigation itself.
As for the local community, the residents are divided. The older
people who wanted to participate, more than anything due to family
ties, and who kept the memory of the events, were reluctant to speak
in public or visit the site; we had to go to their homes to talk to them
and record the information. We were lucky to have the help of the
writer Olga Novo, winner of the National Poetry Award, who lives in
the town. She contacted the older women who looked after the church
and the surroundings, borrowed the key to the church to let the journalists in, persuaded the elderly to provide their testimonies and urged
the priest to continue the work in the future. Carmen García-Rodeja
of the ARMH also came to our rescue. Being with the relatives of the
victims during exhumation is fundamental: a carousel of emotions,
of frustrations and hopes accompany each shovel-load of soil as it was
removed.
On the other hand, many villagers were indifferent to the project
– the majority, in fact – and another sector opposed what they termed
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The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
“moving the dead around”. There were even some who complained
and blamed the ditches we dug for the appearance of cracks on one of
the walls of the church: they were more concerned about the old scars
on the walls than the graves they step on every Sunday.
The absence of any support from the State was compensated
for in Castroncelos by the cooperation of residents, volunteers and
archaeologists who were militant defenders of historical memory.
Pepe Ogando asked us to try to dig further in the area surveyed two
years previously. When we felt that there was nothing more to be
found there, we asked the digger, nicknamed the Flea, to stop. At
that time, on the point of tears, Pepe had come up to us and asked if
we could please just dig a couple of feet more. We felt so sorry. Once
again, the oral tradition had been confirmed: the change of orientation of the church floor plan in the postwar period meant that the
bodies of the García Moral brothers (if they are there) are lying in a
recess near the main altar, inside the new church. It is very hard to
have to stop just a few inches from the truth.
At the foot of the famous cracked wall, in 2016 a commemorative plaque was installed in tribute to the García Moral brothers so
as to preserve their memory. So far it has not been vandalized. The
writer Olga Novo brought her pupils from the school A Pinguela in
74
Opening of a prospective
ditch in the atrium of the
Church of Castroncelos, at
the foot of the stone block
and plaque in memory of
the García Moral brothers.
Relatives, journalists,
volunteers and archaeologists are shown.
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
Monforte de Lemos to this place of memory: an act to reaffirm the
pedagogy of love against the pedagogy of terror. The fact that this educational visit was quite exceptional in Galicia, a pioneering event, is
a reflection of the abnormal situation that still reigns in this country,
even in times of democracy.
Class given in the atrium
of the Church of Castroncelos by the teacher
and writer Olga Novo to
the pupils of A Pinguela
(Monforte de Lemos).
The summer they killed “The Winter”
From Castroncelos, in the same month of July 2018 we moved on to
the neighbouring parish of Saa to try to exhume the remains of Jesús
Casas, also known as O’Inverno (“Winter” in Galician) who had lived
in the village of Eirexalba. For many years his granddaughter Isabel,
who now lives in New York, had been leaving flowers near the site
where her grandfather was killed on 6 August, 1936, near the Alto de
Santa Lucia. After knocking on many doors, without success, Isabel
had requested help from the ARMH to find the exact place. Both
Saa and Eirexalba have a traumatic past that casts a shadow over the
present. In Saa, several families had a prominent role in the local
Falange and Eirexalba had been home to the main group of gunmen
who sowed terror in the region, the self-styled “Black Squad”. As late
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76
as 1944, with the presence of anti-Franco guerrillas in the area, a local
newspaper in Sarria issued the following admonition to the civilian
population: “Warning: Watch out for the Black Squad!” Their extreme cruelty and their continuous abuses even led the authorities to
condemn their leaders to death (Ermida, 2017).
Before launching into the study of this delicate subject, we asked
the secretary of the Town Council if we could hold a meeting with the
residents in order to compile information and describe the project
to them. The villagers’ response to our invitation was lukewarm and,
as in the case of Castroncelos, we obtained most of our information
from relatives of older people who invited us into their homes. During
the exhumation we received hardly any visits. One very special exception was the visit of the parish priest who asked to meet me, the director of the exhumation, in person. We received written permission
from the Bishopric of Lugo to carry out the works as long as the “good
harmony” among the villagers was not disrupted and that the digging
“did not affect coexistence” inside the parish. As we can see, this exhumation interrupted the silence imposed for decades and raised hackles among certain members of the local community who accused us,
again, of disturbing the rest of the dead and of reopening the wounds
of the past.
The murderers of Jesús
Casas: The Black Squad
of Eirexalba (in Ermida
2017).
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
The oral accounts and the available documentation suggested
three possible sites where O’Inverno’s remains might lie. One of them
was in the old cemetery. This area, limited by a shale masonry wall, is
occupied by an illegal landfill. Bedframes, pots, mattresses, shoes and
debris were strewn everywhere, especially in the part closest to the
road, within easy reach for people wanting to throw away things they
no longer want. The people who ranted about archaeologists not letting the dead rest in peace were the ones who dumped rubbish in the
cemetery where their ancestors are buried.
O’Inverno was a member of the CNT, the anarchist trade union
movement. He returned from Cuba with progressive ideas and had
a gift for public speaking. With the victory of the Popular Front, he
stood out for the speeches he gave on land ownership in O Incio and
for opposing the privatization of the communal hill in his parish.
According to the Fascist justice, “by the use of terror he had forced
the majority of the residents of the parish to share his destructive
ideas.” With the news of the military uprising of 18 July 1936, the Republicans of O Incio and A Pobra do Brollón joined together to block
roads, requisition weapons and stop the advance of Rebel troops.
When the situation became desperate, O’Inverno fled to the mountains, taking refuge in the house of some relatives in the village of Covadellas. But he was betrayed; on 6 August, 1936, the Black Squad of
his town, Eirexalba, arrived in Saa at five in the afternoon.
The village elders remember perfectly well what happened, and
their accounts confirm the official records. According to O’Cachete, a
ninety-year-old resident of Saa, who has since died: “Some unknown
men arrived, they said they were Falangists from Sarria. They arrived
in Covadellas and O’Inverno was eating with the owners of the house:
They said “Come on, he’s had enough to eat and drink!” and they took
him to Saa, beating him all the way. One said: “Look at the fat legs
on this rabbit,” and they hit him in the shins with their rifle butts. It
was very hot, and he was wearing short trousers. Covered in blood, he
fell over at practically every step, with his hands tied. The Falangists
did not take him along the road, but turned through the village called
Pousa, in view of everyone. A woman asked them not to beat him,
and said that she wanted to give him a glass of water: “No, señora, he
already had enough to eat and drink up there”. They went towards the
hill of Santa Lucía, and when they reached the pines of O’Xexo, they
told him to choose whether to die facing them or with his back to
them. He chose to be shot in the back, looking to the north towards
his village of Eirexalba. They killed him right there and left the body
sprawled out on the road. The local authorities were informed and
two men went to the Church to fetch the platform used to carry the
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78
On the left, Carlos, the
quarryman. On the right,
another Carlos, a retired
miner, a volunteer of
the ARMH. Both are the
grandsons of victims of
reprisals. They are standing in one of the possible
locations of O’Inverno’s
grave, although this site
was later ruled out after
the excavation.
statue of the Virgin in processions. The next day his widow arrived
with two young girls, two of his daughters”.
The story of this man’s martyrdom became part of the collective
imaginary, which took the ordeal of Christ as reference. The popular
account, so descriptive when addressing this man’s tragic destiny,
does not include his place of burial. The tradition situates O’Inverno’s
grave just at the entrance of the atrium, to the left of the stairway,
in a quadrangular recess in the wall. For decades this area was used
to launch fireworks on the day of the village feast, held precisely in
the month of August. Some of our informants tell us that bunches
of flowers occasionally appeared at that precise spot. But the exploration of this site proved fruitless, as did the study of the ditch dug
in the old cemetery. Finally, we found out that the original location
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
of the pit corresponded to the description found in the municipal
records: “Next, in the cemetery of the parish of Saá the autopsied
body was buried in an open grave next to the wall of the south side
and six yards away from the west side.” At this same point, recently added niches have destroyed the remains located in the subsoil.
In other places, the memory of the victims has endured, and the
tradition forbade any further burials or changes; here, though, it
was different, so much so that O’Inverno rested under the niche of
Recently made niches in
the atrium of the church
of Saa that destroyed
O’Inverno’s resting place.
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The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
families of Falangists. And this is where the dramatic circle of a man
who died for his ideas closes. His granddaughter Isabel still receives
anonymous threats in Eirexalba for wanting to know what happened to her grandfather.
When time stopped in O’Decimal
Love in the times of anger. Despite the fear, the war and the threat
of the death squads, the young folk tried to enjoy the last days of that
tragic summer. A young lad from Piño, over the valley of the River
Teixugo, set out, all spruced up, in the direction of Fornelas. At the
town’s feast a month earlier, he had danced with a girl, and since
then, he had meant to court her. As they say in these parts, “he was
going to Fornelas for courting.” That September night, the suitor
came across something surprising: a truck, motionless at the side
of the road with the headlights on and the engine running. Shouts
and insults could be heard from the rear. Scared, he hid behind some
bushes a few yards away. That plot of land went by the name of “A Bernarda”, but in recent times a sign had been added on the side of the
road indicating the distance from the village: one kilometre. Since
then, the place had been known as “O’Decimal”. Now, the roads were
to become part of a whole cartography of terror.
That day, time stopped in O’Decimal. The suitor saw everything.
Armed men with Falange insignia, forced two men with their hands
tied behind their backs to get off the truck. One of them, older and
thickset, managed to fight off one of the Falangists, and had even got
hold of his weapon. The driver of the truck approached the prisoner
from behind and hit him over the head with the motor crank. Then
the shots rang out; the suitor could hardly believe his eyes: it was all
he could do to hold back the screams he could feel building up in his
throat. A few minutes later, the truck roared off down the road towards Nadela. And then ... silence.
This is the version passed down through the generations in the
parish of Fornelas about the events of 7 September 1936, when
the Fascists murdered the socialist Gervasio González and a stranger.
Gervasio’s granddaughter, María José, went to the ARMH to ask for
help in finding her grandfather’s grave in the cemetery of Fornelas.
Unlike the cases of the neighbouring parishes of Saa and Castroncelos, and despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the local community were
keen to take part in the exhumation carried out in August 2020. In
Saa and Castroncelos, the murderers had been from other municipalities, but in Fornelas one of the executioners was a local – a troublemaker who would later kill another man in an argument over land
hitting him over the head with a hoe. Paradoxically, this collaborator
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of the Fascist gunmen ended up in a Francoist prison. The involvement of a villager in that abject event was felt as a collective stain on
the community, something that Fornelas had to atone for. The need
to cure that wound probably helps to explain the villagers’ engagement in the process of exhumation.
Residents of Fornelas
provide information to
Gervasio’s granddaughter,
María José during the
exhumation in the parish
cemetery.
During the excavation we found that Gervasio’s grave had been
destroyed by later burials, in particular by a niche built for an emigré
who had returned from Cuba. While Gervasio was left to rest for
decades like vermin, the Fascist doctor of Fornelas and the Francoist
mayor of A Pobra de Brollón lie in the finest mausoleum in the cemetery. The collaborator in the murder has a side niche. The archaeological excavation brought to light this entire traumatic story, and served
as collective therapy and a teaching resource for new generations. Of
course, to obtain the unanimous support of the people of Fornelas the
name of the collaborator was omitted; his descendants are part of
the community and are not responsible for their grandfather’s misdemeanours. Our magnificent relationship with Fornelas that developed during the exhumation led us to launch a new digging campaign
in the summer of 2022 in a prehistoric deposit known as Muradella.
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The role of community archaeology in uncovering the common graves of Francoism
82
The inauguration on 30 July, 2022 was capped by a session inside the
parish church where our forensic anthropologists Márcia Hattóri and
Candela Martínez described the details of the exhumation of 2020
and the subsequent research. The church was full to bursting – 80
residents, that is, the entire parish, were reunited with their past and
were able to heal the scars of the wound opened in 1936.
Open day at the church of
Fornelas (30 July, 2022).
Anthropologists Márcia
Hattóri and Candela
Martínez describe the
exhumation of 2020.
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
Conclusion
As Alfredo González states in the quotations at the beginning of this
text, cemeteries are living entities that grow and remove the traces of
the people who disappeared during the times of Franco. The passing
of time plays to the advantage of a Fascist movement that planned
both the physical elimination of its political opponents (as is clearly
seen in Paterna) and the progressive destruction of these graves and
bodies. The three exhumations we describe in this text share three
major common features. In all of them, the press printed headlines
such as “Unsuccessful exhumations; the archaeologists fail; digs end
without success”. It is true that we were unable to find José, Ricardo,
Jesús or Gervasio, but their names have returned to the public arena;
their grandchildren (Pepe, Isabel, María José) have felt supported,
and through our committed and courageous digging we have tried to
repair the wrongs of the past.
What is more, these excavations are an ethnoarchaeological
emergency, an endeavour that has arrived late in the day – though
there is still time to record the testimony of people in their eighties
and nineties, like O’Cachete in Saa, and Ramón from Piñeiros (Castroncelos) who passed away in these last three years. Collecting
this oral memory is essential to reverse the process of invisibility
and to break the silence imposed on the tombs of Fascism. And,
finally, these three exhumations underline the need to persevere
with community-based archaeology, even if it takes place in difficult
and sometimes hostile contexts. Excavating the truth is a powerful
weapon, since it breaks down the hegemonic story of the victors
of the war and provides communities with evidence of the crimes of
Franco. Whether they decide to acknowledge the traces unearthed is
another matter. The process of opening and disseminating these infernal graves, whether or not the victims of the reprisals appear, implicates these small rural populations of the present in their recent
past. In my opinion, this community archaeology, brave and always
controversial, never ends in failure; it achieves valuable symbolic
victories, such as the commemoration of the García Moral brothers
in the cemetery of Castroncelos, the media impact of the recovery
of the figure of O’Inverno and the identification of his murderers, or
the cathartic day of memory in Fornelas attended by the entire community. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, residents, and social and
human scientists, José, Ricardo, Jesús and Gervasio have returned
from the community of the dead to the community of the living. Our
Valencian colleagues are fighting to do the same for the thousands of
their compatriots whose remains are trodden over in the plots of the
cemetery of Paterna.
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84
This exhibition is another milestone on this road which, in many
places, has opened up only very recently – without any aid from the
State.
Replacing the original soil
after the exhumations.
Volunteers from the
Castro de San Lourenzo
site (2020) sow seeds to
regenerate the grass in
the cemetery of Fornelas.
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Xurxo M. Ayán Vila
Bibliography
Ermida Meilán, X. R. (2017) «Para nós o matar é unha honra». As Escuadras Negras de Falanxe. En X. R. Ermida Meilán, Fernández Fernández, E., X. C.
Garrido Couceiro e D. Pereira González (coords.): Os nomes do terror. Galiza
1936: os verdugos que nunca existiron: 63-80. Sermos Galiza.
González Ruibal, A. (2022) «Las grandes fosas de la Guerra Civil no están en las
cunetas». Público, 11 de septiembre de 2022.
[page-n-87]
ANTHRO
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OPOLOGY
91
Where does memory live?
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
113
Objects and memories: the material dimension
of the mass graves
Zira Box Varela
127
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass
graves
Aitzpea Leizaola
145
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary
exhumation process: possibilities and tensions
in the fight for memory(ies)
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
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88
Postcards sent from prison
by Francisco Sanz Herráez to his family
Grave 127, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
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89
Glasses, pencil and stamps
Individual 124, Grave 115; Individual 99, Grave 127, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
[page-n-91]
Knitted sweater, with a necktie of the same fabric,
belonging to Francisco Peiró Roger
Grave 111, Paterna. Donated by the Peiró family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
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91
Where does memory live?
Maria-José García Hernandorena
& Isabel Gadea i Peiró
CURATORS OF THE EXHIBITION «2.238. EL CEMENTERI DE PATERNA:
LLOC DE PERPETRACIÓ I MEMÒRIA»
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92
Where does memory live?
Where does memory live? Or more specifically: Where is the memory
of Francoist repression and where has it been? Those questions are
central to the discourse of the exhibition: “2238. El cementeri de Paterna: memòria i perpetració” [2238. Paterna Cemetery: Memory and
Perpetration]. Based on ethnographic research and taking Paterna
cemetery as our case study with more than one hundred mass graves
located there, this site is both exemplary and pragmatic to reply to
those questions1.
Within this framework, this exhibition provides a fundamental
tool to understand the emergence of a number of contemporary
claims by Valencian society, those who lost everything after the end
of the Spanish Civil War due to repression for their political ideology. They had lost it all, but they never lost their memory. Despite
the efforts by the Dictatorship to physically and symbolically bury
everything that challenged its legitimacy, a thread, strengthened
generation by generation, has kept it alive and given continuity to it
through time.
There are three spaces where we can find the memory of Franco’s
repression associated with Paterna cemetery: the cemetery itself, the
mass graves and the homes of the victims. In addition to the territorial limits, the material culture associated with repression, i.e.,, the
objects, comprise mobilising agents of memorial processes, projecting voices that are capable of affecting individual and social reality
(Bustamante, J., 2014). Hence, and continuing with this author,
while these processes remain inside those places of memory, the objects are activators and the actions and practices are activated through
and by them.
The exposition is a diachronic journey of voices, interests, politics and ways of how the repression was felt and expressed in a confrontation of spaces. On the one hand, the private, closed off, claustrophobic places: a mass grave, a chest of drawers or a cupboard in
the house of the victims of reprisals, who safeguard and transmit an
inconclusive dowry or mourning. On the other hand, an open, public
space: Paterna cemetery. In addition to these spaces, everything they
either contain and/or have contained in the past is striking, comprising a game of different mirrors and journeys that explain why part of
Valencian society still feels indebted to memory. A debt that entails
recovering the bodies of their relatives, but also public recognition
through repairs for injustice, economic and moral compensation,
among others.
Approaching the exhumation of a mass grave today and its current impact on society is also the subject matter of this exhibition,
through a perspective that goes beyond the deep hole in the ground
1
This text is accompanied
by images that are interwoven into the events that
occurred and are a significant part of the story. The
images were produced in
different contexts and for
different purposes, and
so their format, and their
quality, may vary. Each
one of them was vital to
the research necessary
to make this exhibition
possible.
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2
Let us remember that
between 1939 and 1956,
out of the 2238 people put
before the firing squads in
Paterna, 2219 were men,
and only 19 were women.
Most of those women
were murdered because
of their active participation in the 2nd Republic
and/or during the Civil
War. Many of them were
teachers and members
of the militia who held
public offices traditionally assigned to men, and
their political involvement cost them their
lives. In addition to those
women, many others
suffered social, economic
and sexual repression
that the regime reserved
for the “reds”. In the latter
case, it was often those
women who, despite not
having transgressed the
domestic scope that was
assigned to their gender,
they were slandered,
shaved and humiliated
through because of the
fact they were related to a
“red”. They were mothers,
sisters and colleagues
of the victims, all those
first generation women
who made the cemetery a
feminine place.
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
comprising the grave itself. The exhibition widens our outlook on
the lives of the people whose days ended in those graves and their
families, to take a closer look at the objects and places that have been
transmitted over time, and which are witnesses, bearers and transmitters of their memories.
These dynamics cannot be understood without a gender approach: whereas the mass graves in Paterna are mainly masculine2,
the cemetery and the places where the memories of repression are
kept and transmitted are mainly feminine. This inheritance has been
able to take place partly thanks to the objects kept in the households
of the victims, held and hidden by the families as the evocative materiality of the bodies they were unable to receive to end their mourning,
and transformed in “profane altars” (López, J and Picazo, L., 2011).
When interpreting the cemetery and the mass graves in Paterna
from an ethnographic perspective, in terms of gender, we put emotions, feelings, experiences and the subjectivity of the narratives at
the centre, and we try to respond to those who still question the relevance of their claims.
The cemetery
It was the inside of the places and spaces where repairing and commemorative activities were traditionally performed for the victims of
traumatic events and past conflicts, in order to vindicate, repair, honour and remember them, as mentioned earlier. In the case of the Region of Valencia, Paterna cemetery and the mass graves in and around
it (the firing squad wall, the road of Blood) has become one of those
powerfully paradigmatic, symbolic places to observe and analyse processes of remembrance and homage to all those who were executed
during Franco’s dictatorship between 1939 and 1956.
Furthermore, a cemetery is more than just somewhere where
the dead are laid to rest. It is a place where a number of rituals are
performed, understood as collective acts that lead to cohesion and
balance within a community, where social relations and actions take
place over time as a reflection of the surrounding society. In the case
of a cemetery such as Paterna, where there are over one hundred mass
graves dating back to the days of repression by the Francoist dictatorship following the war, those relations, interactions and actions
are even more poignant. They ask us what we should expect of a full
democracy as citizens, but not only that, those questions are asked to
us as social investigators involved in subjects on democratic memory
and human rights.
Likewise, it is the place where exhumation processes of over
one hundred mass graves takes place, following the established
[page-n-95]
94
Where does memory live?
scientific/forensic and archaeological protocols with the aim of repairing the pain and anguish of the families of the victims, returning
the exhumed mortal remains of their loved ones to them. From 2016
onwards3, in response to the demands by relatives of the victims, exhumations began in this town in the l’Horta region, financed through
public funds by means of a policy of subsidies to defray the costs of
exhumation of the mass graves. The objective of the exhumation process is to identify the 2238 executed victims and return their remains
to the relatives who ask for them so that they can be laid to rest and
honoured wherever they wish.
In this volume, regarding the case of Paterna Cemetery, the anthropologist, María-Laura Martín Chiappe from the Autonomous
University of Madrid (UAM) proposes “Revisiting the contemporary
exhumation process of the victims of Francoism, describing some of
the layers of memory that link the memorial stages and the practices
inherent to each of them, but also the possibilities and limitations,
continuities and tensions that surround them”.
The role of women in the cemetery becomes fundamental, and
even today it is barely acknowledged4. In the specific case of this site,
one of the main particularities differentiating it from other places
where executions were perpetrated is the fact that it is a site of memory from the very moment of the executions, thanks to the women
and their open mourning practices that successive generations have
inherited.5 We therefore uphold, as mentioned above, that while the
mass graves are a masculinised space, the cemetery itself is feminised.
