Construction of a reservoir has uncoverd a mass grave with up to 5,000 victims of the Spanish Civil War, writes Jane Walker
He was only nine-years-old at the time, but Simon Perez, now 76, has never forgotten the sight of lorries packed with men, women and children driving up the mountains of the Alpujrras, southern Spain, where his family grazed their goats. The trucks came, he remembers, almost daily for weeks and he watched their human cargo being pushed out on to the ground and killed.
"They were handcuffed, and when they were shot they rolled down the hill and the militia threw quicklime over the bodies," he says.
In those days of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War thousands of people were killed by nationalist forces. Many of those who died are believed to have been Republicans from the Malaga area who were captured as they tried to hide from the Franco forces.
It is thought that the remains of as many as 5,000 people could lie in mass graves outside the village of Orgiva where Perez saw them die.
"The locals have always known about the graves outside their village, and even referred to them as 'Orgiva's second cemetery'," says Gonzalo Acosta, of the Andalusian branch of the Association for the Recuperation of Historic Memories (ARMH), who have been working in many parts of the country to uncover the remains of civil war victims.
He was tipped off by the people of Orgiva recently when work began on the construction of walls for a reservoir. They told him they had seen truck-loads of earth being removed from the site and feared that the earth could contain human bones. ARMH has asked the authorities to stop the work to allow them to excavate the land.
Acosta and a team of volunteers visited the site and, without even digging, found 15 bones. "When we went to the Civil Guard to ask them to halt the work, the officer who took our report told us that as a child he remembers finding bones there, and other people say that bones still come to the surface whenever it rains." If they get permission, they hope to excavate the area at the end of this month. "We know that thousands of people were shot in the area. They were not all buried on the same spot, but in several places nearby and we want to excavate in a trench 100 metres long which we know is there," says Acosta.
Not far away in the town of Alfacar, near Granada, there are plans to exhume bones from another unmarked grave where the poet and writer Federico García Lorca and at least three other men are believed to have been buried. Lorca's descendants would prefer to leave his remains where he was shot on August 19th, 1936, but relatives of the three other men want to recover their bodies to give them a proper burial.
The Irish writer and historian Ian Gibson, who wrote the definitive biography of Lorca, wants his body to be exhumed to answer many questions about how he died. "Lorca belongs to humanity and not to his family. He gave his life for Spain. He was a martyr," says Gibson.
ARMH believes it will be comparatively simple to identify the bodies; Dioscoro Galadi, a retired teacher, was an older man who walked with a limp, and the other two, both bullfighters and members of a left-wing organisation, were smaller and several years younger.
Miguel Botella, professor of forensic anthropology at Granada University, has already used ADN testing to identify the bones of Emilio Silva, one of the first civil war victims whose remains were uncovered in Priaranza del Bierzo, near Burgos last year. Silva's grandson, also Emilio Silva, is UHMH president, and he and some 200 volunteers are working to uncover the remains of thousands of men and women killed by Franco forces around the country. They plan to use metal detectors and an electromagnetic device, similar to the one used to find the remains of the Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara.
"We have very little money and we rely on volunteers to help us with the work, and we have received co-operation from anthropologists and forensic scientists from Spain and abroad. It is a long job and testing is expensive, but we hope to uncover the graves wherever they are and identify the bones," says Silva.