SPAIN:Not all Spaniards are happy at plans to locate the graves of victims of the civil war, writes Jane Walkerin Madrid
IN JULY 1936 Gen Franco's nationalist forces rose up to overthrow the legitimate republican government thereby sparking a bloody three-year civil war which killed hundreds of thousands and heralded in a 40-year dictatorship when thousands more suffered cruel reprisals.
One month later, on August 17th, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was taken, along with three others, to a hillside outside his native Granada.
There they were shot and their bodies thrown over the hillside. He was killed for his support of the republican side, and, it is alleged, for being a homosexual.
For many years it was believed that the poet, along with a local schoolteacher Dióscoro Gallindo, two bullfighters, Francisco Galadi and Joaquín Arollas, both militant anarchists, was buried on that spot beside an olive tree in what is now the Federico García Lorca Park, although this has now been put into doubt, and some believe they lie some 400 metres away.
For some time the descendants of Gallindo and Galadi have campaigned to recover their remains to give them a proper burial. The whereabouts of the family of second bullfighter, Arollas, are unknown, and no one from his family has come forward.
Nieves García, granddaughter of the schoolteacher, Dióscoro Gallindo, has been spearheading the campaign to find her grandfather who was 60-years-old when he was shot. His crime was that of being an atheist, imparting secular teaching to his pupils, and supporting the Popular Front, the elected government until the 1936 uprising.
García and her family made no efforts to find her grandfather's remains until after her own father, Juan García died. Juan was a 25-year-old medical student when Dióscoro was executed by the falangists. He was forced to give up his studies and found work on building sites, as a delivery man and chauffeur. "He never recovered from his father's death and was always afraid he would be identified as the son of a rojo (red) and could be sent to jail," she says.
The Lorca family opposed exhumation because they felt they should be left to lie in peace along with more than 1,000 republicans, gypsies and anarchists who are believed to have been buried in unmarked graves in the same area. His niece Laura said recently that they feared that any exhumation would turn into an undignified media circus and should be carried out with discretion.
Earlier this month the families took their appeal to the high court, and the Lorca family reluctantly withdrew their opposition. "We will respect the wishes of the other parties, but we would prefer the remains to stay where they are," she said.
No one really knows how many died during the civil war and the Franco reprisals which followed it. At least 150,000 Republicans are believed to have perished at the hands of the Franco supporters, and in many cases their resting places are unknown. Hundreds of mass graves are scattered around the country, many of them unmarked and often unregistered.
Last month the high-profile judge Baltasar Garzón asked local, regional and religious authorities to provide lists of known victims and the location of their graves using files, registries and even personal accounts. Within a couple of weeks he had received 130,137 names of republican victims and clues as to their unmarked graves in many parts of the country - but this is believed to be only a small percentage of the true figure and the searches go on. He also received the names of about 7,000 men and women who died in concentration camps in exile.
By a conservative estimate some 60,000 nationalists were killed by republican forces, and this week Judge Garzón asked for their names - although this should prove an easier task as most of them were recovered and reburied as martyrs in Christian cemeteries during Franco's lifetime.
After the dictator's death in 1975 most Spaniards wanted to forget the past to permit a peaceful transition to democracy and forget their bloody past. And so a whole generation grew up in homes where their parents and grandparents never talked about their role in the war, or even which side they supported. It is only in recent years that they began to ask questions about the past, and where relatives who had died in that war were buried.
One of the first to do so was Emilio Silva who founded the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory (ARMH) to assist those who wanted to find graves of their relatives. He began by seeking, and finding, the remains of his own grandfather who was shot in October 1936 along with 12 others. His association grew as hundreds more began their questioning. They put pressure on politicians to pass the Historic Memory Bill which became law at the end of last year.
But not everyone is in favour of this bringing up memories of the past, or opening up of old wounds as some would have it. The president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, the archbishop of Madrid, has angrily attacked the law and Judge Garzón's request for files on the war dead believed to be with the Bishops' Conference. "Why should those born before or during the civil war transfer their problem to another generation?" he asked while it was announced that he would be proposing the beatification of thousands of nationalist war dead.
The ARMH has condemned Cardinal Rouco. "The Catholic Church should forgive, but also ask for forgiveness. They are trying to repress memories which could highlight their sinister part in the 1936 civil war and their support for the Franco dictatorship," said Emilio Silva this week.