In order to analyse the biography of this place of memory, we
have mapped the presence, struggles and resistance that took place
around the mass graves over all these years. As for feminine presence,
there is a gender genealogy linked to the cemetery dating back to
the attendance of women from 1939, when the first mass graves appeared. The appearance of bunches of flowers during the contemporary exhumation process is evidence of the footprint of the first generation of women, the mothers, partners and sisters of the victims,
many of whom went to the cemetery on hearing about the fate of
their relatives and loved ones, with the intention of taking their bodies away and giving them a dignified burial6. They have never stopped
going there since then.
The repression of these families also included the prohibition of
any outward demonstration of mourning. That is why the presence
of those mourning women filling the graves every 1st of November
is a symbol of resistance against the Regime, a fight against oblivion. That is how it was interpreted by the fascist authorities who
tried to evict them, and that fact is kept in the collective memory of
3
Following the example
of a wider movement in
the Spanish State in 2000
started by Emilio Silva,
who demanded exhumation and identification
of his grandfather and 12
other victims executed
by the members of the
Falange movement and
thrown into a ditch in the
roadside in Priaranza del
Bierzo (León) in 1936.
4
There are few places in
Spain where that role of
women transmitting and
keeping the memory of
Francoist repression is
acknowledged. The most
relevant is the Barranca
Memorial in La Rioja
region.
5
The analysis of custody
and transmission of
memory allows us to differentiate between three
different generations of
women. Regarding this
subject, we furthered our
ethnographic investigation (García & Gadea,
2021) and also the text
where we reconstructed
the female family trees related to the mass graves in
Paterna cemetery (Gadea
& García, 2022).
6
Only a small minority
managed to take the
bodies of their relatives to
their respective hometowns or bury them
individually in a niche in
the cemetery itself.
[page-n-96]
95
Bunches of flowers left
inside the mass graves in
Paterna, exhumed by the
teams of archaeologists.
Grave 115. Widows, sons
and daughters of those
executed in Paterna
cemetery. Undated.
Photograph loaned by the
Pastor family.
Grave 135. Widow and
grand-daughters of an
executed person in Paterna cemetery. Year 1959
Photograph loaned by the
Chofre family.
Grave 112. Widows, sons
and daughters of some
of the people executed in
Paterna cemetery. Undated. Photograph loaned by
the Gómez family.
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
[page-n-97]
Where does memory live?
Paterna cemetery. Furthermore, they did everything within their
power to appropriate the graves, to dignify them and bring their
loved ones out of anonymity from a hole in the ground covered with
soil and lime. Despite the financial struggles of the victims of Francoism, many of those women made and placed the first memorials,
using humble ceramic tiles. The violence against the “reds” also
targeted their memorials, which the Regime’s guards deliberately
destroyed. Nevertheless, the women did not give up and they relentlessly replaced them over and over again.
The mourning without closure and the rituals associated with
it were inherited by the next generation of daughters. Many of the
women in that generation drew up new claims surrounding the
graves, as is the case of the fight to declare them exempt of payment
and to dignify and maintain that place of memory. Those women who
went to Paterna throughout their lives saw how the political parties
and trade unions joined together to honour the victims of Francoism following the death of Franco, by erecting memorials or holding
different acts of remembrance. Hence, on 1st November, new dates
were added to the memorial calendar, such as the 14th of April and
the 1st of May.
Granddaughters and great-granddaughters took over the tradition of visiting the cemetery on those dates. Furthermore, as
promoters of contemporary repairing practices, several procedures
have been implemented that directly affect Paterna cemetery. As
mentioned earlier, the exhumation processes are the practices that
are most in the public eye, and in these cases the direct consequence
on the cemetery is the opening of the graves and the many effects
that this entails, at family, association, scientific, political, media,
social and cultural levels (García & Gadea, 2021). Unfortunately,
the goal pursued through these practices of recovering and identifying the bodies buried in those graves places emphasis on the
cemetery as the place where executions were perpetrated (mostly
targeting men), rather than a place of remembrance (mostly involving women).
Consequently, from our perspective, it is indispensable to
narrate the biography of the cemetery (Gadea & Garcia, 2022) as
a place that is explained through the acts of the living. In the exhibition at the Museu Valencià d’Etnologia different materials are
displayed that bear witness to the history of the cemetery as a place
of resistance and struggles, of family remembrance, but also collective, associative and political remembrance.
96
[page-n-98]
97
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Grave 100. Granddaughters and great-granddaughters of victims.
Photograph of the authors.
The mass graves and objects that are painful to see
Lime
Soil
Bones
Spherical projectile cartridge (10 mm)
7 mm Mauser projectile
Thirty-two wooden buttons
Seven bone buttons
Thirty-three metal buttons
Seventeen Bakelite buttons
Nine nacre buttons
A wire spool
Two alpargata sandal soles
A pocket lighter
A silver spoon
Two penknives
Four trouser buckles
Two belts with buckles
Two pieces to fasten clothing
Four pencil leads
Three gold teeth
Fragments of a truss
Fragments of a zip
Fragments of alpargata sandal soles
[page-n-99]
Where does memory live?
Fragments of clothing
Fragments of a pill box
Fragments of a wallet
This list of objects is just an example of the type of items that
appear along with the bones when bodies are exhumed from a mass
grave in Paterna. In this case, they are remains of twenty-one men
executed by firing squad on 2nd November 1939 after the end of the
war, and buried in a mass grave, grave 100 located in the first quarter
to the left of the cemetery.
In 2021 the Museu Valencià d’Etnologia started to show interest
in the cemetery on commission by the Valencia Council, and particularly in regard to the exhumations of the mass graves of the Francoist
Regime. The museum started to assess and consider the importance
of the objects and other types of materials associated with the bone
remains which have been unearthed since the scientific/forensic exhumation processes of the Paterna mass graves began in 2016. That
is how the process to collect these materials started, a process taking
us closer to the families, to the teams of archaeologists working on
exhumation of the graves and the public administration who holds
custody of those items in view of the legal circumstances at the moment. It is interesting to observe the process through which the items
change from very little being known about them, through conservation conditions and the unease they cause by putting them in plain
view and turning them into heritage and museum exhibits.
In this paper we can find the text by the anthropologist from
UPV/EHU, Aitzpea Leizaola, which deals with this subject in other
places around Spain and through her experience with the Aranzadi
Sciences Society. To quote her: “The nature of those objects, their
status, and their future destination are the central theme of this text
to further discuss the material side of memory, the need for a heritage framework to tackle the subject of transmission of those objects
within the context of exhumations”.
The exhumed items bear witness to the terrible events of the
past. We are able to hold dialogue on subjects as varied as the prison
conditions of the people sentenced to death under Franco’s regime,
their hopes, daily life in the prison (health, hygiene, how they dressed
and their footwear, writing, how they spent their time when waiting).
They humanise the victims and present them as people not so far removed or different from us, not the “red horde” with whom we have
nothing in common, but rather normal, ordinary people who ate,
washed, wrote, read and played, and who were also made to suffer.
98
[page-n-100]
99
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
The materials are hard to conserve, exhibit and explain. They represent the nearest, direct presence of the victims of Francoism, and
bear clear witness to the violence they suffered, and once again we are
shocked by that horror.
Loan by a family of objects from a mass grave at
the Ethnology Museum of
Valencia.
Collection of items
from the mass graves in
Paterna cemetery by the
Ethnology Museum of
Valencia.
Boxes where the items
exhumed from the mass
graves in Paterna are
stored. Valencia Council
Warehouse, Bétera.
Trays where the items
exhumed from the mass
graves in Paterna are
classified and conserved.
Valencia Council Warehouse, Bétera.
[page-n-101]
Where does memory live?
Houses and objects of mourning
Tears
Kisses
Silences
Seventeen photographs of executed victims
Six family photographs
Three marriage photographs
Three photographs of sons and daughters
A group photograph at an assembly
A medallion with a photograph of an executed victim
Six birth certificates
Six death certificates
Ten prison sentences
Five summary judgements
Eight municipal acts in respective villages
A newspaper cut-out
Two political party membership cards
An esparto cord with five knots (one for each daughter)
Esparto alpargata sandals in children’s size made in the prison
A handkerchief embroidered in the prison
Three wooden boxes made in the prison
A cigarette lighter
A pipe
A paper with a chess board drawn on it made in the prison
A fountain pen
Wooden tags with names
Two blankets
A bar of soap
A policeman’s personal diary
Forty-six letters and postcards from the prison
Eleven farewell letters
Five pieces of clothing worn during execution
A bullet
This list encompasses the objects related to twenty-one men who
were executed on 2nd of November 1939 and thrown into grave 100
in Paterna cemetery. The items have been kept by their families since
then. It is only a small sample of mourning objects, those that were
hidden in tin and cardboard boxes, cupboards and drawers, between
woven sheets, silence and tears.
100
[page-n-102]
101
7
“Hence, along with the
figure of the “Angel of
the home” the role of
“Guardian of memory”
goes hand in hand with
it, in charge of keeping
the memories, histories,
objects, photographs and
everything else related to
remembrance” (Gadea y
Garcia, 2022:218).
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
As can be seen, many of these objects are the same as those exhumed with the bones, lime and soil that covered the bodies for over
eighty years. The difference between objects that hurt and objects
of mourning is related to the rituals and practices that accompany
one and the other over the years, which we try to explain through
disciplines such as social anthropology. Therefore, while the objects
that hurt represent the bodies of the victims and the impact that
contemporary opening up of the graves has over eighty years later,
the mourning objects materialise and trap the open mourning that
was passed down from female generation to female generation over
the years.
In order to understand the importance and function of these
objects, we need to look at the everlasting mourning of the families
of the victims on the one hand, and on the other, the gender socialisation model on which the duty to mourn fell, particularly on the women. Firstly, it has historically always been women who have taken on
the role of material and symbolic upholding of the family, in accordance with the gender system, prototypical of the patriarchal culture.
Along with the housework and care for the offspring, the remembrance and custody practices of memory are part of the knowledge
alleged to be inherent to the feminine sex. In other words, biological,
cultural and symbolic reproduction is considered to be the responsibility of women (Troncoso and Piper, 2015)7. Part of the symbolic sustenance of the family includes keeping the memory of the dead alive
and being in charge of the associated rituals and practices, hence the
link between gender and mourning.
Secondly, and on the basis of the above, the murder of the victims of Francoism brought about changes to the rituals of death that
were practised at the time. Indeed, the families could not prepare for
the death of their loved ones (the preliminary stage encompassing
practices prior to passing away, such as prevention), nor could they
prepare for a dignified burial (the liminal stage including death, wake
and burial). Moreover, the culture imposed by the perpetrators forbade any outwards manifestation of mourning and cult by the “reds”,
which would usually be a part of the later stage of mourning. The
impossibility of passing through the different stages to guarantee a
“dignified death” led to open mourning as a symptom of an “undignified death”.
The women, mothers, partners and sisters of the victims, were
socially, economically and sexually repressed due to the links or relationship with the victim, and they disobeyed the prohibition of showing mourning and honouring their loved ones, insofar as the ritual
mourning practices that they were able to cling to. Hence, post-liminal
[page-n-103]
102
Where does memory live?
rituals became practices of resistance against the Regime, through
their inconclusive mourning in subversive, subtle, private and daily
mourning.
Among the resistance to forget, on the one hand is the fact that
they kept their mourning to the privacy of their homes and were denied participation in any social acts. Silence and sadness became their
distinguishing features, and the fact that they would be in mourning
until the end of their days. Although this is also related to rituals comprising part of the culture of death at the time, on the other hand we
can also find rituals that acquired greater significance owing to the
context of an “undignified death”. In this case, the practices involving
objects are of particular note.
Pieces such as those on the mourning objects list ended up becoming “profane altars”8 (López García, J. 2011) which were sacred
for their families, insofar as they represented the memory of death
(Fig. Page 108). Indeed, the first generation women (mothers, partners and sisters) would take those objects out of their hiding places in
the privacy of their bedrooms and pray and cry over them, with this
ritual helping them to shed their imposed silence. To quote Cate-Arries: “the significance of the objects of memory in a cult of fear, in
which the silent witnesses of the past managed to conserve the memory of the deceased when the crying relative ‘was afraid to speak’”
(2016: 140). The fact that those family amulets were hidden is a sign
of the repression and fear that those silent women suffered, who hid
those small treasures as part of the strategy of silence required to survive and protect their descendants.
From among the pieces displayed in the domestic altars are
photographs, which acquire great value insofar as they substitute
the body of the absent loved one. Many of those photographs are
still kept by the families today resulting from photo-montages and
enlargements (Moreno, J. 2020). Using the bromoil process, some
of the photographs brought together all the members of the family
despite their physical absence. Likewise, these montages permitted
dressing and shrouding the bodies who could not otherwise be given
a decent burial, at least in the photographs.
We can also find documents bearing witness to the fatal outcome
of their relatives, such as death certificates, prison sentences, summary trials and the documents on investigations into criminal offences
during Francoism, known as the “Causa General”. It must be said that
these documents are included as pieces of the objects of memory
passed on to the third generation of relatives. In other words, those
papers were not a part of the domestic altars of grandmothers and
mothers. Searching through the archives and requesting this type of
8
“Sometimes those thin,
delicate objects became
one of the items which,
along with the last
belongings of the relatives
(letters, scarves, packets
of cigarettes, etc.) were
used to make a type of
profane altar where they
were kept in memory
of those men” (López
García, y Pizarro, 2011:
580).
[page-n-104]
103
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Blas Llopis and Trinidad
Sanchis with their son,
Blas. Drawing made from
a photograph. Loaned by
the Llopis family.
Vicent Coscollá in a photo-montage with his wife,
Leonor Ferrer. Loaned by
the Coscollá family.
Communist Party membership card belonging to
Juan Luis Pomares. 1938.
Loaned by the Pomares
family.
material is part of the procedures and processes that the granddaughters and great-granddaughters have to carry out for exhumation,
since those items are considered proof that their grandfathers were
actually buried in those graves.
Those documents are part of the perpetrator culture, and as such
they have to be placed in context. Reading documents of that type
without considering the reference framework can sometimes lead to
anguish and unease among the relatives. In this sense, we believe that
the success of imposing the perpetrator culture as the only one and the
lack of democratic teaching regarding the repression imposed by
Franco’s Regime leads to those feelings when the information is taken
at undisputed face value
In regard to the documents that accredit political militancy and
participation by their relatives, they also tell us about the bravery and
courage by the women who kept those items, since in a context of repression, keeping documents of that type could be dangerous.
[page-n-105]
Where does memory live?
104
Amidst the coldness of those documents we also find the warmth
of the objects that the victims crafted for their partners, sons and
daughters from the prison. Along with these prison-crafted objects,
the everyday, common objects that they used on a daily basis in the
prison can also be found, such as a bar of soap, a cigarette lighter,
which become priceless for the families after the death of the victims.
A handkerchief embroidered in the prison by
Salvador Gomar. Loaned
by the Gomar family.
[page-n-106]
105
Children's alpargata
sandals made by Salvador
Gomar while in prison for
his son. Loaned by the
Gomar family.
Details of a wooden box
carved in prison by Blas
Llopis. Loaned by the
Llopis family.
A chess board drawn on
a piece of paper by Blas
Llopis while in prison.
Loaned by the Llopis
family.
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
[page-n-107]
Where does memory live?
106
The correspondence exchanged by the victims and their families
is worthy of a special mention (López, J. and Villalta, A., 2015; Sierra,
V., 2016). Through censored postcards or letters that managed to slip
through the prison control system, the social function of writing from
prisons had two goals: to keep in touch with the family and to resist.
The last farewell letters or “chapel” letters add some nuances to the
said function, since they bear witness to events. Beyond the distribution of assets, those final words by the victims expressed their moral
values and ethics that they wanted to pass down to the next generations, and also the need of the family to honour their memories, and
through that, their innocence.
Letter from José Morató
to his parents. Censored.
1939. Loaned by the
Morató family.
[page-n-108]
107
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
Page 4/4 of the farewell
letter from Vicente
Alemany to his wife,
Consuelo. Loaned by the
Alemany family.
Finally, the fragments of clothing that the victims were wearing
when they were executed, or the bullets that put an end to their lives
are objects which talk to us about the presence of women at Paterna
cemetery from the early days of the mass graves, in addition to bearing witness to their undignified end.
Those objects were also significant for the next generation, the
generation of the sons and daughters of mourning. The age or just
how aware those boys and girls were when their fathers were executed
would condition their knowledge of the facts and their understanding
of their mothers’ silence. Indeed, regardless of those factors, all of
them would suffer the stigma of being a son or daughter of a “red”.
[page-n-109]
Where does memory live?
As mentioned earlier, it was the women who kept and transmitted
the memory of their loved ones, and therefore it was also the women
who inherited and received it. It was the daughters who inherited
the silence of their mothers, along with the mourning items and the
commitment and responsibility of maintaining family memory. In
short, the daughters took over the open mourning and its rituals as an
unavoidable legacy. This link between memory, mourning and gender
means we are able to talk about mourning as a part of the dowry of the
“reds”. The symbolic burden of this association becomes stronger and
more explicit when dealing with the items of mourning that were kept
with the dowry, such as embroidered sheets.
It would not be until the third generation, the one known as the
“post-memory generation” (Hirsch, M. 2021), of granddaughters and
great-granddaughters when these items of mourning, and the memories of their grandfathers, were publicly displayed and given places outside of the tin boxes and the drawers where their grandmothers and
mothers had kept them. As we can see, the movements and transfer of
those mourning items are connected to the transmission of memory
through the different generations, in the same way as each generation
is related to memory and materiality in a different way. Regarding
transmission, we must point out that there is a generational leap that
on many occasions means that the first generation grandmothers are
able to speak to their granddaughters about things that they kept from
their own daughters. This link between granddaughters and grandmothers emphasises the weight of the effects on vicarious, indirect
memory, a characteristic feature of the post-memory generation.
108
Small box container/
altar where the items
belonging to Juan Luis
Pomares are kept. The
items include some pieces of the clothing that the
gravedigger of Paterna,
Leoncio Badía kept for
possible future identification of the bodies. Loaned
by the Pomares family.
[page-n-110]
109
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
In many cases, this generation of women convert the open family
mourning in a spark of activism for memory. Indeed, we can see that
on the one hand many of them inherited their political and social
engagement from their grandfathers during the Transition period
and the early years of Democracy, and on the other, the inheritance
from their grandmothers has led them to seek repair for the harm
caused by Francoist repression. In these cases, they feel responsible
for restoring the memory of their grandfathers, making the use of
rights that their grandmothers, aunts and/or mothers did not have
(Egizabal, M. 2017).
T-shirts of several associations designed for
the Paterna mass graves
exhumation. Loaned by
Teresa Llopis (Grave 100
Association Platform) and
Daniel Galán (Grave 128).
The relationship that this generation establishes with the mourning items also has its own peculiarities. As we have already seen, the
repairing practices that are carried out and which place peripheral
memories in the limelight, bring out new documents that are added
to the items already comprising the family treasures. There is also
another feature of this generation which is that the granddaughters
are who publicly display those objects, the photographs in particular,
even at public events, in the press or on social media. Through these
actions, those objects acquire another dimension beyond the family
sphere, insofar as they comprise solid grounds on which public memorial vindication is based.
[page-n-111]
Where does memory live?
Even so, the sacredness acquired by the profane altars made by
previous generations of women is still valid for the third generation,
and some nuances are included regarding their materiality, feel and
encounter with the past. The author describes it as follows: “the objects are particularly susceptible to invoking sensitivities, since their
haptic properties connect them to our touch (they were touched in
the past; they have been touched by the passing of time and often
bear traces of it, of that time span, which remains in them and forms
a part of them” (Rosón, M. 2021:8). In that same sense, we could
say that the particularity of vicarious memory of the post-memorial
generation, who did not directly experience the events of the past or
personally know their grandfathers, makes their meeting with the
past through objects that their ancestors touched and used, more
significant. Likewise, the importance of the attachment that memory
is linked to also has the same effects on the objects, in that they were
held in the hands of their grandfathers, aunts and mothers, who caressed, touched and safeguarded them.
Exhumation of the mass graves dating back to Franco’s dictatorship has become one of the main repairing practices. Indeed, beyond
the political, economic and social factors that facilitate the opening
up of the mass graves, if it had not been for the custody and conservation by the previous generations of women, the processes started
by granddaughters and great-granddaughters would never have been
possible. In the same way as intimate, family memories have brought
about collective public repairing practices, we can also claim that at
the same time, the mourning objects are the things that have brought
about the unearthing of the items that appear during contemporary
exhumation, the objects of pain.
A more general outlook on the importance of the material culture from a social sciences perspective is given in this volume by Zira
Box from Valencia University, who highlights their potential to establish a discourse on memory within the framework of new materiality.
By way of conclusion, this exhibition puts memory in the limelight, and in this case, it also means putting women in the same
limelight. Those women are the people who are truly responsible for
bringing the histories of the victims of Francoist repression to us
today, for bringing those histories out of the mass graves of Paterna cemetery. The same women who established domestic practices
and rituals to fight against oblivion through those objects. The same
women who have made the site of perpetration, a site of memory too.
It is in them that memory lives on.
110
[page-n-112]
111
Maria-José García Hernandorena & Isabel Gadea i Peiró
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Bustamante, Javiera. (2014). Las voces de los objetos: vestigios, memorias y patrimonios
en la gestión y conmemoración del pasado. Tesis doctoral, UB, Barcelona.
Cate-Arries, Francie. (2016). «De puertas para adentro es donde había que llorar:
El duelo, la resistencia simbólica y la memoria popular en los testimonios
sobre la represión franquista», Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 17(2): 1-30.
Egizabal, Maribel. (2017). «Algunas aportaciones desde la antropología al estudio de la memoria històrica», Kobie Serie de Antropología Cultural, 20: 101-112.
Gadea i Peiró, Isa, & García Hernandorena, Mª José. (2022). «Memorias, genealogías femeninas y lugares de perpetración. Etnografía de las exhumaciones
contemporáneas de fosas del franquismo en el cementerio de Paterna (Valencia)», Thémata. Revista de Filosofía, 65, pages 203-225.
García Hernandorena, Mª José, y Gadea i Peiró, Isa. (2021). Etnografia d’una exhumació. El cas de la Fossa 100 del cementeri de Paterna. Valencia. Diputación de
Valencia.
Hirsch, Marianne. (2021). La generación de la posmemoria. Escritura y cultura visual
después del holocausto. Madrid. Editorial Carpe Noctem.
López García, Julián, & Pizarro Ruiz, Luis F. (2011). Cien años para la libertad:
Historia y memoria del socialismo en Puertollano. Ciudad Real. Ediciones Puertollano.
López García, Julián & Villalta Luna, Alfonso. (2015). «Cartas y cuentos desde las
cárceles de Franco». Vínculos de Historia, 4, 147-173.
