IZAGRE: On a patch of land near this northern village, the forgotten remains of Republican victims of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war dead are reappearing, reviving painful memories for older residents.

Armed with brushes and trowels, a team of volunteer archaeologists carefully extract skeletons that lie several centimetres beneath the surface in a riverside field shaded by poplar trees.

Long-time resident Lorenzo Bernardo, 78, approaches the rocky terrain just as a crushed skull is unearthed, touching off the tragic events he witnessed as an innocent six-year-old during the summer of 1936.

The mayor had alerted villagers that General Francisco Franco’s right-wing forces had shot dead a group of Republicans during the night. They had been captured in the nearby city of Leon and brought to Izagre for execution, Bernardo said.

Local residents dug a pit a few metres from where the bodies lay and buried them so their remains would not be eaten by animals, he recalled.

“They were barely more than 20 years old, their hands were tied, their skulls burst by the bullet to the head.

“I was young so I can remember that day better than what I did yesterday,” he said – even if Bernardo, like the nation, tried to forget it all in a “pacto de olvido” or “pact of forgetting” meant to secure national reconciliation after the Franco dictatorship.

Hermenegildo Martinez Francisco, 74, came to watch the exhumation of his uncle Diomedes, a shepherd who was executed for taking part in a pro-Republican demonstration.

“He is my uncle, I want to take him to my grandmother who shed many tears for him at the family tomb,” he said in a low voice.

The operation to uncover the dead at Izagre comes just a few weeks after top Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon launched a probe that is seen as the most important judicial move to date to clarify the fate of Franco’s victims.

Garzon asked all parishes, municipalities and government departments across the country to send him records of anyone who went missing during the civil war and the right-wing dictatorship that followed, until Franco’s death in 1975.

These victims were left buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country even as the Franco regime honoured its own dead.

“In 30 years of democracy, we have hardly done anything for those who disappeared under Franco,” said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARHM), a non-profit group leading efforts to exhume the bodies of civilians killed by the fascists during the war.

‘We’ve hardly done anything for victims of Franco’

“It should be up to the state to investigate the disappearances, to carry out the exhumations, to help families,” he said.

His association grew out of Silva’s own efforts to find and identify the remains of his grandfather, who was shot by Franco’s forces in 1936 near Leon.

The group is responsible for the majority of the 4,000 exhumations carried out in Spain since 2000 at more than 170 mass graves, including the one at Izagre, though they received no government financial support in the beginning.

There has never been official clarification on how many of Franco’s opponents were killed during and after the bloody internal conflict that preceded World War II in the rest of Europe.

Silva estimates that the remains of more than 30,000 people are buried in mass graves.

The civil war was sparked by Franco’s insurgency against the democratically elected left-wing Republican government.

Nazi Germany and fascist Italy stepped in to help Franco, while the Soviet Union aided the Republican government along with volunteers from around the world who joined the “Brigadas Internacionales” to fight fascism.

Almost all the pro-Franco dead were recovered during the dictatorship but Franco’s victims never received the same treatment, even after Franco died.

“It is very unfair, the winners of the war had 40 years to recover their dead but they did not let the other side approach the mass graves,” said Irish writer Ian Gibson, who was the first to locate the remains of renowned Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Gibson, who has written a book about the 1936 shooting of Lorca by Franco’s forces, has pushed to have the poet’s remains exhumed from a grave near Granada in southwestern Spain.

Lorca’s family has until now opposed such a move, fearing it would “turn into a spectacle,” his niece and family spokeswoman Laura Garcia Lorca told El Pais newspaper this month.

But after the family of a teacher believed buried alongside the poet said they wanted the grave unearthed, Lorca’s niece told El Pais: “We won’t stop it.”

After Franco’s death in 1975, all political parties agreed to put the civil war and the dictatorship behind them, and Spain granted an amnesty for crimes committed under Franco’s iron-fisted rule.

But in recent years this “pacto de olvido” began to crumble as associations emerged that sought to recover the remains of those shot and dumped into mass graves.

Their drive got a boost in 2007 with the approval in parliament of the Law of Historical Memory, which obliges local administrations to cooperate in the search for victims of the Franco regime.—AFP