Authors: Giles Tremlett
The digging up of graves like that in Poyales del Hoyo has had a galvanising effect on what some Spaniards have come to call their own ‘
desmemoria histórica
’. This expression was coined to describe an almost deliberate lack of historical memory. Amongst other things, it has set Franco’s apologists scribbling. The most popular of these is Pío Moa.
Moa has changed radically since the days when he was a member of the First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (GRAPO) – a left-wing terrorist group that still occasionally rears its ugly head in Spain. He has had a publishing hit with
The Myths of the Civil War
in which, having moved from one extreme to another, he launches a vicious assault on many historians. Amongst his conclusions are
that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were both
crueller
than Franco, that the Republican loyalists were relatively more bloodthirsty than Franco’s rightist rebels when it came to executing opponents and that the generals’ rebellion was directed against a revolution brewing within the Republic. His rewards included a top place on the best-sellers list and long interviews on state television when it was controlled by the People’s Party.
None of that changes the fact, of course, that Franco had time to hunt down and execute most of those responsible for killing his own supporters. A retroactive law was passed in 1939 which allowed for those deemed politically responsible for political ‘crimes’ previous to that date to be arrested. The last person to be executed for Civil War crimes was the communist Julián Grimau in 1963.
The killings by
rojos
– especially by anarchists – formed an essential part of the Franco regime’s internal propaganda for decades. Hundreds of the priests and nuns they killed have gone down the beatification conveyor-belt at the Vatican in recent years. Pope John Paul II beatified 233 of them in one
record-breaking
go in 2001. The left’s victims were eventually accorded burial in cemeteries, hailed as martyrs and saw their names added to the ‘
Caídos por Dios y la Patria
’ plaques put up in every town and village in Spain. Thousands of the victims of Franco’s
repression
were, however, left in roadside graves or even stuffed down wells (one well in Caudé, in the eastern province of Teruel, is said to be the last resting place of up to 1,000 people).
The full history of the losers – by which I mean the losers’
stories
rather than the left’s version of what happened – is only just being broadcast. The army, which carried out its own executions after summary trials, kept many of its archives on those executed closed until the 1990s. Some files on those executed are still unavailable, piled up in cardboard boxes at the back of military warehouses. Others are simply thought to have disappeared.
There are still thousands of bodies in unmarked graves. The highest estimates talk of 30,000 unidentified corpses. Around 300 have now been recovered. Since the three women from Poyales del
Hoyo were exhumed, two other graves have been identified along the same seven-mile (eleven-kilometre) stretch of road. They are said to contain twenty corpses of men from both Poyales del Hoyo and Candeleda. The rediscovery of the graves caused the author and journalist Isaías Lafuente to pose the
following
question: ‘Can a democratic country allow thousands of citizens murdered like animals by a dictatorial regime to remain buried in its roadside ditches? Can it tolerate this while the man who allowed and encouraged the mass killings rests under the altar of a Christian basilica? The answer is so obvious that is almost an offence to have to ask the question.’
Why had it taken so long to broach the subject, to dig up the dead, to ask the question? Fear is often given as the main reason. Franco’s presence made it impossible to talk freely, let alone dig up graves, for almost forty years. That fear lived on into the first years of democracy. It was encouraged by coup rumours and the 1981 storming of parliament by Civil Guard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero.
Spain’s whole democratic transition was, at least publicly, postulated on the stated belief on all sides that, as the returning Communist leader Santiago Carrillo put it, nothing was ‘worth a new Civil War between Spaniards’. Even Felipe González, the Socialist prime minister who governed for nearly fourteen years from 1982, heeded the advice given to him by a former general to leave the subject of the Civil War well alone in order not to
provoke
the ire of the army. Nothing official was done to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s start in 1986.
In the graves of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana – and in hundreds more like them – there is proof of a silence that has been both
collective
and willing. One of Europe’s most verbose and
argumentative
peoples has simply chosen to look away from a vital part of its history whose ghastly, ghostly presence is to be found under a few feet of soil.
Not even the family of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, whose execution by the Franco Nationalists of Granada was explained by Ian Gibson in his 1974 classic
The Death of Lorca
, had
tried to recover his body. Gibson’s work, specially remarkable for the date in which it was published, was one of the first attempts to counter the Franco-imposed ‘
desmemoria
’ of the time. Lorca’s
family,
despite the popular pressure, still refuses to go any further.
The families of three men thought to have been buried
alongside
the poet do not, however, agree. Two anarchist
banderilleros
(secondary figures of the bullfight, whose job is to rush out and sticks darts in the bull’s back) and a one-legged Republican schoolteacher are said to be in the grave. ‘If one side [of the Civil War] can bury their dead with dignity then it is time the other side was able to as well,’ the grandson of one of those bullfighters, Francisco Galadí, told me on a visit to Granada. ‘The family of García Lorca has to be respected. But my father did not want his father to be left abandoned. Our family were treated as
apestados
– pestilential – for years. My father never got a good job, and we had to go to schools run by priests and
fachas
. I lived under
Franco’s
repression for forty years. After seventy years, now it is time,’ he explained.
The grave of the three women was one of the first to be dug up as Spaniards slowly began to look back down at the ground. These early exhumations were interesting, amongst other things, because they showed that Spain actually had a stock of people already experienced in such things. They were forensic scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists who had already worked on similar, if fresher, graves in the former Yugoslavia or Latin America.
One of the early volunteers was Julio Vidal, an archaeologist from the University of León. He was the first to describe these graves as
secretos a voces
. They still, he says, provoke ‘a heavy and fearful silence’ accompanied by a certain shame. The graves, Vidal says, represent ‘the shameful part of our [democratic] transition which, while it keeps its eyes closed, will not allow this page of history to be turned.’