Moreno Andrés, Jorge. (2020). El duelo revelado: La vida social de las fotografías
familiares de las víctimas del franquismo. CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas).
Rosón, María. (2021). «La memoria de las cosas: Cultura material y vida cotidiana durante el franquismo». Kamchatka. Revista de análisis cultural, 18:5-14.
Sierra Blas, Verónica. (2016). Cartas presas. La correspondència carcelaria en la Guerra
Civil y el franquismo. Madrid. Marcial Pons.
Troncoso, Leyla i Piper, Isabel. (2015). «Género y memoria: articulaciones críticas y feministas». Athenea Digital. Revista de Pensamiento e Investigación Social,
15 (1): 65-90.
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Small bottle containing a note with personal details
Manuel Lluesma Masia, niche 645. Paterna
Manuel Lluesma Masia family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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UNIVERSITY OF VALENCIA
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
“What is done with the objects belonging to the dead?” The Mexican
author, Cristina Rivera Garza, asked that question in “Liliana’s Invincible Summer”, the book dedicated to her sister, a victim of femicide
in 1990, whose belongings remained in boxes for thirty years, “in
sight, but out of reach” in a part of a wardrobe.
What to do with objects belonging to the dead is a question that
also needs to be addressed in the context of exhumation. What to do
with those photographs, letters, pieces of cloth or everyday belongings of the victims of Franco’s repression, whose bodies were thrown
into mass graves, is actually a question that has always been there:
What use were they to their widows, mothers and sisters who kept
them? Who would inherit them afterwards and what can those objects teach us about violence, remembrance and the memories they
contain?
Beyond the restorative work involved in recovering the bodies
and the forensic work helping to measure the nature of repression by
Franco’s regime, the mass graves have a material side to them due to
the objects surrounding them, such as those that have been brought
to light by the analyses from cultural perspectives, including the focus
on new materialisms. They are important at least for the five reasons
explained as follows:
1. The objects have materiality.
First of all, the objects are important because they confer a minimum
amount of the necessary materiality and physicality to the absence
of loved ones in order to overcome their loss. In the context of the
explicit disregard that Franco’s dictatorship had for the victims,
first through concealing their bodies in mass graves, and afterwards
through denying any form of rituals and externalising mourning by
their families, the recovered objects were an intermediate stage to
alleviate the absence of the victims.
Concerning this matter, photographs of the dead are a paradigmatic example of this, which were kept by the relatives, and to quote
Jorge Moreno, they permitted problematizing relationships with
people who were no longer there. The author goes on to say: “The
disappearance of the body makes the memory of the missing person
fade, whereas photographs remind us of the appearance of their bodies, the look that we would end up forgetting without an image. That
is why relatives chose photographs, when they were available, as a
form of speaking to the dead, since the clarity of portraits is perceived
as the place where conversations with those no longer among us can
take place more clearly, more transparently, a direct connection to
those who have gone” (Moreno, 2021: 3).
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Photographs bring presence through an image, but not only this,
they are not only seen, but they are also touched, felt, cherished and
even smelled and therefore they become objects in themselves (Edwards and Hart, 2005). It is then that approaches that have shown interest in materiality gain interest, as pointed out by Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost (2010: 3) in their introduction on the perspective of
new materialisms. According to the anthropologist Michael Schiffer,
we are living in an undeniably material world and interaction with
the objects and artefacts around us may be the irrefutable empirical
reality of our species: what other animals do without any mediation,
humans do with the constant interference of artefacts (Infold, 2012).
On the basis of this premise, it is therefore hardly surprising that the
absence of those who have left us acquire a form of life that they were
denied while living, through the objects recovered by their relatives,
and these objects can also be touched, felt and handled (Rosón, 2021:
8). A rather poignant example of this is found in the research by Zoe
de Kerangat (2020) on exhumations carried out during the Spanish
transition period. At a time when DNA identification procedures had
not been developed, the simple fact of recovering and having some
bones, even if one was not sure whether or not they belonged to the
relative in question, served as some comfort for the relatives to bring
some type of closure to their mourning.
2. Objects are not passive items.
Objects are not merely passive items in which to store memory, but
rather they are artefacts that have to be relived so that those who care
for them can establish their specific link with the past that they represent from their specific present (Jones, 2007: Chapter 1). In this
sense, objects are also important because they are not simple inert,
external things, but rather they have agency insofar as they are able to
demand and question whoever approaches them whilst also affecting
and conditioning the lives and actions of the people who conserve
them. Use of the verb “affect” is common in work on new materialisms, attempting to emphasise with that word that the world affects
us, hurts us or heals us, for example, and it does so materially (Bennett, 2010; Labanyi, 2021).
The agency that the objects of the victims of Franco’s dictatorship
show have perhaps reached their maximum expression through the
emotions that they invoke in the people who safeguard them. If
the relationship by Cristina Rivera Garza with the belongings of her
murdered sister was outside her ability to retrieve them, what feelings
does one have after having now recovered them so long after the tragedy and knowledge about the tragedy? That was something she asked
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
116
Postcard written from
prison by José Morató.
The writing is now illegible, washed away by the
tears of the person reading it; the tears represent
the pain of several generations of women. Loaned
by the Morató family.
regarding the testimonials of the relatives of the bodies in the graves,
compiled through different pieces of ethnographic work, highlighting the consolation that was found through them. And how now to
mourn in public what was denied to them in private, that intimacy of
defeat? to quote Francisco Ferrándiz (2014: 70), which worked as a
catalyst for feelings (Cate-Arries, 2016: Garcia Hernandorena and
Gadea i Peiró, 2021).
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Objects act by transporting and invoking emotions, but also
reactions in families. It is interesting to see how the subject of custody
and possession has led to different behaviours and responses among
the different generations who have safeguarded the objects. Whereas
it caused silence due to fear and pain in the first generation, namely
the widows, mothers or sisters, who initially collected the objects,
in more contemporary generations, namely granddaughters and
great-granddaughters, the objects have led to a wish to finally place
the memories that were kept in private for so long, in a public space
(Aragüete-Toribio, 2017). In the intermediate period, the generation
of the daughters of the victims inherited the silence of their mothers,
but from a position outside of direct pain, but rather a pain that was
passed on by their mothers. It is consequently a generation in a rather
vague position, as poignantly highlighted by the film director Chantal
Akerman (2020) in her short monologue “Family in Brussels”, a
soliloquy written to give a voice to her Jewish, Polish mother who
survived Auschwitz, in an attempt to give words to something that
had until then been shrouded in silence, by describing her childhood.
1
The concept of sexualised
violence is a subject that
has been discussed by the
French scholar of Hispanic culture Maude Joly
(2008) to showcase the
different forms of violence
that men and women
were subjected to during
the war and Franco’s dictatorship. Joly’s research
has mainly focussed
on the violence against
Republican women.
3. Objects tell us about the gender of memory
“The Gender of Memories”, is how Elizabeth Jelin (2002) titled one
of the chapters of her book “The Work of Memory”. In that chapter,
the Argentinian sociologist points out that gender has not only been
present in repression of the Southern Cone dictatorships, there being evidence that violence did not have the same impact on men and
women, and also different specifics, but remembrance and how the
atrocities are remembered is also different: whereas men were more
prone to showing it in public, women mostly channelled their memories within the scope of family relationships, taking on the role of
“living for others” and “bearers of memory” in the family circle, as
per the commonly used expression.
Jelin points out that the Argentinian or Chilean dictatorships
were not much different from Franco’s dictatorship. Indeed, just as
in our case, there is evidence that violence was sexualised,1 and a gender dimension can also be established in regard to memory: whereas
the mass graves were mostly filled with male victims, the cemeteries
and conservation of memory was essentially something for women
(García Hernandorena & Gadea i Peiró, 2022).
The foregoing claim entails the understanding that it was mainly
women who safeguarded the memories of the victims, as mentioned
earlier. In regard to this, the objects are once again a key factor to
rebuild those stories of mourning and pain, dictatorship and repression of women, and which run the risk of being sidelined, along with
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
A woman’s high-heeled
shoes. Individual 23,
Grave 115, Paterna. ETNO
Democratic Memory
Collection. Photo: Eloy
Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
the memory of the victims. The moving of these objects therefore
becomes important again, because they help us to understand and
delve into “the many lives that the powers at large made invisible and
silenced”.2
The fact is that the objects invite us to listen to the silences of
those widows or sisters who held on to the little that was left of their
loved ones inside the protective walls of their homes. As described
by Jo Labanyi (2009) following the investigations into fascism by
the Italian historian, Luisa Passerini, those silences were not a form
of forgetting nor did they entail any form of conformism, but rather
they revealed how veiled, subversive mourning was lived which impels us to acknowledge the agency, understood as the ability to decide
and act, by a generation of downtrodden women who were more than
just victims.
The idea of “subversive mourning” is wonderfully set out in
the detailed ethnography by the anthropologists Maria Jose Garcia
Hernandorena and Isabel Gadea i Peiro (2021) on mass grave 100
in Paterna cemetery. Through interviews with the victims’ relatives,
the authors stated that: “Since in public areas any form of grievance
or mourning related to those who were killed was denied, forbidden
and annihilated, the homes were the only place where this form of
2
The quote is from the
foreword written by the
Mexican author Valeria
Luiselli for the novel “The
Colour of Milk” by the
British author Nell Leyshon. The novel is about
Mary, the daughter of
an English farmer in the
early 19th century, where
she sets out her counterfactual situation, and as
Luiselli suggests in the
foreword, which histories
we would have had if so
many voiceless women,
poor, illiterate women,
had been able to tell their
stories.
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resistance could be carried out, where the women tried to keep, know
and converse. Letters, photographs and objects were key elements in
those silent, dissident rituals”.
“Subtle resistance” was the term used by the historian Zoe de
Kerangat in her research to underscore elements similar to those
observed by Garcia Hernandorena and Gadea i Peiro. Actions such
as wearing mourning attire, religious traditions such as All Saints’
Day or keeping items belonging to the victims became their form of
resistance to the brutal power that denied them almost everything.
Acknowledging that memory is genderised therefore helps us to understand the resilience of the subordinate groups, not only women,
whose memories are kept in the interspace of power (Leydesdorff et
al., 2017).
The fact that thanks to what the objects belonging to the victims
are able to express, we can see the aforementioned ability of agency
that the downtrodden women had within the context of the dictatorship in the war and then shed light on something that historians
have been insisting on for a long time: that beyond the binomial of
submission/resistance or assumption/transgression, those women
showed an array of much more complex behaviours than would be
apparent at first site, because all the structures, even the harshest
such as authoritarian systems, show a certain flexibility when accommodating them. In regard to this, the ethnographic work by Francie
Cate-Aries (2016) on mourning by the relatives of the victims of the
Dictatorship in Cadiz, is significant, precisely because it is based on
the work by the historian Ana Cabana on Galicia, using her concept
of “symbolic resistance”.
4. Inter-generational and intra-family objects.
One of the questions that the studies on memory deal with is how to
create and recreate the past in the different sociocultural contexts,
and this question is closely linked to how memories are passed down
and communicated. From this point of view, as discussed by Astrid
Erll (2011) in her work on the subject, taking families into account is
fundamental, as proved by the fact that since the early 1920’s in work
by Maurice Halbwachs, research on memory has considered the institution of the family as a fundamental agent of transmission.
Objects play a key part in the role of the family in conserving and
keeping memory alive: those remains, photographs or belongings
of the victims materialise their absence and give life to memory that
comes about in an inter-family way, as mentioned earlier. This has
been proved in the work performed on mass grave 100 in Paterna,
and also the work by Francie Cate-Arries on the victims in the Sierra
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
de Cádiz. When the researcher describes the memory that Ana Venegas has of her grandmother, Isabel, placing a white flower next to
the photograph of her grandfather who was killed in Ubrique on 15th
August 1936, or when Garcia Hernandorena and Gadea i Peiro quote
Irene Domenech, the great-granddaughter of one of those murdered
in the mass grave of Paterna, remembering how her great-grandmother slept with the letters written by her husband under her pillow.
This shows the irreplaceable role of the “bearers of memory” in conserving memory, and it also shows how memory is passed down from
mothers to daughters within the family circle.
Studies on how memories are passed down have confirmed
that the success of this transmission does not exclusively depend
on the consistency or effectiveness of what is actually passed down,
the symbolic power of the objects or the coherence and consistency
of the narrative, for example, but rather the contexts in which this
takes place are also important, i.e., the opportunity the family has to
receive the past. It is here where the detailed analyses on changing
circumstances and biographical contexts of the different generations
within the same family become important, because although the
symbolic power of letters or photographs is always the same, the conditions and possibilities that families have to integrate them in their
own lives are different.
In the above lines reference was made to the silence of the people who experienced the violence, and far from being interpreted as
passiveness, that silence should be interpreted as mourning. The subsequent generations were also referred to. First of all, reference was
made to the “daughters of mourning”, those who lost their fathers
and inherited silence, fear and the social stigma that accompanied
growing up in a dictatorship with the absence that still pained their
mothers. This was a generation which, despite not always knowing
what to do and how to face a loss for which there were no words,
several papers have referred to the confusion of that generation that
at the same time knew and did not know (Valverde Grefaell, 2014),
and took over from their mothers to take charge of the objects containing the memories of the victims. To quote García Hernandorena
and Gadea i Peiró (2022: 18), that generation of women, socialised in
the first two decades of Franco’s dictatorship in accordance with the
strict gender codes, they took it on themselves to look after the memories of their loved ones in their families: taking on the “dol” (a word
in the Valencian language that means grieving and mourning) was a
part of the “dot” or dowry and inheritance.
This was different in the case of granddaughters and great-granddaughters, a generation referred to as the “post-memory generation”
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A number of objects that
belonged to Blas Llopis preserve his memory. Loaned
by the Llopis family.
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
in line with the pioneering approach by Marianne Hirsch. As is
known, the aforementioned author coined the phrase to refer to
those who inherited an indirect memory that they did not experience first-hand, and therefore it would be mediated by the subjectiveness of those who passed it down. In the case of the third and
fourth generations of the victims of Franco’s repression, their own
reality, that of living in a democracy and their relationships with the
“bearers of memory”, the fact that access to the memory given to
them by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers was carried
out in a democratic context, and therefore one where fear no longer
reigned, thus made it possible to engage in dialogue that would have
been impossible in the intermediate generation. On the other hand,
both in the public sphere and among civil society, leading to the rise
of the memorial movement from year 2000 onwards, many women
belonging to the post-memory generation brought their grievances
out of their private lives to reclaim the bodies of their relatives buried
underground, and also as mentioned earlier, to bring the silent family
archives out of the cupboards in their homes (Garcia Hernandorena
and Gadea i Peiro, 2021).
5. Objects transmit information.
In a recently published book coordinated by the historians Adrian
Shubert and Antonio Cazorla (2022), a small group of experts explained the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship through
one hundred objects, images and places, with the stimulating aim of
dissemination. Objects such as the microphone used by Queipo de
Llano to broadcast his violent tirades during the first few months of
the uprising in July 1936, or the helmet of a fascist volunteer soldier
that the authors use to describe the furious fighting. Others, such as
the letter written by Julia Conesa in a chapel, who was executed in
August 1939, one of the 13 Roses, or the rationing vouchers for food,
are described as the signs of pain and suffering that the population
underwent.
The aforementioned collective work approach helps us to contemplate the latter aspect that the authors of the text want to underscore in regard to objects: how they are able to tell the stories and
narrate part of history. We have already discussed that the belongings
kept by the families that are used to pass down memories, tell of histories that help us understand what Franco’s regime was like from
other viewpoints. Nevertheless, in conjunction with the above, the
objects are able to express even more. The fact is that when we pay
attention, not only to the families who kept the objects, which talk
about how they affect those who survived the victims in that case, but
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to the objects themselves, both the questions and the answers vary.
This is the case of the objects found in the mass graves that were exhumed along with the bodies of their owners, a subject that Aitzpea
Leizaola discusses in this volume: they give a different insight into
the opening question of this chapter “What to do with them?, since
on this occasion the objects appeared at the moment of exhumation,
and therefore are dealt with differently in regards to bureaucracy and
the legal system, in order to establish who they belong to and what
is to be done with them (Jiménez and Herrasti, 2017). At the same
time we are given different answers, since they no longer talk to us
about families, but rather dead victims, providing valuable historical
information working as an “instant photograph of those people”
that “allow us to analyse the nature of their death and some aspects
of their lives” (Moreno Martín et al., 2021: 220). For example, when
bandages and ropes are unearthed from the mass graves, the violence
the victims were subjected to in the prisons and at the moment of
their execution can be reconstructed. By revealing their clothing and
personal items, we can delve deeper into the social class the victims
belonged to and how their different professions were carried out in
the 30’s and 40’s: by examining their personal hygiene objects we can
get an insight into the conditions of the prisons. In short, by exhuming the bodies we are also exhuming the violence they were subjected
to, and revealing the faces of the victims, to quote an expression by
the archaeologist Laura Muñoz-Encimar (2019: 762), thus corroborating the idea once again that the objects found when exhuming the
mass graves do actually matter.
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Objects and memories: the material dimension of the mass graves
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Jelin, Elizabeth. (2002). Los trabajos de la memoria, Madrid, Siglo XXI.
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[page-n-127]
Exhumed braid of hair, found in the pocket of Miguel Cano
Grave 128, Paterna Municipal Cemetery
The family of Miguel Cano and Maria Navarrete
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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The past, present and future
of the objects in the mass
graves
Aitzpea Leizaola
ANTHROPOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY (UPV/EHU)
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The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
For nearly two decades, the materiality of the bone remains in the
mass graves of the Civil War and the repression by Franco’s regime
has been posing questions to society, forcing it to face up to a past that
is increasingly less present, in a complex scenario that is not lacking
tensions, and where the duty to remember is built, “between vigilance
and updating of memory” to quote Marc Augé (1998). The duty to
remember lies with the descendants struggling between being forgotten, the disappearance of the survivors and handing the past down to
future generations in which exhumations have played a central role.
Despite the enormous number of images of the remains of bones
(Ferrándiz, 2005), the objects or remains thereof that have been
found in the mass graves have played a minor role in the extensive bibliography that has been written about these exhumations in the last
two decades. The nature of those objects, their status, and their
future destination are the central theme of this text discussing the
material side of memory, the need for a heritage framework to tackle
the subject of transmission of those objects within the context of exhumations. Therefore, this text is based on multi-site, ethnographic
field work regarding the exhumations of the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War and repression under Franco’s regime by the Aranzadi
Science Society between 2005 and 2011 in towns of the regions of Navarre, Gipuzkoa, Burgos and Cantabria.
In the period between 2000 and 2017 the Ministry of Justice recorded a total of 2457 mass graves (Serrulla y Etxeberria Gabilondo,
2020), from which over 9000 bodies were exhumed, 89% of which
were identified as republican civilians (Herrasti et al., 2021), and
this figure continues to increase over time as new exhumation work
takes place1. A wide variety of other objects have been found along
with this huge number of exhumed corpses, from almost complete
deterioration of the remains, such as the case of the mass grave in
Iragorri-Katin Txiki, to intact complete items of clothing recovered from the saponified bodies in the Paterna mass grave (Moreno
Martín et al., 2021). The technical exhumation reports follow a systematic pattern to record the findings. Photographs of skulls or other
relevant bone remains are displayed on the same pages as photographs of personal items such as glasses, buttons, toothbrushes, folding cutlery, and even bullet casings, all of which are displayed next to
a reference for scale over a neutral background. This is what forensic
archaeologists and anthropologists call “material culture” or “associated objects”.
1
On balance over the two
decades during which
exhumations from mass
graves has been carried
out, experts claim that
20,000 individuals could
still be recovered from
mass graves that have
not yet been exhumed
(Serrulla & Etxeberria
Gabilondo, 2020).
[page-n-130]
129
Decayed bone remains
from seven individuals,
as well as fragments of a
beret and footwear found
in the Iragorri Grave in
Oiartzun, 2007. Photo by
the author.
Aitzpea Leizaola
[page-n-131]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
130
[page-n-132]
131
Aitzpea Leizaola
Registration of associated
objects and a photo of a
skull with a bullet entry
hole. Report of the exhumation of the grave in
Altable cemetery, Burgos
(2006). Aranzadi Science
Society.
Non-bone materiality
Since exhumations began in the year 2000 employing scientific
methods in Priaranza del Bierzo, following a request by the grandson of Emilio Silva Faba, his body along with twelve others and objects with the bodies were recovered. They are described in detail and
photographed at scale in the first report. This exhumation process,
with participation by a multidisciplinary team employing archaeological, forensic pathology and anthropological techniques, became
a benchmark for the subsequent processes (Herrasti et al., 2021),
while establishing the foundations for a working methodology that
was presented three years later (Etxeberria, 2004) and then defined
as an exhumation protocol endorsed by the Spanish Government
(Order PRE/2568/2011).
In view of the votive offerings linked to the cult of death in the
excavations of the necropolis known as “grave goods”, the objects
found in the mass graves holding the victims of the Civil War and
Dictatorship, insofar as they are crime scenes and places to hide
corpses, remind us of the circumstances surrounding the violent
deaths of the people buried there. Compared to other warring contexts prior to WWII, most of the bodies that have been recovered
from the mass graves are civilians, which to a large extent determines
the nature of the materials found with them. Unlike the corpses of
soldiers often buried in their uniforms and with their combat gear,
the objects in these mass graves are mainly everyday items, fragments
or items of clothing, prosthesis and other personal items belonging
to the victims (see Herrasti, in this paper). In addition to this, there
are bullets, casings and remains of lime, which mean we are able
to determine the causes of their deaths and the circumstances surrounding their burial.
Other singular objects have been used to identify the buried
corpses. Such is the case of the glass bottles, which were carried
with a document inside to identify the person, following the order
of 22nd January 1937 signed by Franco pursuant to burials in battlefields. This use of bottles has been recorded at Paterna cemetery
(Moreno Martín et al., 2021), and also at the Fuerte de San Cristóbal
prison cemetery in Ezkaba, converted in a prison hospital, where the
cemetery is known as the “Bottle Cemetery” with 131 bottles having
been found between the legs of the dead prisoners (Herrasti & Etxeberria, 2014).
[page-n-133]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
132
A volunteer from the
Aranzadi Science Society
shows a block of quicklime to local residents and
family. Fustiñana, 2005. by
the author.
