That during the Civil War there were deaths among both rebels and republicans is an irrefutable fact. However, not all of them followed the same path afterwards. Some, exalted as martyrs of the conflict, were honored in all corners of the country for 40 years and their bodies were sought and dignified from the beginning. On the other hand, the other victims, considered enemies of the New Spainwere relegated to ostracism and silence and their bones are still searched for in the gutters today.
So far, little is known about Franco’s handling of his dead, a “legal, forensic and ideological” process that historian and forensic anthropologist Miriam Saqqa Carazo addresses in the recently published book. Exhumations for God and for Spain (President), in what constitutes the first historical investigation into this phenomenon. The expert assures that “a project of state intervention of equal magnitude” has never been developed since, even for those who suffered reprisals from the dictatorship.
Its main revelation is not only that these practices took place only for a part of the victims, constructing a “biased and exclusive” historical memory, but that behind the physical recovery of the bodies there was an underlying political and ideological current: “The dictatorship organized this judicial and forensic procedure to transform their victims into martyrs and fallen, who, in their story, sacrifice themselves for the nation they intend to support. Their interest was to construct a national narrative through these bodies and their exhumations and to have a propaganda justification for their repression,” explains Saqqa.
The investigation studies the exhumations that took place on the side of the victors between 1936 and 1951, a period in which the expert, aware that not all of them were, identified 177 processes – 116 in Madrid – and 3,518 bodies found. The work was carried out from the first year of the war. As the rebel army advanced and occupied the territories, the search for those considered “victims of the Marxist hordes”, as they were called in several of the provisions published in the BOE at the time, began.
Victim ideal
Already in October 1936, a decree signed by Franco dictated a series of “rules for the transfer of the bodies of those who died during the campaign” and specified that the objective was to “provide maximum facilities” for the movement “of those who gave their lives.” for the homeland. Thus began the construction of this ideal of victim, composed of “military, civilian and religious” that the national forces “linked or assigned to the corresponding political and ideological category” and which has always excluded the victims of insurrectional violence, explains Saqqa.
Among them, some were “illustrious fallen”, among whom stands out José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The founder of Falange was martyr par excellence, whose remains were transferred from Alicante to El Escorial in 1939 in a funeral procession on foot that lasted ten days, during which the Falangists carried his coffin on their shoulders. This was the paradigm of the much less ambitious political acts of homage with which exhumations usually culminated, in the presence of political and religious representatives.
The inauguration of the usual monuments “to the dead” that still exist in many cities, the small inscriptions in churches or cemeteries or the conversion of graves into “sacred places” until their exhumation were some of the legislative actions promoted by the Francoists. In addition, the registration of victims – again, only a few – in the civil registry was encouraged with dubious techniques, which led to cases of people classified as “unknown” but nevertheless registered as victims “of the red barbarism”.
Statewide involvement
In practice, during the years of the Civil War, exhumations carried out by relatives, municipalities and local agents coexisted with the search for bodies promoted by Franco’s military justice, but it was from 1940, once the rebel victory was proclaimed, that the process extended to the entire territory, was institutionalized and judicialized. This was done through the General Cause (CG), an investigation process promoted by the Franco regime to purify, as its preamble literally says, “the criminal acts committed throughout the national territory during the red domination“.
The project, which historians have attributed an eminently propaganda character with the aim of justifying the 1936 coup and blaming the enemy for “disproportionate violence”, not only gave rise to numerous trials and repressive actions, but also “monopolized” the location of graves and the exhumations of rebel victims. “It will give all the powers to the Supreme Court’s prosecution, which will be responsible for giving instructions to the rest of the provincial prosecutors. What interests them is obtaining information from the victims and the alleged perpetrators, for which they will use different techniques,” explains Saqqa.
The entire state was involved: from the municipalities, which had to transmit the data of the deceased, to the Church, the Civil Guard, the Army or even the Falange. These are “the main transmitters” of information to the General Cause, whose archives the researcher searched. This information, which “would serve as a basis for opening exhumation files”, would often be obtained through interrogations of relatives, neighbors but also of detainees by torture, which also made these agents “repressors”.
The exhumations were carried out ex officio by the General Cause itself or at the request of religious entities or family members, who had “a very active role” during the process, both in the identifications and in the recovery of the bodies. Some were organized in associations, which had a “relevant political weight” due to “their ideological charge.”
For example, the Brotherhood of mothers and relatives of heroes fallen in combat in the Mountain Barracksin Madrid, directly requested their exhumation in 1944 to transfer them to the tomb built by the association in the Almudena cemetery, something that was replicated in many Spanish cemeteries, which gradually provided special burial places for the victors. The work at the Mountain Barracks lasted eight days and the figures on the bodies found vary according to the sources: the CG speaks of 170, of which only ten were identified. Despite this, they were all reburied in the new mausoleum.
Make them look like victims
This is not an exceptional practice, according to Saqqa. “The identifications were problematic and, in fact, in many cases, attributed the attribution of martyr and fallen to bodies that they could not identify,” explains the historian. This “forced political and ideological attribution” is easy to see in many cases: for example, in 1943, in Alamillo (Ciudad Real), two bodies were exhumed, “buried in red period“, according to the mayor, who, although they could not be identified, were buried in the cemetery with “funeral honors.”
The same thing happened with the exhumations of Barajas (Madrid), one of the most numerous. 95 bodies were found, but only one was identified. Despite this, they were all buried in the “Camposanto de Paracuellos del Jarama”, a symbolic place of the dictatorship that would become a privileged space to commemorate the fallen for God and for Spain. However, of the 749 people who were buried there on the orders of the CG and who came from different parts of the community, only 16% have been identified. In total, of the more than 3,000 exhumations recorded by Saqqa, only 35% were exhumations.
“The practices implemented were in many cases negligent and the forensic experts involved in the process reproduced an ideological burden that supports the dictatorship. All this shows that there is a political interest, more than an interest in the rights of the victims or relatives, and that it is the construction of a narrative that is still used,” explains the specialist, who focuses on how the process of recovering the bodies and their dignification “represented the radical exclusion” of other victims.
“Francoism gives itself a legitimacy that it totally denies to the vanquished” to the point of acting as if they did not exist. Thus, it deprives their families of the possibility of recovering and honoring their dead. A paradigmatic case is that of the exhumations of Casa de Campo, in which eleven bodies were found that could not be identified but, due to the objects they were carrying, it was necessary to exclude that they were Francoist soldiers. Saqqa believes that they could be young people who participated in Operation Garabitas, a Republican offensive that took place in the region. But in this case, the General Cause did not seek culprits or tributes. Their bodies were buried in the Almudena cemetery, in an anonymous grave, condemned to oblivion.
