More than 20 meters deep, inside a sealed well located in an old mine in Valencia de Alcántara (Cáceres), the skeletal remains of seven people killed during the civil war were found and identified, including those by Diego Vital Díaz, father of the driver of “El 47”, the Torre Baró bus and whose story was adapted for the cinema.
Diego Vital Díaz, Amado Viera Amores -then mayor of Valencia de Alcántara-, Eugenio Díaz Borja, Juan Pirón Machado, Francisco Refolio Gómez, Antonio Tejela Fragoso and Julio Tomás Alfonso Pintor were shot in 1936 and their lifeless bodies were thrown into a flooded well. with water. Later, lime and earth were thrown in. Over time the pit was used to dump dead animals and debris and in 1988 the mine, known as “Terría”, was permanently closed with a slab of concrete beams and reinforced concrete.
The results of the DNA tests carried out on these human remains were presented this Friday to the Provincial Delegation of Cáceres, an institution which financed this work to the tune of 80,000 euros. A process that began in November 2017 with the intention of finding the bodies of 37 victims with their first and last names, through official documents, but the difficult work of identification ultimately resulted in a higher number: 49 people.
Of these 49 people murdered, all men, there are 12 who remain without first or last name. After the exhumation, it was possible to obtain the genetic profile of 40 of the bodies, because the poor conditions of preservation of the remains meant that “some of them completely lost their DNA content”, said Laura Muñoz, the archaeologist who carried the entire exhumation process.
“When we arrived at the bodies, the remains were mixed together to form a large mosaic and the first thing we did was to comprehensively document this ossuary,” he explained during the presentation ceremony, at the during which Conchita Viera, the daughter of Amado Viera, victim of reprisals, was present, and the professor of the University of Extremadura, Julián Chaves, director of the exhumation process.
The analysis of this mosaic of remains was undertaken “bone by bone”. Samples were taken from the skeletal representation, allowing us to know which bones belonged to each person. A laboratory then attempted to sequence the DNA of 49 femurs, but only one positive result was obtained out of 40.
Of the 37 shot with first and last names, it was possible to obtain the genetic sample of 11 cases, “which made it possible to draw the ‘genealogical thread’ to conclude the genetic identification of seven of the victims”.
“There are remains of people without direct relatives or with a very distant degree of kinship, in circumstances such as emigration. The more distant the relationship, the more complicated it is,” according to the archaeologist.
In the case of Manuel Vital’s father, who, on May 7, 1978, drove an articulated bus on line 47 to take him through the streets of his neighborhood and thus claim the right to public transport, it was possible to identify genetically his parent thanks to his son Diego Vital Velo.
Manuel Vital arrived in Barcelona from his hometown of Valencia de Alcántara in 1947, at the age of 24, where he remained until his death in 2010, at the age of 87, without knowing where he was. found the remains of his father, shot dead when he was just a teenager.
“They killed my father and did not deport him”
The one who stayed in Extremadura was Conchita Viera, who just turned 91 and found herself without a father when she was only three years old. In front of the media, he displayed his “satisfaction” at having closed “a dark episode” in his life and his history. His mother, he said, imposed “the law of silence at home, just like the Franco government,” but “we were told that a policeman and two Falangists had arrived at the house to take my father away.”
“They killed him and threw him into the Terria mine. Then they kicked us out of our own house,” recalls Conchita, a symbol of historical memory in Extremadura, just like Manuel Vital in Barcelona when it came to claiming rights.
Another notable chapter of “this cursed good”, as the current mayor of Valencia de Alcántara, Alberto Píriz, called it, took place in July 2022, during the reburial ceremony of the bodies in the municipality of Cáceres.
This process has ensured that the 49 bodies found now lie in a dignified grave and not at the bottom of a deep mine, where some of the barbarity of Spain’s civil war was buried.
