Via a grave site, Spain relives harsh divisions

GRANADA, Spain -- On a hillside overlooking the Sierra Nevada mountains, a gnarled olive tree and a simple granite marker stand where historians believe Spain's most celebrated 20th-century poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was summarily executed and dumped in a communal grave.

It was August 1936 when Garcia Lorca, who romanticized the ruggedness of the landscape and the people of southern Spain in poetry and plays, and who stated, "I will always be on the side of those who have nothing," was killed by Francisco Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War.

It is believed that he was buried in a ditch atop a tiny village named Viznar, with two local bullfighters and a schoolteacher -- the four having no connection other than leftist sympathies with the Republican cause that fought against the rise of Franco's fascist movement.

Some members of the poet's family have said they would prefer that the grave remain undisturbed, but the other three victims' families are pushing the government to permit its excavation. Last month, the regional government began to consider a formal request made last year by the families who seek to unearth not only the bones, but long-buried injustices. A decision is expected at the end of the summer.

Garcia Lorca's is one of thousands of mass graves that historians say dot Spain's landscape. Over the past year and a half, a movement to excavate these sites has emerged in Spain.

With the victory of the Socialist prime minister, Jos Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, in the dramatic aftermath of the Madrid train bombings on March 11, the leaders of the excavation movement are hopeful of more government support.

Spanish activists say the movement draws strength from a growing national resolve to recognize the long, silent suffering of tens of thousands of families of "los desaparecidos," or the disappeared.

Unearthing a memoryTheir bones lie beneath a land that long ago decided -- and that in many ways was forced by Franco -- to bury its collective memory of the bloody and brutal Civil War. But the country as a whole, in the last two years, has set out to unearth its own past as never before, with museum exhibits on the war that have been held over for months because of popular demand, best-selling books and box-office hits all exploring the depths of emotion lingering from the war. Last month, hundreds of elderly veterans of the Spanish Civil war marched demanding that the government do more to support the unearthing of mass graves and the process of recognizing forgotten victims of the conflict.

Nieves Galindo Arroyo, 44, the granddaughter of the schoolteacher believed to be buried alongside Garcia Lorca, held up a gold pocket watch and a yellowed parchment with a teaching certificate dated 1932 that belonged to her grandfather, Dioscoro Galindo Gonzales.

Her father, a medical student during the war, was 27 when he saw his father arrested and taken away by Franco's forces. Then he, too, was arrested and ostracized as many families of the left were. He was reduced to working menial labor his whole life.

"The pain of what happened carried through the generations," Galindo Arroyo said in an interview at a Madrid cafe. "The generation before us was too afraid to speak out, but we are not afraid. Until I see the bones of my grandfather, I will not be able to let go of the memory."

The generation that remembers where the bodies are buried is dying off, but victims' families have preserved the memory, and volunteer-led excavations have gotten underway in dozens of places in the last two years.

In the town of Bosque in the southern region of Andalusia, there is one such excavation that started last winter and stands out as the first paid for by a regional government. On a day in early spring, an archeological team carefully scraped the dry earth and gently sprinkled water until it softened into a rust-colored mud that revealed the chalk-white bones of yet another body.

In the soft morning light, the team was uncovering remains of 30 people believed to have been summarily executed in 1936 by Franco's forces and to have been dumped here in a mass grave.

The excavation of this site is part of a movement, led by the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, that political analysts say speaks of contemporary Spain, with its thriving economy that, over the past 25 years, has emerged from the long shadow of Franco to become one of the European Union's success stories.

The effort to document the past has provided a political theme in modern Spain, a sense that if it is to progress as a modern country it must recognize injustices.

The issue is not prosecution or a formal truth and reconciliation committee, as in South Africa, Chile, and elsewhere. Spain's journey toward truth is about a "persistence of memory," to borrow a phrase from Salvador Dali's depiction of a melting clock, that has lasted through three generations.

"This is not about revenge, it is about justice," said Mateo Venegas, standing above the grave site of his grandfather, Jos Bazan Viruez, a 33-year-old representative of the left-wing, or Republican, government. Viruez was killed and dumped into a mass grave here in July 1936 by The Falange, the fascist organization led by Franco. "Spain will not be complete and whole as a democratic country until there is justice in these cases," Venegas said.

Discovering a bodyEmilio Silva, a Spanish journalist based in Madrid, founded the Association after he set out to uncover the mass grave where his grandfather, a local Republican leader, was buried.

Now Silva leads a team of volunteers, including archeologists from several Spanish universities and family members, such as Venegas, who have helped to excavate 37 mass graves, unearthing 247 bodies for proper burial, since the movement began in the fall of 2000. Three thousand more families are awaiting their chance to uncover loved ones.

"It's like the whole country is in psychoanalysis and we have to go make a symbolic journey back to recover the memory of what happened. That will bring justice for our ancestors. We are breaking open a hole in the wall of silence," Silva said.

Atrocities were committed by both sides in the war. But historians claim that the war's losing side, the Republican sympathizers -- men, women, and children -- suffered a systematic and organized wave of terror and killing by the Falange during the war and its aftermath.

With Spain's powerful Roman Catholic Church on its side, the Franco regime is conservatively estimated to have killed 100,000 people. An estimated 30,000 of them lay in unmarked mass graves that dot the countryside of Spain. Those on the right, who were loyal to Franco, in almost all cases were given a proper burial, and in many cases were provided monuments in their honor as fallen war heroes.

Garcia Lorca stands as a symbol of the Republican cause, and his work, regarded as subversive and banned under Franco, has had a rising popularity and acceptance in the years after Franco's death.

Ian Gibson, a British historian who lives in Granada, wrote a biography of Garcia Lorca that provided extensive research of the location of the grave and the events surrounding his killing.

Banned under Franco when it was published in 1971, the book was released in Spain in 1978 and is still in print as the most exhaustive work on the poet.

"To find Garcia Lorca's body will be a hugely important and cathartic chapter in Spain's history," Gibson said.

But it is also a dimension of its modern politics. For years, the parties of the right and the left have danced around the issue of the Spanish Civil War.

The right-of-center government of the former prime minister, Jos Maria Aznar, had "done everything it could to slow down and to suppress the process of uncovering the grave and other graves," Gibson said.

Aznar funded an effort to commemorate unmarked graves of Franco-era soldiers from the "Blue Division" who fought alongside Nazi forces in Russia.

The Socialist opposition sharply criticized the fact that conservatives would prefer to honor men who fought alongside Adolf Hitler rather than honor those who died defending the democratically elected government of the Republic of Spain, against Franco's ultimate imposition of a dictatorship that lasted 40 years.

Exhuming the memories For now, the slow, meticulous process of unearthing the graves continues.

At the grave site in the village of Bosque, the team of two men and a woman snapped on plastic gloves and carefully placed a bullet and the heel of a peasant sandal in sealed bags. Those items, they said, will go to a forensic team that will use DNA to try to link the identities of the bodies to the families of the missing.

Up the hill from the grave site in a drafty stucco home, an old man warmed his hands by a fire.

At 93, Pepe Vasquez is among the last living links to that history for the younger generation of Spaniards.

He dug the grave at Bosque on a hot August day in 1936. He was ordered to do so, he said, by relatives who were local representatives of the Falange.

But a year ago, he came forward and told his story, which led to the locating of this grave.

"I can still see the faces of the dead when I put them in the grave. I've never forgotten them," he said solemnly as he gazed into the distance. "I always wanted to tell what happened, but I was afraid," he said, rubbing hands that have aged like leather. "Now we can talk."

Charles Sennott can be reached at sennott@globe.com.