Old wounds reopen as Spain gets ready to pass mass grave law for Franco’s victims

After Burundi and Cambodia, Spain has the world’s highest number of mass graves. Graham Keeley reports

Human remains discovered in 2016 during exhumation works in a mass grave at Valladolid cemetery where hundreds of people were dumped during the Spanish civil war (AFP/Getty)

A wedding ring discovered in the morbid surroundings of a mass grave reunited Rosa María Insúa with the father she never knew.

Archaeologists excavating the grave found the ring on a skeleton, and the date of the owner's marriage – 1 June 1931 – was inscribed inside.  

Eugenio Juan Insúa’s family confirmed this was the day he married Irene Serrano, providing his daughter with a poignant link to her father, who was killed in 1936 when Rosa María was only six months old.

“It has been a great joy. I wanted to cry,” Rosa María told The Independent. “It has been so long but we always knew my father was there and now this is the proof. This should give tranquillity to other people looking for loved ones.”

After 84 years of searching, her family were helped by campaigners to find where her father was buried. Pending a DNA test, his remains will be buried next to his late wife.  

More than half a million people died during the 1936-39 civil war and an estimated 120,000 were killed by General Francisco Franco’s regime, while 450,000 were forced to leave Spain, historians estimate.

Eight decades after the conflict ended, Spain’s left-wing government will on Tuesday pass a law to provide redress for the victims of the regime.  

Unlike Germany or Italy, Spain has never addressed events during a dictatorship that lasted almost four decades and ended only with the death of Franco in 1975.  

An amnesty law passed in 1977 prohibited retrospective prosecutions relating to the dictatorship.  

New grants announced this summer under the 2007 Law of Historical Memory will provide a, so far, unspecified amount of state funding to locate mass graves and set up a database including DNA of victims and relatives to help unite them.

After Burundi and Cambodia, Spain has the highest numbers of mass graves in the world, according to the United Nations.

Some 120,000 victims have been identified from 2,591 unmarked graves around the country but only 740 graves have been opened.  

Until now, finding the remains of relatives has been left to families who, without state funds, had to turn detective and scour records or depend on the fading memories of witnesses.  

Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez told the Spanish parliament last week the law will also ban the Francisco Franco Foundation, which works to defend the image of the late dictator.  

“We will ban and make illegal the foundations that defend the Francoist dictatorship, like, for instance, the Francisco Franco Foundation,” Mr Sanchez said.  

Carmen Calvo, Spain's deputy prime minister, said that the bill would ban glorification of the dictatorship by public or publicly funded institutions.

However, the law is highly controversial in a country which is still divided over one of the darkest chapters in Spanish history.

Political parties on the right like the conservative People’s Party and the far-right Vox believe the Socialists are trying to dig up the ghosts of the past and should instead concentrate on dealing with the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic.  

Irene Herrera, granddaughter of Mr Insúa, said the DNA database proposed in the new law would help families who were still seeking to find a final resting place for their loved ones.  

She was pleased the Franco Foundation would be banned.  

“It is an absolute disgrace that an organisation exists to promote a leader who was guilty of massacring so many people,” said Ms Herrera.  

Volunteers came across her grandfather’s wedding ring when they were excavating a mass grave believed to contain the remains of 17 men in El Espinar, 62km north of Madrid.  

Days after General Franco staged an armed uprising in July 1936, Mr Insúa, a 29-year-old father of two young children, answered the call to join up and defend the democratically elected Republican government.  

His unit was ambushed and he was killed.  

Franco’s troops dumped 17 Republicans in unmarked graves. In the following years, his family was too scared to try to recover his remains, even after the dictator’s death in 1975.  

“My mother always had to say that her father had died of illness – not the truth, in case of reprisals,” said Ms Herrera, 54, a biologist from Madrid.

“My mother is frail and had always wanted to bury my grandfather with my grandmother before she died.”  

Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recuperation of the Historical Memory, who traced the remains of his own grandfather 20 years ago, said the legislation did not go far enough.  

“This does not class the victims of the dictatorship in the same way as, for example, the victims of terrorism. There will be no official office to deal with our affairs,” he said.  

“The database which they are proposing also seems insufficient. Instead of the list of names, what we want is for all the military records relating to the dictatorship to be released and digitalised.”

Opponents of the law contend it will open old divisions.  

Pablo Casado, leader of the People’s Party, whose grandfather was jailed by Franco for being a Republican, said: “Sánchez is going to revive the wounds of the past. The Transition to democracy saw supporters of Franco embracing communists.”  

Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party, the third largest in the Spanish parliament with 52 MPs, said the new law was “totalitarian” because it was passed by a party which sought to limit freedom of thought.  

The Francisco Franco Foundation’s president, General Juan Chicharro Ortega, said the ban would be a violation of the constitution.

“That law is nothing but an attempt to divert Spanish people's attention from the government's disastrous handling of the (coronavirus) pandemic and the thousands of deaths,” he said.  

General Chicharro Ortega insisted the foundation, which was founded in 1976 by sympathisers after Franco’s death, does not receive public funding and is financed only by donations.

Since coming to power in 2018, Mr Sanchez’s government has taken a series of steps to remove dictatorship-era symbols, including last year removing Franco's remains from a huge mausoleum near Madrid called The Valley of the Fallen.

Despite a legal challenge from Franco’s descendants, the remains of the dictator were moved to another mausoleum.  

Last week, a court ruled in favour of the government in a dispute against the late dictator’s heirs over the ownership of a palace in the northern region of Galicia.