[Mazhi]

This is an interesting topic not many people outside of Spain seem to know much about. I'm posting some good stuff that helps shed light on the issue here.

http://www.deconcrete.org/2011/05/10/in ... ss-graves/

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=17877

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/ju ... estremlett

Franco's mass graves



05/05/2011 the Spanish Government released the long announced map of mass graves of Dictator Franco’s regime. It is an open-source archive detailing the position of the 2,232 sites and their current status. Most corpses have not been touched yet (green); others have been already completely or partially exhumed (red) and others are disintegrated or bodies are still missing (white). Thus, there is a remarkable amount of yellow sites showing the corpses that were transferred to Franco’s Mausoleum at El Valle delos Caídos (outskirts of Madrid). This hybrid between a cemetery and a monument aimed to praise the victory over his adversaries by taking as many remains from the mass graves as possible into his “valley of the fallen”.

The map is to be found on the Government’s website, and it is possible to search victims by name, surname, year or town. The exact coordinates of each site cannot be openly accessed, so that relatives do not try to exhume the remains themselves and anticipate to a forensic team (as it has been reported in recent years). Not only does this map show the hotspots of a past conflict, but it also reflects the current grade of collaboration of the different autonomous regions, either willing or unwilling to carry out effective action in order to prove the evidence of crimes from the past. It is an invisible piece of 20th Century in Spain that lies on the ground and a series of events that urge to be clarified.

Published on May 10, 2011 16:37.

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Bringing Franco's crimes to light

65 years on, relatives have begun to recover the hidden Republican victims of the Spanish civil war

Giles Tremlett in Piedrafita de Babia

The Guardian, Wednesday 17 July 2002 03.02 BST


Every winter for the past quarter of a century a small crown of flowers has mysteriously appeared on a roadside outside Piedrafita de Babia, a village in the mountains of Leon, northern Spain.
Most villagers know why they are there but until yesterday few dared speak out loud about the terrible events of November 5 1937 and the bodies thrown into a mass grave on the site.

As relatives gathered yesterday to see the shattered skeletons of 14 men, most with pistol shots through the skull, Piedrafita and the rest of Spain were forced to come to terms with the unfinished business of the civil war.

This is just the beginning of an attempt to shame the government into tracing, digging up and reburying the thousands of victims of summary execution by the winners, the dictator General Francisco Franco and his Falangist allies.

The place where the flowers used to lie, between the village cemetery and the municipal dump, has been stripped by a mechanical digger. One corner of the site, where the first bones began to appear 10 days ago, has been more carefully dug up.

Yesterday the bones were stored in a shed lent by the local council. Most of the skulls had jagged pistol wounds at the back, a sign that victims had been forced to kneel for their execution. One had been shot through the forehead. Two corpses are riddled with bullet wounds: they had probably tried to run.

Isabel Gonzalez, the woman who used to place the flowers, and her friend Asuncion Alvarez, were among those who gathered to see the bones, bringing photographs that might help identify them.

"I spent years searching and waiting. Now I can finally bury them properly," Mrs Gonzalez said. Aged 84, and living in the nearby village of Palacios del Sil, she is sure her brother Eduardo and brother-in-law Francisco Gonzalo, 22 and 31 when they disappeared, are among the dead. Mrs Alvarez, 87, is searching for her two brothers, Joaquin and Porfirio.

"Everybody knew the bodies were here. Back then, even after they were killed and secretly buried, people from the village came across the bones after they were exposed by rain," Mrs Gonzalez said. "The priest told them the Reds were so vile that even the earth did not want them. Even now people remember the fear. They don't like to talk about it."

The mass grave at Piedrafita de Babiais one of many that dot the local landscape. Investigators believe a further 23 people are buried in or near the village.

All over Spain, in the dark days of Franco's revolt against the elected Republican government, suspected supporters of leftwing parties were taken on paseos (walks) outside towns and villages. Once out of sight they were shot and tossed into communal graves. Among the more famous victims was the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, killed hundreds of miles further south.

"Even now, after all these years, I still don't understand why they were so intent on killing us. We weren't communist, all we did was support the Republic," Mrs Gonzalez said.

