Spain confronts its Franco past
Carnations in hand, 94-year-old Julio López del Cam- po has come decade after decade to mark the spot where he believes the body of his brother, Mariano, was tossed into a pit along with other victims of the brutal regime of Francisco Franco in Spain.
“They took him to the prison in Guadalajara and in 1940 he was shot,” Julio said at the site next to a cemetery chapel.
“I have come here every year since. I bring carnations and leave a few. I will keep coming until my strength gives out.”
More than 70 years on, the mass grave in Guadalajara, a small city just east of Spain’s capital, Madrid, has finally been dug up, and 26 bodies were recovered. Julio now hopes that a genetic test will confirm that Mariano’s remains are among them.
The Guadalajara exhumation was carried out by vol- unteer associations who, along with some of Spain’s regional authorities, have led the fight to recover the missing and return them a shred of the dignity they have been denied for over half a century.
Until now, there has been little or no help from Spain’s central authorities, and families have seen time running out as a generation quickly fades away. But now there is some hope.
A bill is working its way through parliament that Spain’s left-wing coalition government says will deliver on its pledge to respond to the plight of families. The bill aims to improve on a 2007 Law for Historical Memory which experts and activists agree fell way short of emptying the hundreds of still-untouched mass graves.
The bill faces hurdles on both sides in parliament. The minority government needs the backing of small- er left-wing parties who want it to go further. Mean- while, right-wing parties are vowing to vote against it.
If it passes, the law will recognize the families of victims have the “right to the truth” and will make the central government responsible for the recovery and identification of the missing. To help do so, it estab- lishes a national DNA bank as well as an office to support families.
Like tens of thousands of others, Mariano disap- peared after returning home from fighting for Spain’s Second Republic that Franco’s right-wing military up- rising destroyed in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. He turned himself in to police and, despite promises that he would not be harmed, was never seen again. He was 23.