By Sonya Dowsett
GUADALAJARA, Spain (Reuters) – A Spanish 90-year old woman, wrapped in a fur coat and a woolen scarf, stood tall before a deep open grave and murmured “my father,” to see a skeleton unearthed at the bottom of the pit.
Timothy unionist father Ascension Mendieta, was shot in 1939 in the post-Spanish Civil War months and was buried in a mass grave in a corner of the cemetery of the city of Guadalajara, Castilla La Mancha, about 60 kilometers east of the capital, Madrid.
the mass grave was the first to be excavated in order of an Argentina judge in a lawsuit to seek justice for crimes committed during the Civil War (1936-1939) and the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
the lawsuit filed by Mendieta to give his father a proper burial could trigger a series of similar exhumations.
the case illustrates the difficulties faced by Spain to face a past that is fading from living memory, but it would still leave their marks today.
the amnesty law passed to pave the way from dictatorship to democracy pardoned political crimes committed in the past. But that never made a record of the atrocities means that hostilities were never buried at all.
Historians estimate that at least 500,000 combatants and civilians were killed on the Republican side and national for the civil War. After the end of the war, tens of thousands of enemies of Franco were killed or imprisoned in a campaign to eliminate dissidents.
Mendieta, who was 13 when his father died, traveled to Buenos Aires in 2013 to provide evidence of his death.
This woman was one of hundreds of people who turned to the international law on human rights to go to an Argentine court for justice.
“we can already make a dignified burial like all people deserve. I’m not lying there like a dog,” he told Reuters.
“pact of forgetting”
Spain, like many Latin American countries in their transition from dictatorship to democracy, passed a law amnesty in 1977 to put an end to its violent past.
the United Nations and various rights organizations humans have urged Spain to repeal this law. But Spain has defended the so-called “pact of forgetting” which many see as the necessary price paid to make the transition a success.
The Argentina Judge Maria Servini de Cubria wants to revoke the amnesty law to seek justice for the crimes of the Franco regime, ranging from torture to extrajudicial executions, opened in 2010 in a lawsuit.
at his request, a court in Guadalajara authorized the exhumation of the grave containing 22 bodies of people believed to have been killed by Franco’s forces in the months following the end of the military conflict.
“HERE aRE tHE GRANDPARENTS”
the archaeologists began to excavate the January 19, working from a file on the council, which recorded with an elegant calligraphy the names, ages and positions of those buried in the cemetery of the city.
people working on the project are convinced that about 200 bodies in total are buried in graves in this corner of the cemetery, which was isolated by a wall until after Franco’s death in 1975.
While archaeologists worked digging them, tens of families came to the place to ask about family members who might be buried there.
More than 80 families were recorded in the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) a non-profit group that It is working to identify the victims. The ARMH has documented 114,226 cases of men and women buried in mass graves across Spain.
Pablo Rodriguez, a retired 63, left his contact details in a tent set up by the association near the excavation.
“I came with my mother from small to lay flowers Day Saints. ‘Here are the grandparents’, I said. there was a wall before. We had to ask for a key to go inside” he said.
Rodriguez carried a plastic bag containing old documents and letters, including a 1940 order issued by a military tribunal, to run his grandfather to join a rebellion.
“I’d like to be with her daughter,” he said, pointing to his mother’s grave 20 meters away in the main section of the cemetery.
the samples of bones and teeth of the skeletons were sent to Argentina with saliva samples from relatives for identification. Argentina carried out the tests for free, a service that Spain has offered, said archaeologist Rene Pacheco.
“We would like it to be as fast as possible because here we have a woman waiting 90 years” said
(Translated into Spanish by Thomas Cobos and Robert Hetz in Madrid Writing, edited by Carlos Serrano Writing in Santiago).
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