Unearthing Atrocities in Spain
Scott Boehm | September 28, 2009
Scott Boehm explains the Milagros site to a British television crew.
I have participated in six mass grave exhumations in Spain over the past two years, as part of my work as an interviewer for UC San Diego’s Spanish Civil War Memory Project and as a volunteer for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. This summer, I had the opportunity to take part in two mass grave exhumations. In July I went to Milagros (Burgos) as an assistant to a television crew filming the exhumation for a British documentary, and in August, I was part of the archeological team in Villanueva de la Vera (Cáceres).
My first visit to a mass grave exhumation took place in 2007, only a few kilometers from the site in Milagros. I vividly remember holding the official Burgos prison documents in my hand that stated the fifty political prisoners uncovered in the mass grave had been set free in 1937. Yet “freed” (“liberado”) in this case meant anonymous death in the middle of a wheat field. Deaths not accounted for in the official government or historical record. Deaths that are just now starting to come to light, 70 years after the fact.
Speaking with Juan Antonio, the grandchild of one of the victims in Milagros.
Like most of the mass graves lying beneath the surface of picturesque Spanish landscapes, the Milagros and the Villanueva de la Vera sites both date to the early days of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) when fascist death squads systematically rounded up supporters of the democratic Spanish Republic and killed them before dumping their bodies in shallow unmarked graves. Oral testimony from Villanueva de la Vera indicates that the victims were forced to dig their own grave before being shot.
How is such a thing possible? There are two keys to answering this question. The first is that General Francisco Franco’s forces won the war and afterwards Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. For obvious reasons, his regime had no interest in exhuming the mass graves of the defeated. Instead, he decorated Spain with plaques, street names and monuments that glorified the fallen on his side.
The second key concerns what happened after Franco’s death. Rather than investigate the crimes of the regime, the architects of post-Franco Spanish democracy made a pact to ignore them entirely. This process of politically engineered forgetting condemned the victims of crimes against humanity to another 25 years of suffering
Exhuming a mass grave in Galicia.
In 2000, the politics of forgetting were radically altered by the first public mass grave exhumation conducted with scientific methods. Emilio Silva, founder and president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory—and an advisor to the Spanish Civil War Memory Project—went looking for traces of his grandfather, executed by fascists during the war, in his family’s village of Priaranza del Bierzo (León). To Emilio’s surprise, he discovered the location of the mass grave where his grandfather was buried, along with twelve others. Their subsequent exhumation opened a new, controversial chapter in Spanish history, one that is currently in the process of being written.
The Spanish Civil War Memory Project is a small part of that process. Collaborating with various civic associations that conduct mass grave exhumations, I have both excavated the remains of victims and interviewed family members for the project. As survivors of tragedy, their voices testify to the lives of those executed, as well as to the trauma they suffered in the wake of mass violence and under a dictatorship of silence, only recently broken by the picks and shovels of tireless volunteers searching for answers to historical mysteries.
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