Exhumation as a revealing process
After finding the site and delimiting the area of the mass grave, the
exhumation process begins. During the course of this meticulously
slow process in which the remains start to take shape through the
archaeologists’ tools, there is a constant transit between the area of
exhumation, cordoned off by tape, or the bottom of the grave separating the team of experts from the rest of the people attending the process. Outside of this delimited area where the members of the team of
experts carry out their work, relatives and/or those behind the exhumation lobbying process, members of memorial associations, investigators (historians, social and psychological anthropologists, among
others), students, journalists and photographers all wait expectantly.
[page-n-134]
133
Aitzpea Leizaola
Exhumation of the Cemetery of the bottles. Fuerte
de San Cristóbal, 2007.
Photo by the author.
They all comprise the social life of the exhumation process and take
part in it in different ways.
Exhumation can take several hours, days or even months, and
is carried out in a rather peculiar atmosphere, one that is serious, although with an air of great anticipation, and it usually takes place in
silence only broken by the sounds of the experts’ tools and work and
questions by the public. Occasionally, at least in exhumation in the
field, there are murmurs of banal conversations, which remind us that
life goes on outside of the exhumation process. As progress is made in
the excavation and the bones are uncovered, the interaction between
those who are inside the grave and those who are outside of it increases. It is common practice to show the skulls to the congregated public
so that they can see the entry and exit hole of the coup de grâce, but also
other items of clothing such as buttons, buckles, footwear or other
items. This interaction between the team of experts and the attendees
accompanying the unearthing of bones brings about emotive reactions. This is the affective side to exhumation (Renshaw, 2010).
[page-n-135]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
134
Several generations of
family members participate in the sifting tests,
under the supervision of
members of the scientific
team. Fustiñana, 2005.
Photo by the author.
The forensic scientist F.
Etxeberria describes a
discovery made during
the exhumation to the
participants, among them
a group of UEU students.
Altable, Burgos 2006.
Photo by the author.
[page-n-136]
135
Aitzpea Leizaola
Sensory aspects are central to the process: the gradual revealing of skeletons that contrast with the photographs of the victims in life, the noise
of the tools scraping away at the earth, the feel of the bones or objects
that are placed in the hands of the relatives for a few short moments.
Looking at a photograph of a skull with a bullet hole in it in the
press is not the same as actually seeing it with your own eyes, while
the archaeologist or forensic anthropologist explains the trajectory
of the bullet, or holding a button in your hands still covered in soil
after recently being uncovered along with the bones of a wrist. The
objects mean that a form of dialogue can be established between
archaeologists, relatives and attendees, and materiality is given to
the buried individual beyond what are strictly the remains of their
bones. Although some body parts are easily identifiable, such as the
femur, ribs or skull, not all the human bones are so easily recognisable for the general public. On the other hand, as mentioned by one
of the relatives “boots speak louder than a few bones” (Renshaw,
2011). The soles of shoes, a wedding ring or a simple shirt button humanise the individual whose skeleton is being uncovered.
The archaeologist shows
the remains of a pocket of
a cotton shirt, holding a
folded sheet of newspaper, to relatives and attendees at the exhumation.
Fustiñana, 2005. Photo of
the author.
[page-n-137]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
136
Relatives of a man shot by
firing-squad observe the
remains of a foot inside a
shoe found in the grave of
Altable cemetery, Burgos
2006. Photo by the author.
The archaeologists at Aranzadi who had taken part in the exhumation process at Peidrafita de Babia in León, one of the first scientific exhumations (2003), spoke to me about the distress by some
of the attendees when they saw a pair of red soles appear under the
archaeologists’ instruments. For the then young archaeologists at
Aranzadi struggling with the excavation of the grave, exhumation was
something entirely new to them, not because of the procedure itself,
but rather because of the conditions under which it was taking place
and the emotional toll it had on them. One of the archaeologists, who
I interviewed in 2003, described it as follows: “One of the people attending the exhumation process became very agitated when the soles
were revealed, and jumped into the grave and I almost had to restrain
physically restrain him. He turned out to be the nephew of one of the
victims, who knew that his uncle was wearing footwear like that when
[page-n-138]
137
Objects returned to the
grave before the final
photographic record
of the grave was made.
Exhumation in Fustiñana,
2005. Photo by the author.
Aitzpea Leizaola
he was taken away”. Those soles meant that one of the men buried
there could then be identified.
After being shown to the people attending exhumation, the objects are returned to the place where they were found in the same
position to be photographed before proceeding to remove the remains. The fact that they are mostly common, everyday items makes
the scope of this drama even more tangible. Unlike the military gear
uniformly standardising them, the everyday items of the victims on
the “sacas” or execution lists and the summary executions, often by
other armed civilians, remind us of their circumstances at the time
of their arrests or their professions, mainly the clothes and footwear
they were wearing at the time they were taken prisoner. Beyond the
potential to help identify them (García-Rubio, 2017) the objects help
to humanise the bodies and to individualise them.
[page-n-139]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
The remains of bones invoke the notion of a corpse and necessarily entail a task of rebuilding to invoke the notion of a person
(Delacroix et al., 2022). The way a body is identified, either by means
of a code number or provisional identity, by the team of experts in
the exhumation context, which needs to be subsequently verified via
a laboratory analysis, helps to connect the remains of the bones to
the individuality of each victim, along with the vision of the objects
in situ. Objects such as dentures or glasses help to establish the age
range, ruling out or provisionally indicating one identity or another
when the graves contain people whose identities are known beforehand. In the context of exhumation, the objects play a central role to
individualising the bodies for their relatives, since it means that they
are somehow able to claim the bodies, even without a name.
From one limbo to another
Too recent to be considered as archaeological remains, yet too old to
be processed as a crime in current legislation (A. Leizaola, 2007), the
legal limbo meant that from year 2000 the first exhumations could
be carried out using scientific methods. Those first exhumations
established the foundations for the memorial movement thanks to
the willingness by the owners of the land where the mass graves were
located. Nevertheless, this situation with no legal regulations, was no
guarantee: the landowner could simply refuse to give permission and
exhumation would therefore be rendered impossible. We would have
to wait until the passing of Law 52/2007, otherwise known as the “Ley
de Memoria Histórica” [Historical Memory Act], for relatives and the
memorial movement to be able to act under the protection of the law.
Although administrative and legal measures have been implemented since then regarding exhumation, how the materials and
bones have been assigned or destined has been and still is very variable.
To date, they have not been assigned to any type of heritage that is not
strictly individual. Since the crimes are no longer covered by the legal
system, as they were committed over eighty years ago, there are no
measures to guarantee their integrity other than the need to safeguard
the chain of custody of the remains and other evidence regarding documentation and identification of the exhumed individuals (Herrasti
et al., 2021). According to the forensic protocols that are applied to exhumation processes in the last decade (Order PRE/2568/2011), when
nobody claims the bodies, the items recovered from the mass graves
must be buried along with the bones. This does not guarantee their
preservation (Moreno Martín et al., 2021), nor does handing them
over to relatives. The recently approved Democratic Memory Act (Ley
20/2022) has not included any changes regarding this matter.
138
[page-n-140]
139
2
Guzmán’s chilling documentary on disappearances in Chile during
Pinochet’s dictatorship,
makes a parallel comparison to the extermination
and disappearance of the
indigenous people. Translated from the original
in the Galician language
“O lapis do carpinteiro”.
The novel was adapted
to a screenplay by Anton
Reixa in 2003.
Aitzpea Leizaola
When materiality is set in other media
The latest film by Pedro Almodovar, “Parallel Mothers” echoed the
discovery of a rattle in a mass grave. It is interpreted as homage to
the memorial movement and is considered a as one of the Spanish
director’s more specific nods to politicians. The film is based on a
true case, that of the exhumation of Catalina Muñoz Arranza in Carcavilla, Palencia. Including a reference to an object of memory in a
fictional work of art is nothing unusual, A long time before the film
director Patricio Guzmán took the discovery of a shirt button embedded in a metal beam recovered from the bottom of the Pacific ocean
in his acclaimed film “The Pearl Button” (2015), the Galician author,
Manuel Rivas, had published the “The Carpenter’s Pencil”2 in 1998.
Nearly twenty years separate these two pieces of work, and much
has transpired in between, but both of them share the fact that they
are based on a common object to elaborate narratives on the effects
of past political violence and to question today’s society. Other than
serving as a title for the novel and the film, the objects allow the authors to define the elements on which their respective cinematographic and literary narratives are built. To achieve this, they put the crude
reality of a common, everyday, family item at the centre of a story of
political violence. The three cases remind us of how objects have the
power to evoke beyond their simple materiality (Appadurai, 1991).
The pencil and the rattle remind us of the impact of repression
through their very materiality. Both of them are objects that are directly related to the moment of execution, although in different ways.
The pencil that the jailer pulls out of the painter’s ear after shooting
him is reminiscent of the items stolen from the victims, a common
practice in the context of the execution lists and extrajudicial executions: items of value such as jewellery and watches that the aggressors
shamelessly wore, or clothing and footwear, even everyday items
that changed hands after execution. There are many testimonials in
which the sons and daughters of the victims of the firing squad saw
their fathers’ watches on the wrists of their executioners. There are
other shocking cases, such as that of Ramón Barreiro from Barro in
Pontevedra, whose body was riddled with bullets and subsequently
mutilated by his executioners to remove a ring. In addition to the
common practice of confiscation of land, possessions and property
belonging to the victims and their families during the war, the everyday sight of these objects worn by their executioners was a crude
reminder for the relatives of the victims of their absence, and the
impossibility of knowing where their bodies had been buried. This all
took place in a climate of absolute impunity for the aggressors. Those
are the items that never actually made it to the graves.
[page-n-141]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
In 2011, exhumation of a mass grave in the old Palencia cemetery,
later converted in La Carcavilla Park by the Aranzadi Sciences Society, uncovered 108 bodies out of a total of 310 that were buried there,
among them a young women, initially identified as skeleton 10 211,
the only female skeleton found in the grave and one of the few cases
in that exhumation process where “potential identification” objects
were found next to the body (García-Rubio, 2017).
Nearly eight years later, the El País newspaper published a graphic report in 2019 about the rattle found next to the body of Catalina
Muñoz Arranza, shot in Palencia in September 1936. The photograph
of the rattle, an emblematic object of infancy, invoked tenderness, in
stark contrast to the crudeness of the resting place of her skeleton in a
mass grave. The woven shape of the rattle, with a modern appearance
similar to plastic, and its bright colours, led to doubts about whether
it was actually an object dating back to the 1930’s. Further analysis
of the material (Leizaola 2012) verified that it was an old celluloid
object, which was a common material in the manufacture of a large
number of everyday items at that time. The passing of time had not
dulled the bright colours of the rattle, which she probably had in her
apron pocket to keep the youngest of her four children entertained,
who was barely eight months old. Beyond the exceptional nature of
this specific object, and other objects found in other graves, the rattle
has the power to probe us from its resting place.
140
[page-n-142]
141
Aitzpea Leizaola
Conclusion
In addition to being inter-generational and intra-family (see Box in
this paper), the objects take part in activating memory, as is evident
in the study of their role in other warring contexts (Saunders, 2004).
Analysing the status of the objects found during exhumation, and
that of those who enabled identification of mass grave sites and identification of the remains after exhumation in terms of belonging,
preservation and conservation, leads us to reflect further on the materiality of memory and the different ways it has declined, both inside
and outside the graves.
The legal provisions currently governing exhumations in response to the demands by relatives and memorial associations, mainly
focus on how the bodies are managed. Along with the bone remains,
the teams of experts hand over the objects and other material remains
that they find. If the decision about what to do with the bodies is not
always an easy task, and nor is there consensus about it, as we can see
in some of the cases analysed by Ceasar (2016), this not only affects
the bones, but also the other items found along with them. That is the
“dual life of objects”, before and after exhumation (Baby y Nérard,
2017), once again linking the dead to the living. Conducting a detailed
study on the work of memory of different generations is rather revealing in this sense, such as the case of the ethnography of Mass Grave
100 in Paterna (García Hernandorena y Gadea, 2021).
In the absence of any significant museum pieces and a heritage
policy to provide for showcasing these items and ensuring their
safeguard, their future lies in the hands of relatives once the teams
of experts have handed over the items. They do not necessarily have
the means to properly conserve those items, whose significance in a
museum or an exhibition would go far beyond the fact of belonging
to and representing the memories of a family or a specific individual, and would stimulate the collective memory. In this sense, it is
interesting to observe the increasing amount of cover in the media
focusing on those objects, or the publication of books such as Voces
de la tierra [Voices from the Earth] (Robés, 2020) which discusses a
selection of 25 objects found in different mass graves. All of those
items contribute to setting a material dimension to the mass graves
in other media. The photographs by the teams of experts will be the
only proof of the existence of the objects found in the mass graves in
the future, owing to a lack of a general heritage policy encompassing
the context of the Spanish Civil War and all other aspects of violence
during the dictatorship, including conservation and preservation of
those objects.
[page-n-143]
The past, present and future of the objects in the mass graves
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Augé, M. (1998). Les formes de l’oubli. Payot & Rivages.
Baby, S., & Nérard, F.-X. (2017). Les objets des disparus. Exhumations et usages
des traces matérielles de la violence de masse. Les cahiers Sirice, 19(2), 2.
Ceasar, R. C. (2016). <
Delacroix, D., Losonczy, A.-M., Delacroix, D., & Losonczy, A.-M. (2022). Introduction. In Le cadavre et ses avatars. Approches anthropologiques en contexte de
sortie de violence (pages 9-30). Editions Petra.
Etxeberria Gabilondo. (2004). Panorama organizativo sobre Antropología y
Patología Forense en España. Algunas propuestas para el estudio de fosas
con restos humanos de la Guerra Civil española de 1936. En E. Silva & A. Alvarez (Eds.), La memoria de los olvidados: Un debate sobre el silencio de la represión
franquista (1. ed, pages 183-219). Ámbito ; Asociación para la Recuperación
de la Memoria Histórica.
Ferrándiz, F. (2005). La memoria de los vencidos de la guerra civil. El impacto de las
exhumaciones de fosas comunes en la España contemporánea: Vol. Las políticas de
la memoria en los sistemas democráticos : poder, cultura y mercado (vol. XI) (J. M.
Valcuende del río & S. Narotzky, Eds.; pages 109-132). FAAEE, Fundación
el Monte, ASANA.
García Hernandorena, M. J., & Gadea i Piró, I. (2021). Etnografía de una exhumació. El cas de la fossa 100 del cementerio de Paterna. Diputación de Valencia, Delegación de Memoria Histórica.
García-Rubio Ruiz, A. (2017). Identificación de los restos exhumados en el cementerio de
la Carcavilla, Palencia. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Herrasti Erlogorri, L., & Etxeberria Gabilondo, F. (2014). El cementerio de las
botellas: Las botellas. En F. Etxeberria Gabilondo (Ed.), El Fuerte de San
Cristóbal en la memoria: De prisión a sanataorio penitenciario. El cementerio de las
botellas. Pamiela.
Herrasti, L., Márquez-Grant, N., & Etxeberria, F. (2021). Spanish Civil War: The
recovery and identification of combatants. Forensic Science International, 320,
110706.
Ley 20/2022, de 19 de octubre, de Memoria Democrática., Pub. L. No. «BOE»
núm. 252, de 20/10/2022 (2022).
Leizaola, A. (2007). La mémoire de la guerre civile espagnole: Le poids du silence. Ethnologie française, 37(3), 3.
Leizaola, F. (2012). Informe pericial sobre una pieza hallada en el cementerio de la Carcavilla (Palencia). Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi Zientzia Elkartea.
Moreno Martín, A., Mezquida Fernández, M., & Ariza Jiménez, E. (2021). No
solo cuerpos: La cultura material exhumada de las fosas del franquismo en
Paterna. SAGVNTVM. Papeles del Laboratorio de Arqueología de Valencia, 53,
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Renshaw, L. (2010). The scientific and affective identification of Republican civilian victims from the Spanish Civil War. Journal of Material Culture, 15(4), 4.
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Robés, J. A. et alt. (2020). Voces de la tierra. Alkibla.
Saunders, N. J. (Ed.). (2004). Matters of conflict: Material culture, memory and the
First World War. Routledge.
Serrulla, F., & Etxeberria Gabilondo, F. (2020). Recomendaciones relativas a
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[page-n-145]
Sunglasses
Individual 83, Grave 111, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-146]
145
A look at Paterna to revisit
the contemporary exhumation
process: possibilities and
tensions in the fight for
memory(ies)
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF MADRID
[page-n-147]
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A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Introduction
Prior to being invited to contribute to this volume, I had never been
to Paterna Cemetery, and although I was aware of its existence, I
had never stopped to thing about its details. I knew that exhumation
processes of people murdered by Franco’s regime was taking place,
although I had not stopped to think about the context, to think
about whether the victims were victims of reprisals or firing squads,
if there was just one mass grave, several or many, whether they were
actually inside or outside the cemetery, if they had been integrated in the cemetery in subsequent extensions or if they had always
been there. Neither had I considered the number of people we were
talking about, or whether they were mostly men or women. I had
also forgotten about the role the city of Valencia played in the Spanish
Civil War, and the exemplary and fierce repression there must have
been following the end of the war... One thing is true though; despite
the contemporary exhumation process and the memorial practices
being my subject of study, I had considered Paterna to be “just another
place of repression” on the map of mass graves of people murdered by
the dictatorship around Spain. An interesting place perhaps, but “just
another one”, and nevertheless when I actually went there and saw it
closer, its particularities were evident and the things it had in common with other places of repression and memory, quickly making it
an interesting subject matter for analysis that would permit reflecting
on some of the aspects that would enable and limit the exhumation
process in Spain in the 21st century, and on the disputes regarding
the memories encompassing it.
Exhumations of the mass graves from the Civil War and post war
period have undergone different stages over the eighty years of history separating us from the coup that took place between the 17th and
18th of July 1936, making those of the 21st century only the last in a
long line of succession contrary to the narrative on many occasions,
and which did not begin in the year 20001. Even so, it is only fair to
acknowledge the exhumation on 20th October 2000 in Priaranza del
Bierzo (León) as a milestone in contemporary exhumation, where
the bodies of thirteen civilians murdered by paramilitary supporters
of Franco’s regime were unearthed from a mass grave at the roadside,
as this was the first time that some of the features marking this latest
memorial process were included. Archaeologists and forensic scientists converged at the grave to apply the specific knowledge of their
respective disciplines to retrieve the bodies of those civilians who had
been summarily executed, with the discourse and practices beomg
marked by the discourse of human rights, a fundamental characteristic of exhumations in the 21st century.
1
For further reading
about the pre 2000
exhumations with a
multidisciplinary, compared perspective which
furthers the analysis and
interrelates the stages,
Dueñas & Solé (2014) is
recommended, for those
carried out during the war
on Republic territory;
Saqqa (2022) for those
carried out by Franco’s
regime in the early years
of the dictatorship; De
Kerangat (2020) for those
carried out during the
transition and Ferrándiz
for the contemporary
exhumations.
[page-n-148]
147
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
Another of the particularities of this process is that it took place
within the framework of the information society. Indeed, the images,
claims and discourses surrounding those who were killed, with visible marks of violence on their bodies haphazardly buried in the mass
graves, ran through society in Spain causing distress among the relatives and the onlookers. Among others, the paths taken by those images that were tangible proof of the violence the “vencidos” (losers) had
been subjected to, evident even for non-experts, with shots to the head
and wires tying their wrists, and that the comparative aggravation of
abandonment over decades was recognised, compared to the bodies
of the “vencedores” (victors), and it now could no longer be denied. In
view of those images and exhumation practices, part of the population
started to ask about the possibility of recovering the remains of their
relatives who were buried in the mass graves, in order to give them a
“dignified burial”.
Nobody is indifferent to the subject of exhumations, and the
visibility of the bones as evidence of crimes committed eighty years
earlier drew much attention and collective recognition, although that
visibility was not exempt of criticism due to the indiscriminate exposure of the remains of the victims, now once again brought out into
the limelight. Therefore, in the expert work by the archaeologists
and forensic scientists, those bodies were not only unearthed from
their resting places, but attempts were made to identify them and
establish their causes of death, and also an “authorised discourse” was
made (Bourdieu, 2008) which conferred legitimacy and reliability
for society where science worked as a “regime of truth” (Foucault,
1989:187). This was how, within the context of exhumations, the
practices by the experts, working under the framework of human
rights and transitional justice, brought about an “unquestionable”
discourse, charged with highly effective symbolism and accompanied
by a very persuasive scenario (Ferrándiz, 2015:14), playing a central,
active role in the recognition of those dead bodies. Political deaths
and narratives that they found in the exhumation process as a whole,
from the obtained materiality, recognition and legitimacy that was
previously unknown until that moment.
In relation to Paterna Cemetery, I therefore propose recognising
some aspects that have become fundamental in the collective imaginary and in the memorial practices related to the recovery of historical
memory and the mass graves in this text.
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A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Paterna: repression and contemporary exhumations
Paterna is not “just another place” as I said earlier, among other reasons because it is one of the places where most bodies have been
exhumed in recent years. Since October 2000, around 9700 corpses
from over 785 mass graves have been exhumed in Spain (Herrasti,
2020:24), and somewhere between 10% and 12%2 were unearthed
in Paterna. Between 2012 and 2021, 1163 individuals from 27 mass
graves and 7 niches were recovered (Moreno, Mezquida & Ariza,
2021:2016).
Contemporary exhumations have undergone different periods
of (de)regulation and funding in these two decades. Indeed, during
the early stages, exhumation was financed by associations and relatives, and it was not until 2006 when state subsidies granted by the
Ministry of the Presidency were first awarded. Those subsidies were
maintained until 2011, and were discontinued in 2012 when the PP
political party took over government from the PSOE party. In turn,
an incipient regulation was brought in through Law 52/2007, and
publication in the Official State Journal of the “Action protocol for
exhumations of victims of the Civil War and Dictatorship” in 2011.
The exhumations took place during those years under a “self-contracting model of human rights” (Ferrandiz, 2013) in which, even
though the State had committed to facilitating support and funds,
it delegated the responsibility for the investigation, identification,
chain of custody and reburial work to the relatives, associations and
teams of experts. Although direct state funding ended in 2012, some
regional authorities and councils took over the funding and management of exhumation through different procedures. This was the case
of Paterna, where most of the exhumations took place after 2016:
initially funded by the Valencian Regional Council and afterwards by
the Council for Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality of the Valencian Regional Government, which to a
large extent replicated the self-contracting model through subsidies or
public tenders.
