On ENTR: Living with the ghosts of Spain's dictatorship
Almost 50 years after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, the way the repression is remembered still remains a taboo subject in many Spanish families. But younger generations are fighting to revive the memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who disappeared during the dictatorship – some of them by literally digging up the bones of the past.
Driving through the low, rugged mountains of the Spanish region of León, Javier Voces Vega, 28, points to the side of the road. “That’s where the mass grave is,” he says.
We’re in Priaranza del Bierzo, a small village in north-eastern Spain. A discreet stone plaque below a flowering rosemary bush is the only marker of the atrocities that occurred here in 1936.
“They came in trucks, stopped, made all the people get off, shot them and buried them in this grave. For 64 years they were here under the ground,” Javier says. The remains, uncovered in October 2000, belong to 13 civilians who defended the republican cause, and were killed for it by General Francisco Franco’s repression.
Javier was only four years old when his family brought him to witness the opening of the mass grave, the first to be exhumed in Spain. That moment marked him forever. Now he volunteers for the Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory, an organisation formed by the families of the victims of Francoism whose mission is to find and identify the remains of the disappeared of that time, and reunite them with their families.
The search for the disappeared
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