On the ground
Almost 50 years after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, the way the repression is remembered still remains a taboo subject in many Spanish families. But younger generations are fighting to revive the memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who disappeared during the dictatorship – some of them by literally digging up the bones of the past.
Issued on: 28/11/2024 -
By:
Video by:
ENTR
Anaïs DELMAS
Renée BERTINI
Javier and David fight to preserve the memory of the victims of Franco's repression
. © ENTR
Driving through the low, rugged mountains of the Spanish region of León, Javier Voces Vega, 28, points to the side of the road. “That’s where the mass grave is,” he says.
We’re in Priaranza del Bierzo, a small village in north-eastern Spain. A discreet stone plaque below a flowering rosemary bush is the only marker of the atrocities that occurred here in 1936.
“They came in trucks, stopped, made all the people get off, shot them and buried them in this grave. For 64 years they were here under the ground,” Javier says. The remains, uncovered in October 2000, belong to 13 civilians who defended the republican cause, and were killed for it by General Francisco Franco’s repression.
Javier was only four years old when his family brought him to witness the opening of the mass grave, the first to be exhumed in Spain. That moment marked him forever. Now he volunteers for the Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory, an organisation formed by the families of the victims of Francoism whose mission is to find and identify the remains of the disappeared of that time, and reunite them with their families.
The search for the disappeared
General Francisco Franco brutally rose to power in 1939 at the end of a bloody civil war that began on July 17, 1936, when he ignited a coup to remove the democratic government of the Second Spanish Republic. The dictatorial regime he imposed, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, lasted until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War claimed many victims: probably more than half a million dead, combatants and civilians combined, and between 300,000 and 500,000 refugees. The ensuing repression, which lasted until the dictatorship's end, is thought to have killed between 130,000 and 160,000 more people.
Passionate about history, Javier started to ask questions about his family's past very early on. His great-great-uncle Fidel was one of the regime's victims.
“He was one of the first people from his town to be arrested, then executed and thrown into a mass grave ... He was very young, 36 years old. It was a huge personal wound for my grandmother's family,” he says. To this day, the family does not know for certain where his remains are buried.
The Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory lists 4,444 mass graves across the country. In 2024, only 892 had been fully exhumed. The Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory alone has opened 150 graves and unearthed 1,400 remains.
The next generation’s fight for memory
Nearly 50 years after Franco's death, historians still can't rely on any register or precise data about the regime's victims.
The difficulty of quantifying and identifying victims makes the duty to remember the dead and pass on their legacy all the more vital.
David Fernández de Arriba, 39, is also a member of the association where Javier volunteers. He teaches history at a high school in Barcelona. For him, the challenge is to pass on this piece of history to the next generation.
In 2023, he set up an educational project to get his students more involved with the subject of Franco’s repression.
“I remember a case where we discovered that a great uncle of one of my students had been in a Nazi concentration camp, for example, and the student hadn't known,” he says. "It is necessary for Spanish society, especially future generations, to be aware of this recent past."
But for this, the teachers can't count on institutional support.
“In education in Spain, it's a subject that depends very much on the individual effort and will of teachers,” he says. "At an institutional level, there is a lack of commitment to this issue and to bringing memory into the classroom, and this shows in the curriculum."
The generations who haven’t lived through the dictatorship themselves are the ones who have to keep alive the memory of the crimes committed during that time, David says.
“There needs to be commitment to avoid history repeating itself and above all, for young people to know where we come from, and understand the country we live in today, keeping in mind those roots, which are very recent in reality,” he says.
Click on the video to watch Javier and David's full testimony.
Driving through the low, rugged mountains of the Spanish region of León, Javier Voces Vega, 28, points to the side of the road. “That’s where the mass grave is,” he says.
We’re in Priaranza del Bierzo, a small village in north-eastern Spain. A discreet stone plaque below a flowering rosemary bush is the only marker of the atrocities that occurred here in 1936.
“They came in trucks, stopped, made all the people get off, shot them and buried them in this grave. For 64 years they were here under the ground,” Javier says. The remains, uncovered in October 2000, belong to 13 civilians who defended the republican cause, and were killed for it by General Francisco Franco’s repression.
Javier was only four years old when his family brought him to witness the opening of the mass grave, the first to be exhumed in Spain. That moment marked him forever. Now he volunteers for the Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory, an organisation formed by the families of the victims of Francoism whose mission is to find and identify the remains of the disappeared of that time, and reunite them with their families.