Hence, in 2017, out of the 601 individuals who were exhumed in
Spain, 151 were unearthed from the mass graves in Paterna. In 2018,
out of a total of 609 exhumed individuals, 197 were recovered from
three graves in Paterna, and in 2019, 209 individuals were exhumed
in Paterna out of a total of 668 people exhumed in Spain (Herrasti,
2020:22-23). These figures speak volumes about the significance of
the repression and its continuity, and also the intense exhumation
work in the last decade.
It is estimated that at least 2238 people were buried in the mass
graves in Paterna cemetery and niches as a result of the repression
2
That figure is not exact,
because at the time of
publication access to
the updated totals was
unavailable.
[page-n-150]
149
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
exercised by Franco’s regime, out of a total in the entire Region of
Valencia of 4714 people (Gabarda, 2007). Executions began on 3rd
April 1939, four days after Franco’s troops entered the city that had
been the Republican capital, and ended seventeen years later, in November 1956. Those people who were mainly taken from the Modelo and San Miguel de los Reyes prisons, were summarily executed
collectively before firing squads against the Terrer wall, a site of repression next to the Cemetery where their bodies were moved afterwards, leaving a total of 154 documented graves (Moreno, Mezquida
& Ariza, 2021:216). Their relatives were sometimes able to take the
bodies of their loved ones away in secret in the moments following
their death, and bury them in individual niches or graves, and on occasions were even able to take them to other cemeteries (Gadea and
García Hernandorena, 2022:210). The 450 people who were executed by the Republican rearguard in the initial months of mayhem of
the war between June 1936 and January 1937 however, were buried
in Paterna cemetery and the General cemetery of Valencia, but they
were subsequently exhumed and identified in the early postwar period only to be publicly buried and honoured by the State (Gabarda,
2007; Gadea and García Hernandorena, 2022:209). As can be seen,
the type of repression and how the bodies were dealt with differs
significantly depending on the moment in history, the victims and
which side the aggressors fought on.
As pointed out earlier, along with the technical and scientific
practices, the images of mass grave exhumations containing murdered civilians have led to one of the potential disputes on the historical narrative and the fight for a place in the official memory by
serving as evidence of repression. There have been some powerful
arguments exposing how successive regimes have abandoned and
neglected the matter, relegating the victims to oblivion and disrespect. Powerful too, because we are led to believe that in many roadsides, fields and wells in Spain there are mass graves containing the
bodies of thousands of murdered civilians, who were buried away
from the places designed for the laying to rest of the dead, i.e., cemeteries. In fact, one of the reasons motivating public claims to justify
and promote recovery of those bodies is to undo the “undignified
deaths” and “undignified burials” that took place in those graves and
to give the victims a dignified burial. Nevertheless, despite the fact
that those powerful roadside images are the ones that have stuck in
the collective memory of repression by Franco’s regime, thousands
of people executed under the regime were laid to rest inside the cemeteries rather than outside them. Moreover, the mass graves with the
highest number of victims are, or at least were, inside the cemeteries.
[page-n-151]
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A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Let us consider the case we are dealing with, namely Paterna,
where over 2000 individuals were/are found in around 150 mass
graves, but also the example of the San Rafael cemetery (Malaga),
where 2840 people were exhumed between 2006 and 2009, or the
Pico Reja grave in San Fernando Cemetery (Seville), where work is
being carried out to exhume the bodies, with a provisional result of
869 bodies who were victims of repression by Franco’s regime3. Paterna, and the mass graves in the cemeteries there, invite us to stop
thinking about mass graves and repression in a reductionist manner
as evidence of the “heat of the moment terror”, the moment at the
start of the war in the summer and autumn of 1936 which followed
the taking of a town by “both sides” (Casanova, 1999:159-160),
when the rearguards were out of control and committing crimes, but
rather to reflect on the evidence of the existence of complex cemetery spaces dotted all over with mass graves filled with victims of institutionalised, legalised repression over a significant period of time,
the period of “legal terror” (Rodrigo, 2008).
The analysis accompanying the exhumations not only provides
important information based on the legal files and the corresponding
sentences, ,with regard to accusations, investigations and “serving
justice” that the regime carried out, but also based on the cemetery
documents when such are available, among other information,
concerning the identities and places of burial (mass grave number)
of the victims4. Furthermore, exhumation work in itself has highlighted how methodical and well-planned the burials were in order
to make the most of the available space. An example of this is one
of the sides of the Guadalajara cemetery where a row of 15 mass
graves containing the bodies of executed people after 1st April 1939.
The three graves were exhumed by ARMH between 2016 and 2021,
which measured approximately four metres deep and one and a half
metres wide, each one containing over twenty bodies. Deep, narrow
graves, where the bodies from different “sacas” (execution lists) were
buried together. The mass graves in Paterna are located in the first
quadrant to the left on entering the Cemetery, duly laid out one next
to one another, measuring approximately two metres by two and a
half metres wide in a rectangular shape, and some of them are up to
six metres deep, such as the case of grave 128 (Moreno, Mezquida
and Ariza, 2021:217). Furthermore, as is the case of other cemeteries, the layers of bodies are interspersed with layers of soil and lime
“the stratigraphy of Francoism”, as pointed out by the archaeologist
González-Ruibal (2022). The information from these exhumations
allows us to glean a better idea of the violence that was perpetrated by
the rearguard and how it continued throughout the Dictatorship, i.e.
3
Figures by Aranzadi in
February 2022 (https://
www.aranzadi.eus/
pico-reja) although
press sources pointed at
1200 in June the same
year (https://www.
publico.es/politica/
historia-huesos-fosa-pico-reja-mineros-querian-parar-golpe-fascista.
html).
4
In fact, to a large extent,
this information highlights the systematics and
impunity of the process.
[page-n-152]
151
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
it was not just punishment in the heat of the moment, but it was rather more “cold, paralegal terror, sanctioned or directly implemented
by the authorities” (González-Ruibal, 2022) which was planned and
carried out over several decades.
In a complex process of adopting and translating concepts
linked to the language of human rights by adopting the figure of the
“desaparecido” (disappeared) over the years, the “fusilados or represaliados” (executed by firing squad or punished) became victims of
Francoism too (Ferrándiz, 2010). Although this made them publicly
visible and legitimised the reappearance process, it also removed
the political agency from them, thereby displacing other narratives
such as that of the “resistente” (resistant) (Gatti, 2011; Montoto,
2019). Mass graves such as those in Paterna shed light on deaths
that are even more uncomfortable, guilty in the eyes of illegitimate
justice, decades ago whose reference framework still needs to be
broken down.
5
These figures are from
telephone conversations with the forensic
scientist, Javier Iglesias, a
member of ArqueoAntro,
a scientific association
working at Paterna
Cemetery.
Paterna: a place of memory(ies)
Clandestine burial in mass graves is a post mortem punishment that
is imposed on the dead and the living in an exercise of symbolic and
funerary violence. The perpetrators’ decision to deny burial in a place
socially designed for this purpose clearly shows the intentionality of
imposing an undignified burial. The cemetery is the place par excellence where the dead become visible as such, and those who are not
buried there are not a part of the legitimate community of the dead
(De Kerangat, 2019:78). As De Kerangat (2019) points out though, in
that place inclusion and exclusion can also take place, so we can ask:
what has happened to those people who, even though they are buried
inside a cemetery, have not been included in the community of the
dead? What has happened to those whose method and place of burial
is a planned punishment ongoing over time, those whose clandestine
burial is a grievance, not necessarily regarding the victors, but regarding those who are laid to rest in individual graves or niches, or family
pantheons around them? It is interesting to highlight how upsetting
it is to see the bodies mixed together in a jumble of bones, without any
recognised burial, and how, within the framework of the contemporary corpocentric exhumations in Paterna, that feeling and the focusing
on repair and “dignified burials” has brought hundreds of families
together joined by their wishes to recover the mortal remains of their
“badly buried” relatives, with this number increasing from around 30
or 40 in 2016, to over 300 today5.
As mentioned earlier, the idea of a mass grave in a ditch or verge
leads us to think of an abandoned, inhospitable place, although as
[page-n-153]
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
Ferrándiz (2014) points out, the mass graves were an open secret from
when they were created, known, yet deliberately forgotten and ignored. When entering Paterna cemetery though, it is hard to forget
the many items that mark out the location of the mass graves.
There are marks of the different stages of the memorial process,
dating back to the moment of execution. Graves cared for over decades
by the relatives of those whose records and hearsay claim they are buried there, and this is interesting because memory does not start in year
2000 as is the case of the exhumations. Hence, just as the monument
built during the Transition period with its white columns is striking,
along with its flower garden depicting the colours of the Republican flag, and a plaque stating “To all those murdered in the name of
freedom, democracy and social progress - Paterna 1981”, we also find
graves covered with ceramic slabs –which is a material that was historically used in the area, with different dates, ranging from the date of
152
[page-n-154]
153
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
execution and names, to the places the victims were from and their
ages, including messages such as those in the lower part of the following picture “Your family will not forget you”. In some of them the passing of time and successive layers of memorial work are evident.
6
This invites us to reflect
on the reasons why a family would put the name of
their relative twice on the
same grave.
Photographs of some of the executed victims have been attached to
some of the older slabs, and even small black marble headstones (referring to more modern funerals), which repeat the names of some of
those who were executed6.
We can also see some areas where the bodies from the mass
graves have already been exhumed, which are marked out differently,
sometimes just with a lump of cement, or, as in the case of grave 100,
a ceramic slab over cement stating the number of the grave which appears to be provisional. On other occasions individual grey or black
marble headstones have been erected on the ground where the bodies were, in no apparent order adding to other funeral ornaments,
[page-n-155]
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
as evidence of the people who were once there. Texts bearing
messages referring to the unfairness and intentionality of hiding
those deaths can be seen on several of the sites where bodies were
exhumed, also featuring transitional justice language, the international justice language or the innocence of the victims, signed by
associations of the relatives of each of the victims of the graves. A
black marble mausoleum is also found on grave 113, which is there
for the bodies of any victims who have not been identified or claimed
from that grave. In turn, on retracing our steps towards the entrance
to the cemetery, we find an enormous steel monument, erected in
the last decade, which features a man in chains and the names, ages,
places of origin and dates of execution of the victims.
154
[page-n-156]
155
7
http://www.fosacomun.
com/comunicado.htm
8
In the case of Paterna,
there were only 20
women compared to 2218
men. For a reflection on
the presence of women
in the mass graves, the
dominant narratives on
violence against women,
their possible political
commitments and
how women conceived
and represented, see
Martín-Chiappe (2019)
and Martín-Chiappe and
De Kerangat (2019).
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
In his first analysis of contemporary exhumation processes,
Ferrándiz (2014, 62-63) highlighted two different types of disputes,
those “above the ground” related to how exhumation and reburial
were managed, where the battle related to what type of symbology
should or should not form a part of that moment of dignification,
and disputes “under the ground”, dealing with the decision of
whether or not to exhume a mass grave. From the start of the process different memorial associations were opposed to exhumation,
whereas others, in favour of it, have changed their views over time,
highlighting that carrying it out outside of a legal process contributes to destroying evidence, and indirectly contributes to covering
up the crimes perpetrated by Franco’s regime. They also claim that
exhumation destroys “historical heritage”, precisely related to the existing monuments, and propose signing and “dignifying” the graves
instead of exhuming them7.
There is an awareness in Paterna about the processes of the fight
by previous generations to keep these places of memory alive, and
one of the arguments put forward by some of the people who oppose
exhumation is that the site is a part of the biographies of their relatives, and exhuming the graves would destroy a part of their legacy
(Gadea and García Hernandorena, 2022:212). On the other hand,
some people want to recover the bodies, concerned about how the
relics of previous memorialisation could be conserved (García Hernandorena and Gadea, 2020). The relics of memorialisation also
permit paying tribute to those who conserved the memory of the
dead, who also built and maintained those places of memory over
generations through their actions, i.e., the women.
Isabel Gadea and Mª José García Hernandorena suggest thinking about the mass graves from a holistic, feminist perspective, with
the graves themselves as spaces for masculinised memory, while the
cemetery itself is a feminine space. As mentioned earlier, focusing
attention on the graves has favoured the memories of the experience
of masculine violence, resistance and repression, since it is mostly
men who were buried in these graves, compared to the feminine
memories, even though there are also women buried in those graves,
although at a much lower proportion8. Nevertheless, conducting a
biographical analysis of the cemetery permits revealing the decisive
roles of women in passing down and conserving memories, and also
in the contemporary repairing practices (Gadea and García Hernandorena, 2022:214). The fact is that it is women who have passed down
the family memory (Jelin, 2002), and through the roles assigned to
their gender and the (re)productive role, they kept the memories of
men alive, and those of the women who went before them, whilst also
[page-n-157]
A look at Paterna to revisit the contemporary exhumation process: possibilities
and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
performing small and large subversive practices. By caring for the
graves, and through such, marking out the burial sites, women displayed their private memories in public areas to ensure that this act
eventually made political sense and represented an act of resistance
and counter-discourse (Martín-Chiappe and De Kerangat, 2019). It
is interesting to give a feminist perspective to the analysis of the practices of resistance and not to consider them in terms of heroic acts of
enormous repercussions, a definite intentionality or awareness, and
extending the analysis to the everyday actions of women. This perspective of the practices carried out in private permits understanding
them as part of the many forms of transgression against the established order, and recognising the collective actions of the women who
performed them (Martín-Chiappe and De Kerangat, 2019), thereby
allowing memories of repression to be passed down to our day.
Concluding thoughts
Getting to know Paterna Cemetery meant I was able to revisit the contemporary exhumation process of the victims of Francoism, describing some of the layers of memory that link the memorial stages and
the practices inherent to each of them, but also the possibilities
and limitations, continuities and tensions that surround them.
Exhumations and reburials have broken down a systematic, ruthless way of domination imposed by Franco’s regime. The bodies that
have been recovered not only channel mourning, but they also have
life and play a role in politics, while moving them to a legitimate burial place involves a change to the visibility of the person whose body
is moved and the ideas attributed to it (Verdery, 1999), which is even
more evident when it is carried out under technical/scientific practices and in line with the discourse and the human rights that socially
legitimise such actions. The revealing, visibility and transfer of those
bodies broke away from the “official memory”, paving the way for
“subterranean memories” (Pollak, 2006), which in turn also caused
“memorial disputes” within those memories (disputes above and below ground), producing privileged visibilities and neglect. Looking
in more detail at the role of the mass graves in cemeteries allows us to
shun the idea that heat of the moment terror was an exception in the type
of repression imposed by the regime, and to recognise that it continued throughout the regime through cold terror, a planned, organised
repressive practice that was maintained over time.
The “historical memory recovery” process was closely linked to
the “recovery of bodies” and ignored the existence of any previous
memorial practices. It did not necessarily ignore the personal narratives and histories, but it did ignore the prior collective practices
156
[page-n-158]
157
9
It also built up expectations and needs that could
not always be reached or
fulfilled, such as genetic
identification.
10
Although we must admit
that subsidies have also
paved the way for other
types of activities, not just
exhumations.
María Laura Martín-Chiappe
such as those in cemeteries, where the graves had not only not been
forgotten, but they had in fact been cared for over decades. The scientific discourse9 we mentioned earlier also contributed to the aforementioned corpocentrism, since the figure of the “body evidence” and
the figure of the “disappeared” while opening up an array of opportunities, attracted (almost) all the attention at the expense of memorial
practices10.
On the other hand, looking outside of the graves, but inside them
too (Martín-Chiappe and De Kerangat, 2019), allows us to get to
know and report life stories, resistance and repression of women,
whose stories had not been “spoken about” (Pollak, 2006). On occasions, when their stories and actions were recognised, it took place
within the framework of an interpretation that downplayed the resistance in the spaces and practices socially assigned to women in their
social role of (re)production, by reading them with the same mindset
as masculinised heroics and resistance. Hence, the subterranean memories of women also have to contend for the spaces inherent to other
subterranean memories in which they were apparently included.
[page-n-159]
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and tensions in the fight for memory(ies)
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CRATIC
MORY
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Graves and Democratic Memory
Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
175
The right to truth with regard to the human rights
violations during the Franco regime
Mauricio Valiente Orts
189
First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
Baltasar Garzón Real
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International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory:
The Case of Spain
Carmen Pérez González
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162
Postcard
Vicente Roig Regal, Grave 128. Paterna
Roig Tortosa family collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-164]
163
List of names of people shot, by José Peiró Grau
Grave 112, Paterna. Donated by the Peiro family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
[page-n-165]
Pencil
Individual 3, Grave 94, Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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Graves and
Democratic Memory
Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
OFFICE OF HISTORICAL MEMORY, DIPUTACIÓ DE VALÈNCIA
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Graves and Democratic Memory
In the wake of the restoration of democracy in our country, historical
memory appears as a policy and tool to put an end to the Francoist
version of events in Spain since the establishment of the Second Republic. Despite the vicissitudes of this memory since then, it has always been presented as a pillar to bring an end to the “memoricide”1
that exists around graves and repression linked to the Civil War and
Francoism. The UN’s definition of memoricide is “the wilful destruction of cultural heritage that cannot be justified for military ends”.
While it is true that graves are not repositories of memory or heritage comparable to museums or archives, they do represent something more than simply the place where the dead bodies of specific
enemies lie.
In this respect, we cannot forget that the etymology of the word
patrimony is to “inherit from one’s father” and that this legacy must
not necessarily be material and turned into assets or objects; it can
also be an attitude towards life, certain ideals… Graves are the end of
a process that looks for something more than just defeating an enemy. The objective is to make them disappear from history, and hence
the aim of a summary trial — faster and with fewer guarantees for the
accused, whose version of events lacks due validity — and executions
and subsequent burials in mass graves, where nameless bodies are
piled up with no notification sent to relatives. It is about executing
the vanquished after defeating them at war, when military interest
no longer remains and all that is left is punishment and an interest in
eliminating them from history’s equation. It is about laying to waste
the memory of the defeated, the enemy, their memories and identity,
about imposing a collective amnesia on families and survivors (not to
mention those shot away from home, those whose father was red…),
to create an identity that differs from the identity of the defeated: a
New Spain.
This repression does not stem from incidental actions but deliberate ones executed within a wilful memory policy searching for
objectives: to suppress, defeat and bring about the surrender of an
enemy already defeated by armed force, to snuff out any resurgence in
this ideology to ensure it interferes in no way with the new model of
the victors and their new culture.
To separate political prisoners from the rest of the convicted,
placing them before a firing squad and dumping them, nameless, into
mass graves and that these graves were piled one on top of another,
without distinction or that one grave would remain open over a number of days or was re-opened to throw in bodies from a new saca (the
removal of prisoners to execute) tells us of a process that dehumanises the victims, that separates them from their families and omits
1
A term coined by Croatian historian Mirto D.
Grmek to describe the
destruction of Sarajevo’s
National Library.
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
A different celebration of
the Day of the Dead in the
Paterna Cemetery, organised by the relatives of
those who were executed.
Drawing: Matías Alonso.
their name (the maximum expression of the individual) and buries
them alongside those accused of the same offence: being red. Each
of the deceased is simply a red. And so the individual identity of each
prisoner has been erased and the policy of terror seeks to mask the
group politics surrounding them. There is a fear of opposing the victors, of this difference being noticed in towns; ideology is not spoken
about outside the home, beliefs are dissimulated… Thus, the collective memory of those on the losing side is attacked for the purpose of
ensuring that only the victor’s survives, characterised by having eradicated the social cancer represented by the defenders of the Republic.
For the defeated, the rights that humanised them are snatched
away. For instance, prisoners may be forced to work in battalions to
reconstruct, at no cost, what “the reds destroyed” — essentially a
form of slavery. Pregnant women who are prisoners could also have
their babies stolen, because they might pass on this socialist, communist or anarchist disease. Wives or widows could also be made to work
for the local Falange, and so on.
It goes hand in hand with a policy of re-writing the Republican
era, a time when Spain was blighted by misfortune, in which the Civil
War was deemed necessary for saving Spain from the communists
and for dismembering their organisation. Consequently, the elimination of individual and collective identity, and memory — namely
amnesia — is complemented by action aligned with the re-writing
of history and building a new identity, in accordance with the ideals of
the victors to justify the new system, the need for a military uprising.
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Graves and Democratic Memory
This “historical cleansing” based on ideological criteria, and
still a form of genocide, sought to manipulate events or, more to the
point, the memory of what happened from the present of the victors
to ensure that the new discourse of the past evolved into a tool to consolidate the new regime.
Yet with the end of the dictatorship, this reading of the past was
dismantled, as R. Koselleck highlights (1997, p. 239): “In the short
term, perhaps history is made by the victors, but in the long term the
historical gaining of knowledge comes from the vanquished”.
The slow but inexorable advance of democratic memory in Spain
has been delineated by specific landmarks, the most recent of which
is the adoption of Law 20/2022, of 19 October, on Democratic Memory. Taking its title as a starting point, of note immediately is a profound evolution in relation to its predecessor, Law 52/2007, which,
despite being known as the Historical Memory Law, was officially
defined as: “The Law by which rights are recognised and expanded
and measures are established in support of those who suffered persecution or violence during the Civil War and dictatorship”. This
development was largely reflected in different regional regulations
resulting from a path forged by international reports and condemnations.2 The new Law is underpinned by principles established by the
UN’s Human Rights Committee, even in its own articles, in which
there are chapters devoted to truth, justice, reparation and the duty of
memory.
Public memory policies must always be driven by general interest
and designed to bring about positive effects in society, which is why
the State must ensure that the relentless biological disappearance of
victims and those who witnessed events does not denote ethical and
moral annihilation. With the passage of time, the children of the victims of reprisals will disappear, as will their grandchildren, yet society
and citizens must remember, and it is the government’s responsibility to repair and acknowledge human rights violations.
This leads us to a tense setting between memory, history and politics, which in Spain must never be understood as exclusive. We find
similar situations in numerus other countries, for instance slavery in
the USA, the Indigenous population in Australia and the actions of
mother countries in repressing colonies’ independence movements.3
Memory is a faculty to understand the past and comprises impressions of past events, both individually and collectively. These
narrations of the past, that which correlates to group values, tend to
be stereotyped and passed down intergenerationally. When there is
a heavy conflict at the heart of the group, narrations begin to distinguish between victim and murderer.
2
Of note is the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe
condemning the Franco
regime (2006) and the
“Report by the Special
Rapporteur on the
promotion of truth,
justice, reparation and
guarantees of non-recurrence”, drawn up by Pablo
de Greiff for the UN’s
Human Rights Council
(2014).
3
A clear example of such
tensions can be seen in
the The New York Times’
1619 Project, which establishes how “the moment in
August 1619 when the first
enslaved Africans arrived
in the English colonies that
would become the United
States could, in a sense,
be considered the country’s
origin”.