Spain’s local magistrates, fearful of a flood of cases, refused to get involved in digging up graves. There were, they said, no crimes for them to investigate. There was no official money for the task of digging them up, either. Aznar’s government, which had spent
its time studiously trying to show that it had nothing to do with Franco-style rightism, was challenged to act. Emilio Silva took a case to the UN Committee for the Disappeared, more used to arguing over the mass graves of Kosovo or Guatemala than those on western European soil.
As the petitions from relatives of the disappeared flooded in, a national Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was formed. It tried to stay clear of party politics. It petitioned
parliament
for help. The petition claimed that up to 30,000 victims of General Franco’s supporters were buried in several hundred mass graves – some in cemeteries and others scattered along roadsides, in woods or open country.
‘The conflict of the two Spains has not finished, nor will it
finish
until the truth of what happened is restored and the pain
suffered
, and still endured, by these families is recognised by handing back the bodies so that they can, at last, be given a dignified
burial
. Those who lost the war were condemned to silence, imposed on them by the dictatorship and agreed on by the democracy in the Amnesty Law of 1977. That condemnation has now reached the third generation of these families … Today there are people who still feel the need to lower their voices or even to close their windows when talking about these events, as if they themselves were doing something clandestine,’ the group said in its
parliamentary
petition.
The group asked parliament to fund its activities, open up all the military archives, exhume and identify the bodies and bring an end to the ‘discrimination’ against Franco’s victims and their families.
The parliament, where Aznar’s People’s Party held an
absolute
majority, trod around the subject as if walking on egg shells. Eventually it was agreed that local councils and regional authorities could, if they wanted, set funds aside for exhuming bodies. The same local authorities were ordered, sixty-three years after the war had ended, to avoid ‘reopening old wounds or stirring up the
rescoldo
, the embers, of civil confrontation’. The motion was approved, by consensus, on 20 November 2002
– twenty-seven years to the day since General Franco had died.
That a European parliament should, at the turn of the
twenty-first
century, be passing motions about a war that finished
sixty-three
years before may seem surprising. That it should include in one of those motions a stern warning about reviving the embers of that confrontation shows that the Civil War still had the power to provoke fear.
The political debate over what to do with the Civil War and its victims continues. A political class which had publicly declared the war to have been overcome has found it impossible to avoid in its own debating chambers. The left found a sudden enthusiasm for the subject when Aznar was in power. It tried, amongst other things, to pass motions that formally recognised the war had been started by an illegal rebellion against the established and elected government. It was an enthusiasm that had been entirely absent when the Socialists were in power in the 1980s and early 1990s.
A significant part of the right continues to insist, however, that the war cannot be blamed on Franco’s side alone. People’s Party spokesmen at parliamentary debates talked of ‘civil confrontation’ and ‘national self-destruction’. Blame, the modern right insists, should be shared by all. Some believe it should be pinned firmly on the left. Right and left, it seems, are forever destined to disagree.
The Socialist government that has now taken over from Aznar has vowed that it will, finally, do something about the mass graves. It is a sign that something is changing. The plans look set, however, to provoke cries of outrage from the right. More than six decades later there are still political arguments to be had – and, presumably, votes won or lost – on the issue of the Civil War. Spain has yet to put that war to sleep.
What about the killers? No one has ever been tried for crimes like the killings at Poyales del Hoyo or Priaranza. Nor can they be. Most of the killers are dead, of course. But some are not.
In an attempt to find one of them, I travelled back to
Candeleda
. Here, I was told, an infamous Falangist gunman was still alive. His name was Horencio Sánchez, but like most people here he was known by his
mote
, or nickname –
Sartén
, Frying Pan. The
search for him, with Mariano as my guide, proved comical.
Candeleda
boasts some bizarre nicknames. Amongst those I would hear as we went around the pueblo were
Cagacantaros
,
Pitcher-crapper,
Chupahuesos
, Bone-sucker,
Mataperros
, Dog-killer and
Cagamillones
, ‘He who craps millions’. (This last
mote
, I was told, was given to a man who boasted about his wealth.)
First, however, Mariano wanted to introduce me to some of those who remembered the Civil War. We started off looking for Feliciano Pérez, who was not at home and, we were told, would be at the funeral of the oldest man in the village, who had died the previous day. We tried the church. This created a serious problem for Mariano. It is quite acceptable to wander in and out and chat to people in church services in Spain, but Mariano refused, on principle, to enter. The priest, he explained, had secretly said a Mass for his deceased father. This had led to a violent argument in the street. A boot, it was suggested, had been applied to the priest’s backside. And, anyway, there was the Church’s past to be considered. ‘You have to understand … the Church, the
landowners
and Franco were one and the same thing,’ he explained.
We thought we had the solution to that one when we found the local newsagent chomping on a cigar stub as he stood under the trees outside of the church with a handful of other men. But the newsagent, it turned out, had also sworn never to set foot inside the church, which has a plaque commemorating the local priests killed in the Civil War. ‘Not on my life,’ he said. So,
having
discovered that anti-clericalism was still alive and kicking, we gave up.
Eventually we found Feliciano back at home. ‘
Te cagarás
, you’ll crap yourself, if I tell you how old I am,’ he said, by way of
greeting
. Feliciano was in a good mood. With the previous day’s death he had, at ninety-six, become the new oldest man in town.
Unfortunately
his memory was fading and his story of how Franco’s Moorish troops took the town was jumbled and confusing.