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Authors: Giles Tremlett
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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
, hadtried 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 spentits 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
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
, hadtried 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 spentits 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
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