About 35,000 people are believed to have died this way, without trial or after rapid, meaningless courts martial. Up to now nobody has paid attention to any but the most famous victims.

In silent fear

During the nearly 40 years of Franco's dictatorship their relatives, already harassed and threatened, were too afraid to talk about them in public.The political class, intent on not reopening the wounds of the civil war, has ignored the issue during the past 25 years of democracy. Now, 28 years after Franco's death, the first bodies are finally being unearthed.

But it is not being done by the government: it is relatives, widows, elderly children and middle-aged grandchildren, who are collecting money or getting down on their hands and knees and doing the digging.

In Piedrafita they have been helped by a team of international volunteers. Even the occasional elderly veteran of the international brigades, the volunteers who came to Spain to protect the Republic, has come to help.

The size of the job is overwhelming. In villages like Piedrafita and Palacios del Sil, which have only 400 inhabitants each, between 10 and 20 people were dragged from their homes and shot. "My great-grandfather Narciso was killed just because, as a wandering tailor, he travelled around so much," said Alejo Ordas, whose family still lives in Piedrafita.

The same story is repeated all over this part of Leon, which is dotted with small mining and farming villages, and, to a largely unknown extent, over much of Spain.

In Palacios del Sil the only sign of civil war martyrs is a ceramic plaque erected in Franco's time to five Falangists who were "vilely killed by the enemies of Spain".

"Their families all received money. They were treated like heroes," Mrs Gonzalez said. "My brother's only crime was that he campaigned for the left in the elections of February 1937. I campaigned too. They would have killed me if I had not left."

After fleeing to France with her husband, she returned briefly to Spain in the 1940s. One day she met a man who told her that her brother and the other victims were informed that they were being taken to the San Marcos prison in Leon city. Outside Piedrafita the lorry carrying them stopped, another prisoner appeared and, while some prisoners dug graves, others were shot.

Maria Prada, the anthropologist leading the excavations, says there are few clues to their identities. Only two pairs of shoes were found and no watches or rings, suggesting that they were stripped of their possessions. "We can estimate age and height. After that it is up to DNA testing, but we only have possible relatives for seven of them," she said.

Mrs Gonzalez and Mrs Alvarez are to give DNA samples to a laboratory in Granada so that they can be compared with the Piedrafita bones.

That is the route Emilio Silva, co-founder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, used to find his grandfather, also Emilio, buried in another mass grave in the nearby town of Priaranza del Bierzo.

He has a list of 80 grave sites, and 800 missing victims in this part of Leon alone. He wants the UN to oblige the Spanish government to start digging them up.

Spain: Investigating the Crimes of Franco Dictatorship

Fascist Falange Allowed to Join Prosecution of Judge Baltazar Garzón

by Vicky Short

The Spanish Supreme Court has allowed the fascist party, the Falange, to join a private prosecution brought against Judge Baltazar Garzón because of his attempts to investigate the crimes of the Franco dictatorship. The Falange, which was the sole political organisation allowed under the regime, carried out countless crimes against the Spanish working class during the civil war (1936-1939) and the dictatorship afterwards. Today it has a tiny membership.

Garzón, who is a member of the highest criminal court of Spain, the Audiencia Nacional, has become well known internationally for his controversial investigative activities. In 1999 he attempted to extradite Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from Britain in order to try him in Spain for genocide, terrorism and torture. He has investigated the actions of the Basque separatist organization ETA as well as the anti-ETA death squads established by the Felipe González Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) government in the 1980s. Garzón was also involved in investigating corruption inside the opposition Popular Party (PP).

He has been criticised recently by both the United States and Israel after he attempted to charge members of their governments with crimes against humanity―the US for its actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and Israel for war crimes committed in Gaza. He also summoned Chinese government ministers to testify about the crackdown on protests in Tibet.

In September 2008, Garzón started his investigations into the Franco-era killings after accepting petitions from families, grouped together in Historical Memory societies, who wanted to find the remains of their loved ones and clarify the circumstances of their deaths. As a result of his investigations Garzón accused Franco and 44 former generals and ministers, plus 10 members of the Falange, of crimes against humanity. He demanded the opening of dozens of mass graves where over 100,000 of their victims were summarily shot and buried.