The search for the disappeared
General Francisco Franco brutally rose to power in 1939 at the end of a bloody civil war that began on July 17, 1936, when he ignited a coup to remove the democratic government of the Second Spanish Republic. The dictatorial regime he imposed, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, lasted until his death in 1975.
The Spanish Civil War claimed many victims: probably more than half a million dead, combatants and civilians combined, and between 300,000 and 500,000 refugees. The ensuing repression, which lasted until the dictatorship's end, is thought to have killed between 130,000 and 160,000 more people.
Passionate about history, Javier started to ask questions about his family's past very early on. His great-great-uncle Fidel was one of the regime's victims.
“He was one of the first people from his town to be arrested, then executed and thrown into a mass grave ... He was very young, 36 years old. It was a huge personal wound for my grandmother's family,” he says. To this day, the family does not know for certain where his remains are buried.
The Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory lists 4,444 mass graves across the country. In 2024, only 892 had been fully exhumed. The Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory alone has opened 150 graves and unearthed 1,400 remains.
The next generation’s fight for memory
Nearly 50 years after Franco's death, historians still can't rely on any register or precise data about the regime's victims.
The difficulty of quantifying and identifying victims makes the duty to remember the dead and pass on their legacy all the more vital.
David Fernández de Arriba, 39, is also a member of the association where Javier volunteers. He teaches history at a high school in Barcelona. For him, the challenge is to pass on this piece of history to the next generation.
In 2023, he set up an educational project to get his students more involved with the subject of Franco’s repression.
“I remember a case where we discovered that a great uncle of one of my students had been in a Nazi concentration camp, for example, and the student hadn't known,” he says. "It is necessary for Spanish society, especially future generations, to be aware of this recent past."
But for this, the teachers can't count on institutional support.
“In education in Spain, it's a subject that depends very much on the individual effort and will of teachers,” he says. "At an institutional level, there is a lack of commitment to this issue and to bringing memory into the classroom, and this shows in the curriculum."
The generations who haven’t lived through the dictatorship themselves are the ones who have to keep alive the memory of the crimes committed during that time, David says.
“There needs to be commitment to avoid history repeating itself and above all, for young people to know where we come from, and understand the country we live in today, keeping in mind those roots, which are very recent in reality,” he says.
Click on the video to watch Javier and David's full testimony.
Spanish torture victim from Franco era testifies in court for first time
For the first time since Francisco Franco's death in 1975, a man who says he was detained and tortured by the dictator's regime testified before a Spanish court.
Issued on: 15/09/2023 -
By: NEWS WIRES
Franco dictatorship victim Julio Pacheco Yepes poses outside the courthouse prior to his hearing in Madrid on September 15, 2023. © Pierre-Philippe Marcou, AFP
About 30 supporters applauded and chanted "reparation, truth, justice" as Julio Pacheco Yepes left a Madrid court after testifying for over about an hour.
"This is the start of the breaking of the wall of silence and impunity which we have regarding Francoism," the 67-year-old told reporters after the hearing.
"It means there could be more (lawsuits) and we can finally obtain justice, I am hopeful. The first step has been taken."
Until now, Spanish courts have rejected lawsuits filed by Franco-era victims, arguing that they fell under an amnesty law passed in 1977 during the transition to democracy, or that the time limit for filing criminal charges had passed.
Pacheco Yepes was 19 when he was arrested in Madrid in August 1975 for belonging to a left-wing underground movement that opposed the regime.
His detention happened just three months before the death of Franco, who had ruled Spain with an iron fist since the end of the country's 1936-39 civil war.
The former printer said he was tortured for several days at police headquarters in the city's Puerta del Sol Square before being jailed for "terrorism".
Nearly five decades later he filed a lawsuit against his four alleged torturers, among them former police commissioner Jose Manuel Villarejo, who recently gained notoriety for spying on political and business personalities.
'Milestone'
The case was filed in February and judge Ana Maria Iguacel decided in May to admit it on grounds it contained possible evidence of "crimes against humanity and torture".
Iguacel also indicated she intends to summon the alleged torturers for questioning and has requested documents from the police and the National Archives.
Once her investigation is finished, the judge will decide whether to dismiss the case or send it to trial.
"It is an important milestone," Pacheco Yepes told AFP on Wednesday at his home in Vallecas, a working-class district of southeastern Madrid,
The United Nations has urged Spain to revoke the amnesty law, which was passed two years after Franco's death and prevents the prosecution not only of offences committed by political opponents of the regime, but also those carried out by "civil servants and public order agents" such as police.