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
An image of the website
of the Office of Historical Memory from the
Diputació de València.
Over time, victims demand reparation for these past events still
considered relevant and exhibited with a moral superiority stemming
from the unjust suffering inflicted upon them. Opposite these people,
the executioner speaks of a fading past, the result of extreme conditions set out by those who portray themselves as victims. The killers
believe that they couldn’t have acted in any other way, that there was
no alternative, and that under the circumstances no one is really innocent. Applying these principles to the coup d’état in 1936 is obvious, as
is the social utility the past has for the future. Traditionally in Spain,
national heroic deeds have been used as an element which binds and
strengthens a way of understanding the country and underpins national identity. The romantic and idealised vision of the past has been
employed for decades as a cognitive and affective anchor that identifies us with that and bolsters our sense of national belonging. This
past social utility is not negative per se. Rather, what is debatable is
the social and political model seeking to shape our identity.
The new Law signifies a qualitative jump in numerous aspects,
but I want to just pause on its setting, beyond reparation for victims…
because it has become a key tool for contributing to forming historical thought on this period.
In Article 1 of this Law it stipulates: “The present Law aims to
recover, safeguard and disseminate democratic memory, thereby
understood as the vindication and defence of democratic values and
fundamental rights and freedoms throughout contemporary history
in Spain, with a view to advocating coherence and solidarity among
different generations with respect to constitutional principles, values
and freedoms”.
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Graves and Democratic Memory
The Law cites a broad chronological framework, evident in the
sentence “throughout contemporary history in Spain”, because in our
country the 1812 Constitution signalled the start of the struggle for
State sovereignty in the nation, for the implementation of suffrage and
other rights. Yet in practice, almost all of its articles made reference to
the consequences of breaking away from the democratic route in 1936
as a result of the illegal coup towards a government voted for freely by
the Spanish people. The Law looks to equip every citizen with instruments and tools (maps of graves, a census of victims, DNA banks, the
subject included in secondary education syllabuses…), enabling them
to independently understand and interpret this recent past in context.
It understands that historical memory as a way to comprehend the
past must serve a democratic citizenry, who in history find a key tool
for interpreting the current world and for better managing the future.
In these terms, we can understand the assertion of historian
Josep Fontana (1982), for whom the whole view of history constitutes
a genealogy of the present. Therefore, the Democratic Memory Law
starts from the current situation, a State with a democratic system, to
trace its origins in the past, which is why it focuses on the chronological period spanning the birth of the Second Republic to the adoption
of the current 1978 Constitution. Undeniably, this objective has a
social purpose since it attempts to show the existence of a natural and
positive evolution from the past that has taken place in the present.
Everything in the past that has opposed this evolution advocating the
establishment of freedoms and rights is considered negative and regressive, and, moreover, this evolution is deemed unfinished and thus
looks for citizens to project their ideal society in the political proposal
entailed in democracy.4
Hence, past, present and future are interwoven in such a way that
a whole vision of one involves a new version of the other two. Furthermore, the past, as well as explaining what took place, offers us
keys to understand the present, with both together seeking to lead us
towards a future that this past and present consider suitable.
The power of the present over the vision of the past and future
that must come is more than apparent and we only need to pause on
the image of the Second Republic and road the State should have travelled down under the Franco regime with regard to what is set forth
today as a victory of freedoms and democratic ideals in Spain, ideals
that have been reconquered and developed in today’s society and
travel unequivocally towards an intensification of democracy that will
lead to a better and fairer society.
This future we attempt to travel towards can be understood
as a profound foresight which submerges its roots in the past and
4
On these ideas applied to
the field of teaching, see
Santiesteban (2010, p. 35).
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
present, those that show us a possible social evolution. There is not
one sole future — there are different possible, probable and desirable
futures — and our Democratic Memory Law seeks to portray a positive image to society on its capacity to mould the future on the basis
of past knowledge. The key lies in managing to get citizens to inherently buy into the desirable future and to make it real to ensure they
do so consequentially. This is the line along which G. Steiner (2008)
proposes to “remember the future” and thus invites us to conceive of
places of memory, of the past, as spaces from which to learn of possible futures and make the correct decisions in the present to arrive at
that which we desire. Along the same line, the preamble to the 2022
Law states: “The processes of memory are an essential component
in the configuration and development of all human societies, and the
effects range from daily gestures to major State policies. The deployment of memory is particularly important in building individual and
collective identities, for its huge potential for cohesion is comparable
to its capacity to cause exclusion, difference and conflict. Therefore,
the State’s main responsibility in developing democratic memory
policies is to promote their capacity for reparation, inclusiveness and
pluralism”.
Only with an inclusive, tolerant and diverse present is a fully
democratic future possible, and to achieve that we must move towards building a new “master narration” that responds to who we
are, what we want to be and how we must behave to achieve that. This
involves deconstructing the decades-long narratives we have received
and looking for new reference points which support inclusion and
the transformation of the distinction between victims and aggressors
with an “us” that makes room for everyone.
Hence the importance of the State, and this new Law, fulfilling its
role and providing means and carrying out actions to avoid the loss of
critical thinking and a disregard for human rights violations.
This recent past, occupied by democratic memory, is not only
affected by the political polarisation of the present, but also posttruth. For that reason, the means must be provided to prevent a deliberate distortion of reality and a loss to the value of objective data
to foster opinions and emotions which elicit this past, and which
are employed to consolidate confrontation in the present day. We
all have to convey the existence of adversaries, not enemies, and our
political adversaries must not lose any of their rights given that they
are the figures we compete with to defend opposing projects to deal
with social problems, but always within the regulations of fair confrontation and conserving the possibility of understanding (Arnoletto, 2007).
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Graves and Democratic Memory
Democratic memory seeks to nurture critical thought and the
search for social justice, and thus shows us the need to transform conflict resolution and manage to reduce violence, preparing us to advance on the path to co-existence and respect for ideas. Accordingly,
the 2022 Law also strengthens, along with the memory owed to victims, the fight for democracy. For the War of Spain, no longer viewed
just as a civil war, is presented as the first link in the fight democracies
took on to be free of fascism. The Republican defeat specifically, owing to the scant support it received from its environment, facilitated
the ensuing momentum of fascism. And so, in a globalised world, the
Spanish defeat is connected to the global fight for democracy.
Therefore, the Law sets 31 October as a day of remembrance
and in homage to all victims, a day on which Spanish Parliament
approved the Constitution, a constitution that was later endorsed
by the vast majority of Spaniards and which opened up a period of
pacific and conciliatory co-existence. Further, it establishes 8 May as
a day of homage to the victims of exile, the day the Second World War
ended. For the Allies fighting against Nazism and fascism, 8 May is
the Unconditional Surrender of Germany, or VE Day. For victims
of the Nazi regime — jews, homosexuals, Romany people, communists, social democrats, liberals, Spaniards from the resistance and
all enemies of Nazism — 8 May 1945 was Liberation Day: liberation
from the concentration camps, the prisons, from life in inhumane
conditions.
I can find no better coda for these words than the verses written
by Vicent Andrés Estellés:
«Mentre la terra invoca en va
la mort principi de les morts
criminals tongades de morts
collites de morts els morts
de la postguerra els morts els morts
mentre la terra es tapa els ulls
terra universal de Paterna
terra dels morts oh amarga terra
terra de la calç clivellada
terra martiritzada…»5
While the land invokes
death begins deaths
criminals layer upon layer of deaths
deaths harvesting deaths
deaths of the post-war deaths deaths
5
Versos 28 to 34 of Poem
III (Estellés, 1998).
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Francisco J. Sanchis Moreno
while the land covers her eyes
the universal land of Paterna
the land of the deaths oh bitter earth
land of cracked lime
martyrised land…
Bibliography
Arnoletto, E. J. (2007). Glosario de Conceptos Políticos Usuales. Available at:
www.eumed.net/dices/
Estellés, V. A. (1998). Ofici permanent a la memòria de Joan B. Peset, Tres i Quatre,
València.
Fontana, J. (1982). Historia: análisis del pasado y proyecto social. Grupo Editorial
Grijalbo, Barcelona.
Koselleck, R. (1997). L’Expérience de l’histoire. Editions Seuil, Paris.
Santiesteban, A. (2010). “La formación en competencias de pensamiento histórico”. Clio & Asociados. La historia enseñada, 14, 34–56.
Steiner, G. (2008). Recordar el futur. Arcadia, Barcelona.
[page-n-175]
Rope used to tie victims’ hands before the execution
Individual 119, Grave 127. Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Albert Costa. ETNO
[page-n-176]
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The right to truth with regard
to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
Mauricio Valiente Ots
PHD IN LAW FROM THE UNIVERSITY CARLOS III IN MADRID
[page-n-177]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
During the historical episodes in which massive violations of human
rights have taken place, there has been a deliberate intention to conceal and manipulate the facts. Practices such as the “disappearance”
of people and their burial in mass graves form part of a pattern that
evidences a preconceived desire for impunity. In these circumstances,
the right to the truth, a basic concept in international human rights
law, is not only an essential instrument to redress the damage caused
to victims and their families, but also a requirement in the necessary
clarification of causes and responsibilities. The case of Spain, one
of the countries with the highest number of disappeared people according to United Nations data, as a result of the coup d’état and the
Franco dictatorship, is a clear example of the relevance and practical
significance of the right to the truth.
The right to the truth in international law and its reception
in Spain
Although the right to the truth has not been explicitly recognised in
human rights declarations, which has caused it to have diverse definitions and interpretations, after a long process of doctrinal elaboration and inclusion in various international treaties it now has a solid
basis in international law.
Article 32 of the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, adopted in 1977, recognised the right of
families to know the fate of their relatives. The following article
of the protocol, as a consequence of this recognition, defined the
obligation of states to carry out an active search for missing persons. This was a first step which, in the context of the social and
legal reaction to the grave human rights violations in Latin America
in the following decade, would prove to be insufficient. The Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights played an
important role in the process of broadening and clarifying the legal
concept, the former of the two organisations noting, in the 1986
report referring to events during the Argentine dictatorship, that
“society as a whole has the inalienable right to know the truth of
what happened, as well as the reasons and circumstances in which
aberrant crimes were committed, in order to prevent such events
from happening again” (Garretón, 2003: 121-2). This added a social
or collective dimension to the individual dimension of the victims’
right to the truth.
In the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on 16
December 2005 on basic principles and guidelines on the right of
victims of gross violations of international human rights law, access
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Mauricio Valiente Ots
to information was expressly provided for. More specifically, it was
stated that affected persons have the right to request and obtain
information on the “causes of their victimisation”. Given the uncertainty about the firm establishment of the right to the truth, a process
of consultation with experts and specialist entities was initiated in
preparation for the future work to be undertaken by the international
bodies of the United Nations system (Naqvi, 2006: 4-5; Rodríguez,
2017: 303-39).
There is no doubt that a qualitative leap was made when the right
to truth was explicitly recognised in the International Convention
for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance of
20 December 2006. In particular, article 24 obliges states to take
effective action to guarantee that each victim has “the right to know
the truth about the circumstances of the enforced disappearance, the
progress and results of the investigation and the fate of the disappeared person”. In line with this process of progressive recognition,
the United Nations General Assembly, by resolution 65/196 of 21 December 2010, established 24 March as the International Day for the
Right to the Truth, in memory of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero,
who was assassinated on that day in 1980.
One of the instruments created to promote the extension of this
right in member states was the appointment by the Human Rights
Council, in 2011, of a special rapporteur to promote truth, justice,
reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. It is worth noting that
the jurists who have held the position so far, Pablo de Greiff and
Fabián Salvioli, have paid great attention to the Spanish case, severely
criticising the shortcomings with respect to the right to truth suffered
by the victims of the Franco regime.
What has been the impact of this right in Spain? The Spanish
transition to democracy – “the transition” – which was presented as
a model, especially for Latin American countries, was based on a discourse that insisted on consensus and reconciliation, which involved
officially shelving the most problematic issues, such as seeking the accountability of the officials of the dictatorial regime who, meanwhile,
had for the most part allowed the agreed evolution to a constitutional
regime to take place. The consequence of this was an enormous deficiency in terms of the right of victims to clarification regarding what
had happened during the harsh repression of the Franco regime and
an absence of public policies on memory. It was thirty years before
Law 52/2007 was passed on 26 December 2007, recognising and
broadening rights and establishing measures in favour of those who
suffered persecution or violence during the civil war and the dictatorship (hereinafter, the Historical Memory Law).
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The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
The official name of the 2007 law already gives a clue as to the
inadequacy of its content. At least in its explanatory memorandum
it was proposed that the public authorities should promote “knowledge of our history” and foster “democratic memory”, albeit in the
spirit of “the rapprochement and concord of the transition”. Even so,
the application of the law has been very limited. This shortcoming,
precisely when the right to the truth was becoming more clearly defined and gaining greater importance in the international arena, has
been redressed by what Professor Rafael Escudero Alday has called
“the autonomous route for the recovery of historical memory”, with
ambitious legislation that has directly addressed the objective I am
analysing in this article (Escudero, 2021).
As was to be expected, the autonomous route generated resistance. Several pronouncements by the Constitutional Court opposed
the creation of truth commissions in the autonomous communities
of the Basque Country and Navarra, arguing that the judiciary had
exclusive responsibility for the investigation of crimes (Escudero,
2021: 175-177). Leaving aside the criticisms that have been made of
these rulings, what was evident was the absence of a regulatory implementation of the right to the truth in Spain. This shortcoming could
be extended to the European regional sphere, although a detailed
analysis of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights has
allowed Luis López Guerra to establish the existence of a right, with
an ill-defined ownership but which goes beyond the victims and their
families, of access to information of public importance and especially
in cases of human rights violations (López Guerra, 2018: 24-26).
Spain’s ratification of the International Convention for the
Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance on 14 July
2009, and the recent approval of the Democratic Memory Law make
way for a new scenario in Spain, consistent with the developments I
have summarised in the international sphere. The explanatory memorandum of the new law is very significant, in that it gives citizens
“the inalienable right to know the historical truth about the process
of violence and terror imposed by the Franco regime”. This principle
is specified in Article 15 of the enacting terms, which proclaims the
right of the victims, their relatives and society in general, to the verification of the facts and the full and public disclosure of the motives
and circumstances in which violations of international humanitarian
law or serious and gross violations of international human rights law
occurred during the civil war and the dictatorship. I will now analyse how this right is established within the text that came into force
in October 2022, in comparison with the Historical Memory Law
of 2007.
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The right to the truth of the victims of the Franco regime
The 2007 Historical Memory Law sought to recognise and extend
the rights of the victims of Francoism, but it did not include a detailed description of the different types of persecution suffered, a
general procedure for their recognition or a method for their quantification. In order to make up for these shortcomings, the new law
involves a wide-ranging attempt to characterise and describe the
situations that led to victimisation, while at the same time contemplating the creation of a register to guarantee “the effectiveness of the
principles of truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition”. The register will record the circumstances of the repression suffered, as well
as the place and date on which the events occurred, and the source
of the information. From this register of victims, a public census will
be drawn up, complete with names and surnames. This is essential to
avoid inaccuracies, manipulation and exaggeration which, as Francisco Espinosa reminds us in a recent work, even when carried out
with the best of intentions, generate confusion and discredit memory
policies (Viñas, Espinosa and Portilla, 2022: 42-5).
The new law significantly modifies, improves and extends the
provisions of the Historical Memory Law with regard to the mapping
of graves, the exhumation protocol and the authorisation procedure
for carrying out exhumations. Despite being the issue that attracted
the most attention in this precarious first Spanish formulation of the
right to the truth, its approach has proven to be flawed and clearly
insufficient. It is flawed because it places the burden of locating and
identifying the victims on the relatives and the social entities that protect them (first paragraph of Article 11). The general state administration only appears in the second part of the article with the mandate
to draw up work plans and approve subsidies to cover the expenses of
the individuals in question. Given such a message, the meagre result
in terms of the number of exhumations and recovered remains is not
surprising (Viñas, Espinosa and Portilla, 2022: 48).
On the other hand, by incorporating the recommendations
of various international bodies, the new law brings necessary and
radical changes. It expressly establishes the search for missing persons as being the responsibility of the general state administration.
In addition, it is stated that this work will be carried out “without
prejudice to the competences of other public authorities related
to this activity, reinforcing collaboration between them”, which is
not a mere precaution in the light of regional and local sensitivity
to the possible undermining of their competences, but rather the
confirmation of a situation established by the “autonomous route”
to which we have already referred. It is worth noting that this route
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The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
180
[page-n-182]
181
Press report of one of
the first exhumations
of the people executed.
The person in question is
Basilio Serrano, known as
El Manco de la Pesquera
(December, 2005).
Mauricio Valiente Ots
anticipated the change of approach set out in the new law (Escudero,
2021: 174).
It is now proposed to put in place several instruments that will
be key for the transition from the legal formulation of the right to its
effective implementation. Firstly (Articles 16, 17 and 19), multi-annual plans are envisaged for the search, location, exhumation and
identification of missing persons, which will be supported by location
maps and new protocols. This will take the form of an integrated
map for locating missing persons covering the whole of Spain, which
will incorporate the data submitted by the different public authorities. These measures do not represent a great novelty with respect to
what was contemplated in 2007, except the final provision, which is
very relevant for the effectiveness of the right to the truth and which
establishes that, in contrast with the aim of the Historical Memory
Law to make information only “available to interested parties”, from
now on the annual exhumation data – which will include the number
of requests registered, the number of graves and remains of persons
located, as well as the number of searches without a positive result –
must be made public.
Secondly, the creation of a state DNA bank is planned. Its function will be to receive and store the DNA of victims of the war and the
dictatorship and their relatives, as well as those affected by the abduction of newborn infants, with a view to their genetic identification.
The provision of biological samples by relatives for DNA profiling
will be voluntary and free of charge. In view of the banks that already
exist, close collaboration is foreseen between the state bank, the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, the institutes
of forensic medicine and the laboratories designated by the different
autonomous communities. The DNA database will contain samples
of skeletal remains from the different exhumations carried out.
These instruments represent a great step forward that will allow
progress to be made in the identification of the victims. More dubious in its scope and more controversial in its formulation is the wording of the new law regulating the authorisation of activities for the
location, exhumation and identification of disappeared persons, as
well as the management of the results of these interventions.
The fact that the activities of location, exhumation and identification of missing persons require prior administrative authorisation
is not a novelty with respect to the previous law. However, what is
crucial is the provision that the procedure will be initiated ex officio
by the autonomous community in whose territory the remains are
located or, where appropriate, by the general state administration in
a supplementary capacity, which will make it possible to combat the
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The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
inactivity of the former, something which has unfortunately occurred
on too many occasions up to now. Local bodies, family members
and memorialist organisations, providing proof or evidence, will be
able to request the initiation of proceedings. Controversy has arisen
in the processing of the new law due to the establishment, prior to
authorisation, of a public information period in which “the existence
of opposition to the exhumation by any of the direct descendants of
the persons whose remains are to be transferred, if any, must be taken
into account”. It seems clear that, in the case of a massive violation of
human rights and possible crimes against humanity, the resistance
of relatives should not be a determining factor under any circumstances, which demonstrates the complexity of the right to the truth
and the necessary collective or social dimension of this right.
Another controversial issue has been the reference to the result of
the investigations, since, although it is established that the discovery
of remains will be immediately brought to the attention of the Public
Prosecutor and the competent judges, the memorialist movement
has insisted that the latter should direct the entire process, given that
it involves possible crimes. This relates to the issue of how the judicialisation of the crimes of Francoism is addressed, which I cannot
discuss here in the depth that it deserves.
The collective dimension of the right to the truth
The 2007 law ruled out any kind of truth commission. Article 56 of
the new law provides for the creation within the Council of Democratic Memory (a newly created consultative body in which memorialist organisations will participate) of an independent, temporary
and non-judicial commission, academic in nature and with the aim
of contributing to the clarification of human rights violations during
the civil war and the dictatorship. It will be made up of people of
recognised prestige in the academic world and in the field of human
rights practice.
This is a further example of the practice of truth commissions implemented at the international level, which will have to be specified in
the implementing legislation, but which draws on the experience accumulated in other countries. As María Saffon and Rodrigo Uprimny
point out in a study, the extrajudicial truth of this type of commission
is not free of limitations and weaknesses, so rather than regarding
them as an exclusive instrument, it is a question of seeking their
complementarity with judicial truth and what these authors call the
“non-institutionalised social truth” (Uprimny and Saffon, 2006: 31-3).
In accordance with this non-exclusive intention, the new law is
not limited to this initiative. With the aim of fostering the scientific
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Mauricio Valiente Ots
Founding act of the
National Platform for a
Truth Commission at
Julián Besteiro School, in
Madrid, in March 2013.
knowledge that is essential for the development of democratic
memory, the government is mandated to promote research into all
aspects relating to the civil war and the dictatorship. In this regard,
comparative research will be promoted to make connections between the Spanish case and similar European and global processes.
This is a vision that is in line with the repudiation and condemnation
of the coup d’état of 18 July 1936 and the subsequent dictatorship, a
regime which, as the law’s explanatory memorandum recalls, UN
General Assembly resolution 39 (I) declared to be fascist in origin,
nature, structure and general conduct, which did not represent the
Spanish people, and which was imposed by force with the help of the
Axis powers.
The fact that the law aims to promote historical research and that
it indicates the subjects it considers necessary to consolidate the policies of democratic memory does not imply, as is expressly pointed
out, that it ignores “the inherent uncertainty” of historiographical
debate, which derives from the fact that it concerns “events in the
past about which the researcher can formulate hypotheses or conjectures under the protection of the freedom of scientific creation recognised in Article 20.1b) of the constitution. In this regard, as the law
itself points out, the Constitutional Court has made it clear (in particular in Judgement 43/2004, of 23 March) that scientific freedom
enjoys greater protection than that which applies to the freedoms
[page-n-185]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
of expression and information. This conclusion is reinforced by the
analysis we have already mentioned of the case law of the European
Court of Human Rights” (López Guerra, 2018: 25-29).
Of particular significance is the new law’s provision for the Spanish education system to include among its objectives the knowledge
of democratic memory, the struggle for freedoms and the repression
that took place during the civil war and the dictatorship, something
which will be reflected in textbooks and curricular materials. To make
this provision effective, the curricular content for compulsory secondary education, vocational training and the baccalaureate will be
updated, and the subject will be included in initial and ongoing teacher training programmes.