Garzón raised the case of the forced separation, mainly by the Falange’s Foreign Service, of an estimated 30,000 children from their parents, usually political opponents of the regime. He pointed out that the Spanish courts had never carried out a criminal investigation into any of these crimes and not a single perpetrator had been brought to justice.

However, just a few weeks after issuing this damning indictment against Franco and his henchmen, the judge dropped the charges after lawyers appointed by the PSOE challenged his authority to pursue the investigation. They argued that Garzón had breached a 1977 law granting amnesty for atrocities passed as part of the so-called “peaceful transition to democracy” following Franco’s death in 1975.

The PSOE’s action marked a significant capitulation to opposition to Garzón from the Popular Party opposition, which originated in the Falange, the Catholic Church and the
media. Encouraged by its actions, two newly formed extreme-right organisations, Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) and Libertad e Identidad (Freedom and Identity), launched a petition for Garzón’s prosecution on charges of “corruption in the performance of his functions,” which was accepted by the courts. If indicted, Garzón would be immediately suspended pending trial.

The action against Garzón is a clear sign that the ruling elite is determined to intimidate anyone who attempts to question the “pact of silence” about Francoist crimes agreed by the right wing, the PSOE and Communist Party (PCE) during the transition. Many of today’s ruling elite and top officials are direct heirs of the Franco regime.

Not only is Garzón in the dock, but the people who asked him to initiate an investigation are being put at risk. The court has made available the documents presented by the historical memory associations regarding thousands of victims of the dictatorship to those attempting this prosecution―including now the Falange.

An investigation into the crimes of the fascist regime would expose the role of the so-called “transition to democracy,” which preserved capitalist rule in Spain after Franco’s death and prevented any settling of accounts with the fascists. For 35 years, every attempt to uncover what took place has been frustrated.

Involved in the prosecution of Garzón is the fear that such an investigation of the past will become a catalyst for a new eruption of the class struggle and of a political struggle against the existing order, especially given growing economic and political discontent.

There has been widespread support for Garzón within Spain and internationally. The Progressive Union of Prosecutors (Unión Progresista de Fiscales) said they backed Garzón’s investigation because “it fitted completely national and international legality” and “in no way can be considered judicially unfounded or arbitrary.” They criticised his prosecution by “organizations associated with the most extreme right wing in the country, some of them direct heirs of those implicated in the crimes being investigated.”

The retired anti-corruption attorney Carlos Jiménez Villarejo declared, “The Spanish extreme right wing has managed to win to its side one part of the judiciary… The decisive issue is that he dared do what nobody had done―investigate the forced disappearances, a hundred thousand disappearances.”

A group of leading writers, lawyers, academics and musicians signed a manifesto of support for the judge and declared they were “sadly convinced” that he will suffer a “Kafkaesque” trial.

Letters to El Pais expressed support for a political and judicial accounting with the Francoists.

One said, “It is incredible that none of those implicated in the dictatorship’s crimes have ever paid for them and yet they are demanding explanations from the judge who wants to investigate those crimes.”

Garcia noted, “And to think that the very people who attack Garzón, if tomorrow they achieved power they would commit the same crimes as their ancestors, it is terrifying just to think about it.”

“The same judges have given details of those denouncing Franco to the Falange, putting their safety at risk. This has no other interpretation than the judge (who allowed it) is also a Francoist and he helps the fascists seeking protection in legality. It is well known that the extreme right wing look to position themselves in posts of power, the army, the police, the judiciary, political posts, etc., to build up a de facto government, regardless of what party is in power. That is their strategy.”

José focussed his anger on the PSOE and its collusion with the far right: “The Francoist right wing have won. And what is the government doing? It is letting them manipulate. I don’t know who they are more scared of, the fascists or Garzón finding out the truth…. Zapatero has disappointed me. The Historical Memory has come to nothing. Have they made a pact with the right wing or what?”


Global Research Articles by Vicky Short