Many Franco-era torturers have died without ever standing trial, such as policeman Juan Antonio Gonzalez Pacheco, who died in 2020.
His nickname was "Billy el Nino" or "Billy the Kid" for his habit of spinning a gun around his finger as he beat his victims.
'Very receptive'
One of the people who filed a lawsuit against him was 66-year-old Rosa Maria Garcia Alcon, Pacheco Yepes's wife, but her lawsuit was rejected.
She was arrested at the same time as Pacheco Yepes in August 1975.
Garcia Alcon also testified on Friday, but as a witness. She says one of the ways the police tortured Pacheco Yepes was to force him to watch them hurting her.
"I told everything that is in the lawsuit, the arrest, the torture, everything that happened at the time. The judge was very receptive," Pacheco Yepes said after the hearing.
Faced with legal obstacles in Spain, victims' groups turned to Argentina, where magistrate Maria Servini in 2010 invoked the principle of "universal justice" to open an investigation into genocide and crimes against humanity during Spain's civil war and the ensuing dictatorship.
As part of the ongoing inquiry, Servini in 2014 issued 20 international arrest warrants for former Franco regime officials, among them ministers, judges and police officers, but Madrid refused to cooperate.
(AFP)
About 30 supporters applauded and chanted "reparation, truth, justice" as Julio Pacheco Yepes left a Madrid court after testifying for over about an hour.
"This is the start of the breaking of the wall of silence and impunity which we have regarding Francoism," the 67-year-old told reporters after the hearing.
"It means there could be more (lawsuits) and we can finally obtain justice, I am hopeful. The first step has been taken."
Until now, Spanish courts have rejected lawsuits filed by Franco-era victims, arguing that they fell under an amnesty law passed in 1977 during the transition to democracy, or that the time limit for filing criminal charges had passed.
Pacheco Yepes was 19 when he was arrested in Madrid in August 1975 for belonging to a left-wing underground movement that opposed the regime.
His detention happened just three months before the death of Franco, who had ruled Spain with an iron fist since the end of the country's 1936-39 civil war.
The former printer said he was tortured for several days at police headquarters in the city's Puerta del Sol Square before being jailed for "terrorism".
Nearly five decades later he filed a lawsuit against his four alleged torturers, among them former police commissioner Jose Manuel Villarejo, who recently gained notoriety for spying on political and business personalities.
'Milestone'
The case was filed in February and judge Ana Maria Iguacel decided in May to admit it on grounds it contained possible evidence of "crimes against humanity and torture".
Iguacel also indicated she intends to summon the alleged torturers for questioning and has requested documents from the police and the National Archives.
Once her investigation is finished, the judge will decide whether to dismiss the case or send it to trial.
"It is an important milestone," Pacheco Yepes told AFP on Wednesday at his home in Vallecas, a working-class district of southeastern Madrid,
The United Nations has urged Spain to revoke the amnesty law, which was passed two years after Franco's death and prevents the prosecution not only of offences committed by political opponents of the regime, but also those carried out by "civil servants and public order agents" such as police.
Many Franco-era torturers have died without ever standing trial, such as policeman Juan Antonio Gonzalez Pacheco, who died in 2020.
His nickname was "Billy el Nino" or "Billy the Kid" for his habit of spinning a gun around his finger as he beat his victims.
'Very receptive'
One of the people who filed a lawsuit against him was 66-year-old Rosa Maria Garcia Alcon, Pacheco Yepes's wife, but her lawsuit was rejected.
She was arrested at the same time as Pacheco Yepes in August 1975.
Garcia Alcon also testified on Friday, but as a witness. She says one of the ways the police tortured Pacheco Yepes was to force him to watch them hurting her.
"I told everything that is in the lawsuit, the arrest, the torture, everything that happened at the time. The judge was very receptive," Pacheco Yepes said after the hearing.
Faced with legal obstacles in Spain, victims' groups turned to Argentina, where magistrate Maria Servini in 2010 invoked the principle of "universal justice" to open an investigation into genocide and crimes against humanity during Spain's civil war and the ensuing dictatorship.
As part of the ongoing inquiry, Servini in 2014 issued 20 international arrest warrants for former Franco regime officials, among them ministers, judges and police officers, but Madrid refused to cooperate.
(AFP)
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