Truth in the public space
A key perspective and one that has a major social impact is the presentation of the truth in the public space. This has both a corrective
component that targets any vestigial reminders of the exaltation of
the coup d’état and the dictatorship, and another that entails giving meaning, based on the values of democratic memory, to certain
places that are symbolic of the repression and the social struggles for
freedom and justice. Continuing with the comparative approach that
I have adopted in this article, with reference to the 2007 law, the new
regulations involve an extension of the instruments to put an end to
symbols, elements and acts contrary to democratic memory.
It also adds a reference to civilian and military units involved in
collaboration between the Franco regime and the Axis powers during
the Second World War, a clear allusion to the Blue Division. Similarly,
the names imposed by the Franco regime on places, streets and public
centres of any kind will be considered to be contrary to democratic
memory.
The drawing up of a catalogue of symbols and elements contrary
to democratic memory, to be published with annual updates, incorporating the data supplied by the autonomous communities and local
bodies, will serve as a permanent and public reminder of the elements
that must be removed or eliminated. It may include those elements
denounced by the victims, their relatives or memorialist organisations, in defence of their right to honour and dignity, or those which
are the result of studies and research work. The most important novelty is that, if the removal or elimination of the elements included in the
catalogue has not taken place voluntarily, the competent authorities
will initiate the procedure for the removal of these elements ex officio.
With regard to protection, it is established that the public authorities that own property declared places of democratic memory
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will have the obligation to guarantee their “durability, identification,
explanation and adequate signage”. In any event, they will avoid the
removal or disappearance of any remains erected as remembrance
and recognition of events representative of democratic memory and
the struggle of Spanish citizens for their rights and freedoms in any
era. In cases where these are privately owned, the same objectives will
be pursued by means of agreements. This will avoid losses, in terms of
democratic memory, such as the complete disappearance of the former Carabanchel prison.
In defence of the documentary heritage
The new law devotes ample space to archives and documents, far exceeding the scant reference in the 2007 law on access to public and
private archives. In addition to the consolidation of the Documentary
Centre of Historical Memory in Salamanca, the criteria for archival
policies in defence of human rights drawn up by UNESCO are incorporated into this legislation in detail. The right to open, free and universal access to public and private archives is generally recognised as
an essential component of the right to the truth. Any person will have
the right to consult all the information contained in the documents
that accredit their status as a victim, and may also consult the personal details of third parties appearing in these documents. The right to
obtain a copy, free of charge, of all documents in which the victims
are mentioned for any claim for reparation to which they may be entitled is also recognised.
Similarly, within a period of one year, among the assets making
up the documentary heritage, it is planned to create a specific section
called the “Census of Documentary Collections for Democratic Memory”, which will include everything related to the repression and violation of human rights. This will include the data corresponding to the
archives and documentary collections in public or private ownership
with documents produced or collected between 1936 and 1978. The
census is intended to be an instrument for the dissemination of democratic memory and will be made available online in its complete form.
The great novelty of the Democratic Memory Law with respect
to the previous law is the establishment of a system of penalties that
clearly defines offences and sanctions, which will be applied in accordance with the ordinary administrative procedure, providing the
type of guarantees that were sorely lacking in the law of 2007 and
limited its effectiveness. With regard to the issue under discussion in
this section, the destruction of public or private documents related to
democratic memory, or the misappropriation of documents of a public nature by individuals or private institutions that held public office
[page-n-187]
The right to truth with regard to the human rights violations
during the Franco regime
during the civil war, the dictatorship and until the entry into force of
the constitution of 1978, is considered a very serious offence. Failure
to comply with the legal obligations of protection and conservation
with regard to the documentary heritage described above is also classified as a serious offence.
Conclusions
Spain is at a decisive moment for the consolidation of the right to
the truth with the entry into force of the recent law 20/2022 of 19
October on Democratic Memory, which represents a substantial
advance in this area. Political impetus for its application, adequate
regulatory development and effective coordination between all
administrations is required to guarantee the effectiveness of the
proposed measures. The focus of the law and the specification of
what it calls the “duty to remember” represent a novel approach and
it will be very important to monitor its implementation. As Carlos
Villán Durán and Carmelo Faleh Pérez point out, international human rights law is an unfinished, living work that must respond to
the demands of the international community through a continuous
updating of its material and procedural content (Faleh and Villán,
2017: 33). Following the singling out of our country for its repeated
non-compliance with the right to the truth, the successful implementation of the new law represents the best possible contribution
to this progressive development.
The consolidation of the right to the truth in the international
arena makes it difficult to imagine taking a step backwards as a consequence of a political change. It cannot be ruled out, but both international law and regional regulations will make a lasting reversal of
policy difficult. In any event, in the Spanish case, the commission and
the rest of the measures that accompany it should not be considered
as an instrument of transitional justice, but rather as a constituent
element of public policies on memory. Contrary to the common
misrepresentation, the right to truth is not the establishment of an
official historical narrative, the imposition of a kind of unquestionable official truth. This is precisely what the Franco dictatorship attempted to do. It is a question of establishing a democratic identity
and embedding it firmly in the history of a country such as ours which
has suffered serious human rights violations. There will continue to
be debates and controversy, and conflicting political and historiographical perspectives, but the victims and society as a whole have an
established right to know, so that the truth about the causes of and
responsibilities for what happened are known and remembered, so
that it will never happen again.
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Bibliography
Escudero Alday, R.: “La vía autonómica para la recuperación de la memoria histórica en España: leyes, derechos y políticas públicas”, in Revista Catalana de
Dret Públic, number 63 (2021), pp. 166-184.
Espinosa, F., Portilla, G., and Viñas, Á.: Castigar a los rojos. Acedo Colunga, el gran
arquitecto de la represión franquista, prologue by Baltasar Garzón, Crítica, Barcelona (2022).
Faleh Pérez, C., and Villán Durán, C.: El sistema universal de protección de los Derechos Humanos: Su aplicación en España, Tecnos, Madrid (2017).
Garretón, R.: “Alcance y eficacia de los instrumentos legales internacionales”,
in Comisiones de la verdad. Memoria del seminario internacional ‘Comisiones de la
verdad: tortura, reparación y prevención’, pp. 119-127, Comisión de derechos
Humanos del Distrito Federal, Mexico (2003).
López, L. (2018). «El derecho a la verdad: ¿la emergencia de un nuevo derecho en
la jurisprudencia del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos?». Anuario
Iberioamericano de Justicia Constitucional, 22, 11-30.
Naqvi, Y. (2006). «El derecho a la verdad en el derecho internacional: ¿realidad o
ficción? International Review of the Red Cross, 862. https://www.icrc.org/es/
doc/assets/files/other/irrc_862_naqvi.pdfRodríguez Rodríguez, J.: Derecho
a la verdad y derecho internacional en relación con graves violaciones con los derechos
humanos, Berg Institute, Madrid (2017).
Saffon, M.P., and Uprimny Yepes, R.: “Verdad judicial y verdades extrajudiciales.
La búsqueda de una complementariedad dinámica”, in Pensamiento Jurídico,
number 17 (2006), pp. 9-36.
[page-n-189]
Pipe belonging to Ramón Egea Benavent
Grave 112, Paterna. Donated by the Egea family
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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First and foremost, the victims.
Principle of Justice
Baltasar Garzón Real
JURIST. PRESIDENT OF FIBGAR
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
The Multinational Commission of Responsibilities, meeting in Paris
on 29 March 1919, identified the category of crimes against the Laws
and Customs of War and the Laws of Humanity. With reference to
these laws, they examined the beginning of what was then known as
the Great War (before we had to start numbering them), as well as the
acts committed during its course. This was in accordance with Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles of 28 June 1919, which expressly
ordered the prosecution of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Hohenzollern for
crimes of this nature, as later occurred with the Treaty of Sèvres in
1920, concerning the prosecution of the Ottoman military for the Armenian genocide of 1915. In its report, it stated: “The Commission
concludes that, having examined a multiplicity of crimes committed
by those powers which shortly before and at The Hague had professed their reverence for the law and their respect for the principles
of Humanity, the conscience of the people demands a sanction which
will make it clear that cynical disregard for the most sacred laws is
not permitted”.
I included a reference to these historical paragraphs in the order
of 16 October 2008, by which I declared myself competent to investigate the crimes of Francoism. Further on, in the same order, I concluded: “[...] therefore, and with the support of international law, the
action taken by the persons who rose up and contributed to the armed
insurrection of 18 July 1936 was entirely unlawful and they attacked
the form of government (crimes against the Constitution, in Title Two
of Spain’s Penal Code of 1932, in force at the time of the uprising), in
a coordinated and conscious manner, determined to put an end to the
Republic by de facto means by overthrowing the legitimate government of Spain, and thereby laying the groundwork for the implementation of a preconceived plan that included the use of violence as the
basic instrument for its execution”.
I wrote this order after a lengthy and exhaustive investigation of
the allegations made by a group of lawyers who, on behalf of memorialist collectives, attended Court 5 of the Audiencia Nacional (Spain’s
National High Court), of which I was the judge, in December 2006.
They were later joined by associations of relatives and an MP from
the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party). They called for an
investigation into the disappearances, torture and forced exiles that
took place after the 1936 coup d’état.
The victims
As a jurist and judge and with a focus on human rights that I have
cultivated from the very early stages of my professional career, I could
not but investigate. The reason: the victims, to whom I gave priority.
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I was guided by the principle of justice which establishes that all people, by the mere fact of being human beings, have the same dignity,
regardless of any circumstance, and are therefore worthy of equal
consideration and respect. The principle of justice, recognised as an
overriding principle of the legal system, encompasses the values of
reasonableness, equality, equity, proportionality, respect for legality
and the prohibition of arbitrariness.
The victims are the main focus of historical memory. The goal is
to gather their stories, personalise them, and investigate the circumstances that led their being subjected to crime or offence. Bringing
their cases before the court is the beginning of a process which also
involves setting out on the road to truth and reparation. Testifying
before a judge brings into the light events which have been concealed
for years.
I will never forget María Martín López, 81 years old, who testified before the magistrates of the Second Chamber of the Supreme
Court of Spain, showing a tremendous strength which belied her
small stature. With the conviction of someone telling the truth, she
said: “My mother was brought to testify, but they killed her on the
way; they killed twenty-seven men and three women...”. She told
the judges that the last time she had seen her mother she was only
six years old, and that she and her family had been engaged in a protracted and gruelling battle to recover her remains from the Pedro
Bernardo cemetery in Avila. She was the first witness in the proceedings before me, and after her, other people came forward, humble,
calm, eager to tell of the enormous burden they carried, and to have
judges who dispensed justice do something to support them in their
quest for the truth to emerge. They expressed their enduring disbelief at what had happened, overcoming the fear imposed by silence.
Those days stand out in my memory in a unique fashion, as if all
the people who had been imprisoned, tortured and executed were
taking shape as flesh-and-blood individuals; as if they were being
given new life as they were named with warmth and affection by the
witnesses; as if these words opened a portal to a past which was still
alive somewhere in time, and the portal remained open for the duration of the testimony. These men and women from the past came
alive through the memory that gushed forth after long years of imposed silence, reaffirming their existence and shedding light on the
injustices committed against them by the executioners of Franco’s
regime. These stories and these names spoken by those who testified
before the highest court of justice of a society still fearful, so many
years later, were proof that the fascists had not achieved their goal of
wiping these people off the face of the earth, nor the ideals and hopes
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
they had espoused during their lives. There they were again, hand in
hand with their wives, daughters and sons. Although the witnesses
were listened to with respect, we know what happened afterwards:
the Supreme Court granted impunity and no one else was allowed to
testify in court.
Justice
In around the year 211, the Roman jurist Cnaeus Domitius Annius
Ulpianus defined justice as the continuous and perpetual will to give
to each their due. This idea forms part of Plato’s philosophy and thus
the philosophy of the ancient world, although the concept of aequitas
(equity) was the most commonly used. That everyone should receive
their due is therefore the classical outlook, an outlook which was also
reflected, centuries later, in the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, who refers to it as: “the continuous and perpetual will to give to
each their due”.
Nowadays, jurists approach the principle of justice from a variety
of different perspectives. I myself am particularly interested in garantismo (a theory of constitutional guarantees or warrants), the manner
of understanding, interpreting and explaining the law that has been
developed and disseminated by the jurist, judge and philosopher Luigi
Ferrajoli who, since 1989, has been working on applying this theory
to penal law. The idea that mistrust of all kinds of power should form
the basis of the guarantee of rights is particularly applicable in the trajectory of the case taken by the victims of Franco’s regime, which is
inconsistent, bizarre and, on too many occasions, not in keeping with
the law. I share fully Ferrajoli’s scepticism as to whether the powers
that govern us are capable of providing complete and positive solutions when it comes to ensuring fundamental rights, and that they
tend to restrict these rights with the help of the legal mechanism. The
task of the legal administrator, the judge, or the prosecutor, in their
duty of independence, is to combat this spurious will by protecting the
rights that may be violated.
The philosopher Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre argues that we
need to have a conception of society and social relations in order to
have a conception of ethics and justice. In other words, he believes
that, in order to give everyone their due in terms of justice, we must
first determine what he or she contributes to the different social
spheres. However, for this to happen, our concept of society must be
of one which is just and free. John Rawls, for his part, considers justice
to be the primary virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of
thought. The American philosopher argues that, just as a theory must
be rejected if it is not true, so it does not matter whether or not laws
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and institutions are orderly and efficient; if they are unjust, they must
be reformed or abolished. He adds: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that not even the welfare of society as a whole
can trample upon. It is for this reason that justice rejects the idea that
the loss of liberty for some is made just by the fact that a greater good
is shared by others. It does not allow the sacrifices imposed on some to
be offset by the greater number of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore, in a just society, the liberties of equal citizenship are definitively
established; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
bargaining or the calculation of social interests”. This observation is
all the more pertinent in today’s world, when the judicialisation of politics is leading to situations of injustice for those affected, for citizens
and for society in general.
Francoism on trial
These prevarications and fudges regarding what justice should be
were also apparent in the trial to which I was subjected for the investigation into the crimes of Francoism. The trial began on 24 January
2012, which, as fate would have it, was the thirty-fifth anniversary
of the murders at the hands of the extreme right of Arturo Ruíz,
María Luz Nájera and the Atocha labour lawyers. In response to the
concept of the principle of justice, I remember The New York Times
describing it in a hard-hitting editorial as “an offence against justice
and against history [...]. It represents a disturbing echo of Franco-era
totalitarian thinking”.
“Is there no justice for these crimes?” read a large banner in
front of the Supreme Court, displayed by the Association for the
Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de
la Memoria Histórica). When the principle of justice is violated, the
doorway to impunity is opened and the demonstrations which took
place in Spain and abroad were against such arbitrary measures. One
only has to look at how the Second Chamber of Spain’s Supreme
Court acquitted the judge, but condemned the victims, closing off
the possibility of criminal investigations into these crimes of the
dictatorship. I have always been of the belief that no crime should
go uninvestigated and unpunished. I can only wonder as to which
powerful interests have the ability to bend the rule of law in a court,
so that it decides that so many murders remain unpunished. This is
an example of how the principle of justice can become muddied by
judicial rulings which are not in keeping with the principle of equity.
Moreover, the events which were the subject of the allegation I allowed had never been criminally investigated by the Spanish justice
system, and thus this impunity prevails to this day.
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
The fact that the lawsuit against me came from the rancorous
ultra-right says a lot about those interests which I mentioned earlier,
and which seem to have influenced the court in its subsequent decision to have any potential enquiry dropped, leaving the victims and
their families in the lurch. Ten years after that trial, it was clear that
things had not changed or that they had perhaps even worsened. In
cases such as these, time is not on the victims’ side, and their lives often
come to an end without them having been able to bury their loved ones
with dignity.
Reading Spanish Law 20/2022 of 19 October on Democratic
Memory, published in Spain’s Official State Gazette (BOE) No. 252 of
20 October 2022, which came into force on 21 October 2022, leaves
me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is joy that the victims
will be able to pursue legal means in their legitimate demands for
truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition; on the other hand, there
is a feeling of bitterness given the time wasted since my orders of 16
October and 18 November 2008. In these orders, I had argued, based
on many of the considerations now included in the law, that the investigation should have continued instead of being closed by the Spanish
justice system, which, moreover, prosecuted the judge, with the pain
and suffering that this entailed for those who were asking for their
right to be met.
The exhumation of the Francoist Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, remembered for his terrible deeds in Andalusia, one month after his
death, provides a clear example of what should be done. For this we
have to thank those who, then as now, have not ceased in their quest
for truth and justice. I am moved to remember the courage of these
people, all of them of advanced age, who came to tell their story before
the impassive and distant gaze of the Supreme Court judges, and that
of so many others who, following their example, fight day by day for
their rights, ignored for so many years. Now the law will force institutions to act - at last!1
Zero impunity
Milestones such as the exhumation of the dictator by Dolores Delgado, then Minister of Justice, or the efforts to push forward a law on
democratic memory, are small triumphs for all of us who wish to see
the principle of justice prevail in all areas, and even more so in those
where it has continually been denied. We must no longer grant impunity in cases of atrocious crimes such as genocide, crimes against
humanity, war or torture, as this would run counter to everything
that international law has managed to achieve. Impunity cannot be
allowed. Arguments which state that when revisiting the transition,
1
BOE.es - BOE -A-202217099 Law 20/2022, of
19 October, at: www.
boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2022-17099
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The boots of the victim of
reprisals, Basiliso Serrano,
el Manco de la Pesquera,
on the firing squad wall
in Paterna where he was
executed. Photograph:
Matías Alonso.
in reference to the Amnesty Law, “we should stick together”, or that
the aim is to “reopen old wounds”, are populist and false. They are
arguments which do indeed lead to confrontation, and which are in
the interests of the same people who have prevented justice from prevailing for so many years, knowing that those who use them do not
recognise the rights to which the victims are entitled.
In Spain’s transition to democracy, a leap forward, towards modernism, towards Europeanism, was sought, erecting a barrier of forgetting that cannot work. Imposed forgetting always fails. Officially
decreed pardons, too. Reconciliations, also. You forgive whom you
want to forgive and reconcile with whom you want to reconcile. MacIntyre sums it up well: “It is a condition of forgiveness that the offender accepts as just the verdict of the law with regard to their action
and acknowledges the justice of the appropriate punishment; hence
the common root of the words ‘penitence’ and ‘penalty’. The offender
can be forgiven if the offended person so desires”. As for forgiveness,
MacIntyre outlines a fundamental difference: “Justice is typically administered by a judge, an impersonal authority representing the community; but forgiveness can only be granted by the offended party...”.
I think that what is important is that if, at a historical juncture
such as Spain’s transition to democracy, it is not possible to deal with
certain issues, then this should happen afterwards. But to refuse and
to allow a situation where people in their eighties and nineties have to
continue asking for justice is so shameful, so ignominious, that it
is hard to accept. It is very difficult to explain to other countries,
when international organisations are demanding that we investigate
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
when the Supreme Court has closed down all avenues. The fact that
the victims of Franco’s regime are still not recognised in Spain today
shows that we have been unable to move on. Only on the day when
the name of a street is changed from that of a dictator to that of a
democratically elected leader without it causing an uproar will we be
able to say that we have done so.
Upholding ethics
The principle of justice must be upheld through accountability, because it is the basis of the Law and because it is the means by which
we can protect those who do not have a voice. Applying it entails tackling these issues in a combative fashion, in keeping with the conception of society advocated by MacIntyre. If you fail to move forward,
if you stand still, as a judge you may have a comfortable career, but
you will never be a fair and equitable one. Progress involves having to
meet challenges met and entails risks. It is a matter of upholding ethical principles and applying them, of holding on to your independence
and wearing it like a shield, of not being swayed by other principles
such as the interests of power or of the powerful, which only serve to
leave the victims exposed. I have never been able to understand how
people from the judicial world are able to enter politics, forgetting
that independence is one of the watchwords of the justice system
and one of its fundamental safeguards, and seeking to manipulate or
distort it in order to serve these spurious interests. This in turn leads
to public distrust of the institution, which is being done a disservice,
while undermining the rule of law, when, on the contrary, public service in the justice system, in politics or in any other sphere is essential
in order for democracy to flourish.
The principle of justice cannot be divorced from a sense of compassion, from the feeling of sadness caused by someone’s suffering,
prompting us to attempt to alleviate their pain, to remedy or prevent
it. Charity hovers on the fringes of the concept of justice, as a signifier
of concern for the other. I believe that if those who dispense justice
are oblivious to these sentiments, while their work may be faultless
from the point of view of interpreting legal standards, they will not be
adequately fulfilling their obligation to look after the weak. This is not
to say that we should bypass the law, but rather that the professional
who passes judgement on others must be trained not only in legal
postulates but also in social reality, and in the real world, compassion
and charity are elements the absence of which debases society; likewise, the judge must be aware of certain sensitivities which can make
the difference between ruling in a strictly academic manner or doing
so with an understanding of the situation and its broader context.
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First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
Obstacles
Serving those whose rights have been violated is not an exclusively
ethical matter, rather one must be compelled to do so by the principle
of justice. In his report in 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on transitional justice, Pablo de Greiff, reminded the Spanish
State of its duty to urgently take into account the demands of the victims of the Civil War and Franco’s regime, highlighting as priorities
the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) and the arbitrary sentences
handed out during the Civil War and Franco’s regime, calling for
their annulment. “The state has an obligation to attend to the rights
of the victims and their families and to put an end to the suffering of
thousands of people who still - in some cases eighty years after the
events, more than forty years since the return of democracy - do not
know where the remains of their loved ones are”, underlined the rapporteur, referring to the standards of international human rights law,
which are always binding.
Those of us who have been attempting to navigate our way
through the tricky terrain of democratic memory know that rightwing governments have put every imaginable obstacle in the way of
the principle of justice, with total disregard for the truth and no hint
of any reparation whatsoever. For the right, heir to the dictatorship’s
occultism, Pablo de Greiff ’s assertion amounts to nothing but so
many words: “The strength of a democracy is measured by, among
other things, its capacity to address valid claims from victims, regardless of political considerations or affiliation, and to guarantee the
right to the truth concerning events, no matter how painful it may
be”. The government of the Partido Popular (People’s Party) turned a
deaf ear. Even more so when Greiff pointed out: “There is a need for
a resolute State policy that does not fall prey to political tensions and
divisions, but which guarantees integrated, coherent, prompt and
impartial measures in favour of truth, memory and reparation [...].
This is a matter of human rights, not partisan politics.”
A textbook case
One example of such arbitrariness in government is provided by the
case of Teófilo Alcorisa. On 14 April 1947, Teófilo Román Alcorisa
Monleón was working in a vineyard in the village of Higueruelas, in
the province of Cuenca, dressed in corduroy trousers and wooden albarca shoes, when he was arrested by the Guardia Civil. The arrest was
made in the context of a major operation against the guerrillas of the
Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante y Aragón. The Guardia Civil was looking for Pedro Alcorisa, Teófilo’s son. When they did not find Pedro,
the Guardia Civil proceeded to arrest his father, an elderly man who
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was not involved in any party or movement, supposedly so that they
could question him regarding the whereabouts of his son. Teófilo was
taken to the Arrancapins barracks in Valencia. His family was never
informed of the place of his arrest, nor of his death, nor of the place
where he was buried. A member of the civil guard took pity on Teófilo’s
wife and said to her: “Don’t look any further, your husband is dead.”
In the year 2000, the children, Pedro and Pilar Alcorisa, began to
investigate the whereabouts of their father through memorial associations. The burial site was located in the Valencia cemetery and in 2009,
the Valencia City Council, at the time led by Rita Barberá of the Partido
Popular, was asked to carry out the task of recovering the remains.
As a result of the administrative/political obstacles that they were
continually facing, the association and the relatives sought the help of
ILOCAD, the law firm of which I am the director. Thus, on 19 February 2014, the relatives filed a complaint with Valencia’s Court of First
Instance No. 7. A complaint was filed concerning an alleged crime of
unlawful detention without providing notification of location, for
the events that had occurred in 1947, and the ongoing nature of the
alleged criminal actions was emphasised. The judicial process was
guided by the Supreme Court ruling, i.e., the outcome was negative,
but the crowning touch was the rejection of the appeal by the Constitutional Court in an order dated 13 March 2015 on the grounds that
“there is no violation of any fundamental right”.
The situation changed with the election of the coalition of the
Compromís, PSPV and València en Comú parties and on 14 April
2016, Pilar and Pedro recovered their father’s body, receiving it from
Mayor Joan Ribó. The process had taken almost seven years and had
been marked by administrative red tape, official disinterest and a political mood more in line with the militant activism of the right wing
when it comes to anything that seeks to challenge their idealistic vision of Franco’s regime, ignoring the crimes committed, the 140,000
disappeared, the stolen children... facts which have not gone away.
Defending democracy
In that lengthy process, as with so many others that have met with a
stubborn institutional and judicial denial, justice was absent and continues to be so today. It did not carry out its duty, which was to support the victims, defend them and make reparations, failing to fulfil
its obligation to enforce the law.
During all these years, I have seen too many things that run counter to what I have held most sacred as a judge. Octogenarian orphans
crying because they have been prevented from digging up the remains
of their father; judges refusing to grant the right to a burial; I have
[page-n-201]
200
First and foremost, the victims. Principle of Justice
followed closely as a law concerning historical memory was consigned
to oblivion by a right-wing government, with the president of the government himself, Mariano Rajoy, denying any support to the families,
and boasting that he would not spend “a single euro” to support the
victims in their quest. Meanwhile, the ultra-right has been growing in
popularity, feeding off a rancid nostalgia for the privileges of another
era. Disregarding justice entails ignoring the truth and leaving the
wounds open, unresolved, with the added insult of decorating the perpetrators, to the astonishment of the wronged parties. What’s worse
still is that hatred for the victims has remained. Faced with a progressive government that has dared to exhume Francisco Franco and
that is putting forward a law aimed at restoring this much-maligned
principle of justice, the right wing has announced that, if it succeeds in
regaining power, it will repeal the Law on Democratic Memory, just as
it will undo other advances that serve to consolidate freedoms. Their
goal is to return Spain to the darkness from which we managed to
emerge with so much pain and effort when we established democracy.
Recognising the dignity of all people, whatever their circumstances, and fighting for their rights, is the basis of the principle of justice
that must inform democratic memory and society in every situation.
Constructing truth and memory, as something both present and future, is essential and gives a society strength. Because let us never forget that the obligation of every democrat is to fight against impunity.
Bibliography
Ferrajoli, L. (2006). Garantismo penal. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Mexico City.
Garzón Real, B. (2013). Auto declarándose competente para investigar los crímenes del franquismo. Available at: https://baltasargarzon.org/wpcontent/
uploads/2013/11/auto_memoria_historica.pdf
MacIntyre, A. (2004). Tras la virtud. Ed. Crítica, Barcelona.
Rawls, J. (2004). Teoría de la justicia. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Madrid,
Spain.
Sánchez, A. (29 January 2022). «Este tribunal condenó a las víctimas a la desesperanza». Infolibre. https://www.infolibre.es/politica/decada-acoso-garzon-investigar-crimenes-franquismo_1_1217869.html
Crutches
Stratigraphic Unit 1020, Grave 114. Paterna
ETNO Democratic Memory Collection
Photo: Eloy Ariza-ArqueoAntro Scientific Association
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201
International Law, Reparation
and Democratic Memory:
The Case of Spain
Carmen Pérez González
SENIOR LECTURER IN PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS AT UNIVERSIDAD CARLOS III OF MADRID
[page-n-203]
202
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
1. Introduction
Designed as a tool that seeks to bring about, or at least facilitate,
the renewal and rebirth of societies grappling with a past of gross
human rights violations (Vasuki Nesiah, 2016: 779), transitional
justice poses a specific set of complexities in Spain. Diverse in nature
(historical, political, social), these challenges are also reflected at the
legal level, here largely stemming from the passage of time. This has
been clearly explained by the UN Human Rights Council’s Special
Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, who stated in 2014 that the Spanish case
“involves challenges which are characteristic of post-authoritarian
as well as post-conflict transitions, such as broad variations over
time and geographical factors in the patterns of violence, during
the Civil War (1936–1939) and the dictatorship (1939–1975), a long
dictatorship following a conflict, and major developments in the
national and international legal contexts since the initial violations
occurred”1.
These international developments to which the Rapporteur
refers serve as the point of departure for this paper. In the ensuing
decades since the gross violations of human rights were committed in
Spain, international law has steadily and undeniably moved towards
establishing certain obligations that States cannot ignore. In other
words, I believe that any legal approach to the plight of the victims of
these violations, to their rights, cannot today overlook the progress
that has been made in this respect under international human rights
law (IHRL) and international humanitarian law (IHL).
As the two cornerstones of this legal framework, the principles
that the UN’s work has established to date cannot go unmentioned.
Specifically, I refer here to the principles in the “Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through
Action to Combat Impunity (hereinafter Set of Principles)2 and
the “Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and
Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human
Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian
Law” (hereinafter Basic Principles and Guidelines) approved by the
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 60/147 of
16 December 20053. International human rights protection institutions have played an extraordinary role in specifying and updating
these principles and in establishing the content of the corresponding
obligations. Their efforts have consolidated the State’s obligation
to apply what has been called “the transitional template” (Ignacio
Forcada, 2011: 23) as a means of guaranteeing victims’ rights to
truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. At the
1
See paragraph 8 of the
Special Rapporteur’s
report of 22 July 2014 following his visit to Spain
(A/HRC/27/56/Add.1).
The visit took place from
21 January to 3 February
2014. The Report is
available at http://www.
ohchr.org/EN/Issues/
TruthJusticeReparation/
Pages/Index.aspx (all
electronic documents
cited throughout this
paper were accessed on 3
October 2022).
2
Available at https://
ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_s.aspx?si=E/cn.4/2005/102/
Add.1.
3
The resolution is available
at: http://research.un.org/es/docs/ga/quick/
regular/60.
[page-n-204]
203
4
See his report entitled:
Memorialisation Processes in the Context of Serious Violations of Human
Rights and International
Humanitarian Law: The
Fifth Pillar of Transitional
Justice, adopted on 9 July
2020 (A/ HRC/45/45),
available at https://
undocs.org/ es/A/
HRC/45/45.
5
However, the Democratic
Memory Law, which
I will discuss in more
detail below, assumes
that this will necessarily
be the situation in some
cases, for example, the
exhumations and transfer of the remains of the
victims buried in the Valle
de Cuelgamuros (Valley
of the Fallen). According
to Article 54.6 of the
Law, “in the event that
exhumation is technically
unfeasible, reparation
measures of a symbolic
and moral nature shall be
arranged”.
6
Law 20/2022, of 19 October, Official State Gazette
(BOE) No. 252, of 20
October 2022.
Carmen Pérez González
recommendation of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of
truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition, a fifth
pillar should be added to these first four: memorialisation4. As Margalida Capellà i Roig has noted, it is worth bearing in mind that the
State’s obligations in this sphere “are complementary and not alternatives, they cannot replace each other” (2021: 106)5. Truth, justice
and reparation are, in effect, a sort of system of communicating vessels, a single measure therefore capable of serving two of these purposes. Likewise, the absence of progress in any of these areas clearly
compromises the process as a whole.
In Spain, this process has been late, sluggish and intermittent.
Nevertheless, the Spanish State has made some truly significant
strides towards complying with its obligations under international
law in relation to the protection of the rights of those who were victims of gross human rights violations during the Spanish Civil War
and the subsequent Franco dictatorship. Against this backdrop, this
paper will draw particular attention to the obligation of reparation, to
which victims of gross human rights violations are entitled to under
international law. Principles 31 to 34 of the Set of Principles refer to
this right. More specifically, they refer to the rights and duties arising
out of the obligation to make reparation (Principle 31), reparation
procedures (Principle 32), publicising reparation procedures (Principle 33) and the scope of the right to reparation (Principle 34). Reparation should be comprehensive. That is, it should cover all injuries
suffered by the victims and include measures relating to restitution,
compensation, rehabilitation and satisfaction as provided by international law. To this end, the State should develop a system of redress
that is readily available, prompt and effective at the criminal, civil,
administrative and/or disciplinary levels.
The analysis I propose begins with a brief description of the way
in which Spain, particularly through its Democratic Memory Law
passed in October 20226, has complied with these obligations (2). I
will then discuss several pending issues (3). I will close the paper with
a series of conclusions (4).
However, there is one last introductory clarification that needs
to be made. The fact that it is the State, taken as a whole, that is the
subject of international law and the corresponding international obligations to which I refer should not obscure the fact that some autonomous communities in Spain have made more progress than others
in recognising and guaranteeing the rights of the victims of the Civil
War and the Francoist repression that followed, although their ranks
are growing. This also applies to reparations (de La Cuesta and Odriozola, 2018; Rafael Escudero, 2021).
[page-n-205]
204
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
2.The Spanish State’s compliance with its obligation
to make reparations
2.1. General issues
As far as Spanish law is concerned, the Democratic Memory Law is
without doubt a vital step in the process of designing and implementing a public policy in Spain that adequately protects the rights of the
victims of the Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship. Earlier legislation has played a significant role in this process, specifically
Law 52/2007 of 26 December 2007, which recognises and extends
rights and provides for measures in favour of victims of persecution
or violence during the Civil War and the dictatorship (known as the
“Historical Memory Law”)7. This law was the State’s initial attempt
to provide the country with a coherent policy that could meet the
obligations imposed by international law, including in terms of reparation, and it “joins other legal and regulatory provisions that have
been approved since the transition to democracy to compensate people who were repressed during the dictatorship” (Rafael Escudero,
2013: 320-321).
As mentioned, protecting victims’ rights has long been a matter
of concern for the UN’s human rights protection agencies. Therefore,
I find it useful in this analysis to consider two recent pronouncements by these bodies which, on the one hand, confirm some of the
Visit of the Platform for a
Truth Commission on the
crimes of Franco's regime
to the European Parliament, in March 2014,
to denounce the lack of
assistance provided to the
victims in Spain. Frame
from the video by Bruno
Rascão.
7
Official State Gazette
(BOE) No. 310, of 27
December 2007.
[page-n-206]
205
8
A/HRC/48/60/Add.1,
disponible en https://
undocs.org/es/A/
HRC/48/60/Add.1.
9
CDE/C/ESP/OAI/1,
available at https://
tbinternet.ohchr.
org/_layouts/15/
treatybodyexternal/
Download.aspx?symbolno=CED%2FC%2FESP%2FOAI%2F1&Lang=en.
10
Particularly through the
measures provided for in
Article 48.
11
According to the second
paragraph of this Article,
“the purpose of the law
is to recognise those who
suffered persecution
or violence for political
and ideological reasons,
thoughts or opinions,
religious conviction or
belief, or sexual orientation and identity during
the period between the
coup d’état on 18 July
1936, the Spanish Civil
War and Franco’s dictatorship until the Spanish
Constitution of 1978
entered into force, as
well as to promote their
moral reparation and the
recovery of their personal, family and collective
memory (…)”.
Carmen Pérez González
concerns that these same agencies have previously expressed and,
on the other hand, assess the progress that the Democratic Memory
Law would imply.
The first of these pronouncements is from the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees
of non-recurrence. He released his report on the follow-up visit to
Spain from 21 January to 14 February 20148 on 5 August 2021. The
report is critical and based on the assertion that many of the obstacles
to achieving the full guarantee of victims’ rights that were first identified remain. The second of the pronouncements that will serve as the
foundation for the brief analysis that I will make in this section are
the Concluding Observations of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances of 27 September 2021 on the complementary information
Spain submitted under Article 29(4) of the Convention9.
The Democratic Memory Law represents a step forward in terms
of reparation. Chapter III of the Law refers specifically to reparation
(Articles 30 to 33). The Law embraces the idea that reparation should
extend beyond economic reparation and couples this obligation with
the more symbolic10 obligation to restore dignity to the memory of the
victims, which is tied to the Government’s duty of memorialisation.
The moral redress of the victims thus constitutes one of the purposes
of the Law, pursuant to Article 111.
This reparation must also be comprehensive. As I have already
stated, this is an obligation of the State. Consequently, it should develop a set of restitution, rehabilitation and satisfaction measures
that are geared towards re-establishing the rights of the victims both
individually and collectively. For Pablo de Greiff, this comprehensive
nature is twofold: internal and external. Internal integrity (or coherence) refers to whether the various benefits distributed by a reparations programme relate to one another. Most of these programmes,
Greiff argues, provide more than one type of benefit. Thus, they can
include both symbolic and material reparations, each of these categories in turn including different measures that can be distributed individually or collectively. It is important that these reparation measures
be mutually supportive if the proposed objectives are to be achieved.
External coherence, on the other hand, refers to the idea that reparation efforts should be designed in such a way as to be closely linked
to other transitional justice mechanisms, for example, criminal justice, truth-telling and institutional reform (Pablo de Greiff, 2010:
10-11). As noted, we are not dealing with isolated issues, and different
types of reparation measures have been established bearing this in
mind. I will now discuss some of them, although this is by no means
an exhaustive list.
[page-n-207]
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
First, those reparation measures that have a collective dimension,
linked to “citizens” rights, are important to mention. In this sense,
Article 4 of the Democratic Memory Law recognises and declares all
convictions and sanctions for political, ideological, conscientious or
religious reasons during the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship to be
illegal and fundamentally null and void, regardless of the ruling used
to establish said convictions and sanctions. Subject to the limitations
discussed in the following section of this chapter, this entitles the victim to a declaration of recognition and personal reparation, pursuant
to the provisions of Articles 5 and 6.
The law establishes measures of a more personal nature, including specific measures that refer to property stolen during the Civil
War and the dictatorship, which translate into the obligation to conduct an audit of this property and to implement potential channels
of recognition for the victims (Article 31). Furthermore, the ninth
additional provision stipulates that property that was confiscated by
political forces during the dictatorship should be returned when it
was seized abroad through judicial or administrative proceedings.
Likewise, Article 32 provides for a series of measures of recognition
and reparation for the victims of forced labour. Beyond the obvious
personal dimension, it seems obvious that this type of measure has a
collective scope which is related to the right to the truth as well, also
on its collective scale – that is, linked to society’s “right to know”.
Finally, the Law also refers to granting Spanish nationality to volunteers who were members of the International Brigades (Article
33) and to those born outside Spain to parents or grandparents who
were exiled for political, ideological or religious reasons (eighth additional provision).
Lastly, certain reparation measures are envisaged for specific
groups. This is especially the case for women. Article 11 refers specifically to this group, the third paragraph establishing the public
authorities’ obligation to design specific measures of reparation for
the damages from the repression or violence women experienced as
a consequence of their public, political, trade union or intellectual
work, or as mothers, partners or daughters of those who were repressed or assassinated. Reference is also made to women during the
Civil War and dictatorship who were imprisoned or victims of other
punishments for the crimes of adultery and abortion.
2.2. Mass graves and reparation
The Democratic Memory Law links the issue of mass graves and the
exhumation of remains to the right to truth. While Law 52/2007
addressed this issue, it failed to do so in a way that would remove all
206
[page-n-208]
207
Artist’s impression of the
executions by firing-squad
at the Paredón de España,
“the wall of Spain”, in
the cemetery of Paterna. Drawing by Matías
Alonso .
Carmen Pérez González
the obstacles that the relatives of the missing were, and still are, facing. Once again, the Law incorporated measures in line with a model
that has been called the “privatisation of truth”, a model based on
“collaboration” between governments and the direct descendants of
the victims, who were granted subsidies that could be put towards
the task of exhumation. This model is lacking from an international
law perspective, the reasons clearly expressed by the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of
non-recurrence in 2014. No real state policy was established on the
matter, but rather the responsibility for arranging complicated and
costly exhumation projects was delegated to the relatives and the organisations they had formed. In short, families and associations have
been doing the State’s job ever since.
[page-n-209]
208
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
I believe it can be argued that the Democratic Memory Law is a
significant improvement on this point. Taking these criticisms into
account, it outlines a model that can be considered more in line with
the requirements of international human rights protection bodies.
Beyond the obvious link to ensuring the right to truth, it seems obvious that allowing relatives to identify and exhume the remains of their
missing loved ones and to receive compensation, if applicable, is also
a way of guaranteeing their right to reparation. Some of the challenges in accomplishing this task have been underscored in the literature
(Margalida Capellà, 2021).
3. Pending issues: reparation without economic benefits
resulting from the annulment of convictions
In terms of reparation, the regulation in the Democratic Memory
Law is relevant in relation to the issue of annulling convictions,
an issue that was unsuccessfully addressed in 2007. Recall that the
“Historical Memory Law” only recognised and declared the “radically unjust” nature and the illegitimacy of the convictions and
punishments handed down for political, ideological or belief-based
reasons by the special courts during the Civil War and by any court
or criminal or administrative body during the dictatorship. The Law
also established that victims had the right to request the issue of
declarations of reparation and personal recognition. This was, as
has been noted, an insufficient solution (Jorge Errandonea, 2008;
Daniel Vallés, 2015). Article 5 of the Democratic Memory Law now
regulates in certain detail the annulment of resolutions and the illegitimacy of certain bodies. However, the fourth paragraph of the
article sets a limit to the effects that the annulment described in the
preceding paragraphs could have. Specifically, it states: “The annulment covered in the preceding paragraphs shall give rise to the right
to obtain a declaration of recognition and personal reparation. In
any event, this annulment shall be compatible with any other form
of redress established in the legal system, without it affecting the
recognition of the economic liability of the State, government or private parties, or giving rise to any financial or professional redress or
compensation”.
As the Special Rapporteur noted in his report of 5 August 2021,
this restriction contravenes international standards regarding the
obligation to provide full reparation to victims12. The “Basic Principles and Guidelines” are clear in this regard, providing for restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees
of non-repetition as forms of reparation13. As for compensation,
these guidelines establish that victims should, as appropriate and
12
See Section 33 of the
report.
13
See Section 18 of the
“Basic Principles and
Guidelines”.
[page-n-210]
209
14
Ibidem, Section 20. The
damages to be assessed
expressly include physical or mental harm; lost
opportunities, including
employment, education
and social benefits; material damages and loss of
earnings, including loss of
earning potential; moral
damage and the costs
required for legal or expert assistance, medicine
and medical services, and
psychological and social
services.
15
A/CN.4/L.602/Rev.1,
Available at https:// legal.
un.org/ilc/ses- sions/53/
docs.shtml.
Carmen Pérez González
proportional to the gravity of the violation and the circumstances
of each case, be provided with all economically assessable damages
resulting from gross violations of international human rights law
and serious violations of international humanitarian law14. Furthermore, the obligation to provide compensation results from the
international law on State responsibility. Thus, pursuant to Article
34 of the International Law Commission’s Draft articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts15, “full reparation
for the injury caused by the internationally wrongful act shall take
the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction, either singly or in combination”. Compensation is specifically referred to in
Article 36, which is exhaustive in stating in its first paragraph that
“the State responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under
an obligation to compensate for the damage caused thereby, insofar
that such damage is not made good by restitution”. And it adds in its
second paragraph that the compensation must cover any financially
assessable damage, including loss of profit insofar as it is established
(Christian Tomuschat, 2007).
4. In conclusion
Fighting impunity has been at the heart of the UN’s work in the context discussed in this paper. It is a goal that has encouraged the search
for and enhancement of adequate mechanisms for holding perpetrators of gross human rights violations accountable. It is, moreover, a
goal to which contemporary international law is firmly committed.
The fact that achieving this goal seems to be more complicated
when it comes to dealing with human rights violations committed in
the past during an armed conflict or dictatorship cannot be ignored.
However, only the objective of avoiding impunity for such conduct
is compatible with effective and adequate protection of victims’
rights. Both the “Body of Principles” and the “Basic Principles and
Guidelines” cited here specifically set out the obligation that States
have to adopt measures to address impunity. These measures should
adequately guarantee both the rights of victims of gross human rights
violations to truth, justice and reparation and the non-repetition of
such violations, even when these violations were committed in the
past. The State’s principle of continuity would serve as a basis for such
an obligation in these cases. Accordingly, “the essence of this principle can be summarised by stating that the State remains the same, for
the purposes of the international legal order, whatever the change or
changes that have occurred in its internal organisation. Consequently (...) a state must comply with all those international obligations
in order to, let us recall, “resolve the problems resulting from a past
[page-n-211]
International Law, Reparation and Democratic Memory: The Case of Spain
of large-scale abuses”, whether or not it is immersed in any kind of
transitional process; although, we should at least qualify that these
obligations will likely have to be interpreted in such a way that, without breaching the permitted limits, they do not become impossible,
unfeasible, counterproductive and/or odious” (Javier Chinchón,
2009: 53-54).
The Democratic Memory Law and several of the regulations adopted at the autonomous community level in Spain are evidence that
the Spanish State is still willing to face some of the difficulties that, as
I stated at the start, are caused by the passage of time when it comes
to designing and implementing programmes that guarantee the
rights of victims of gross human rights violations.
210
[page-n-212]
211
Carmen Pérez González
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