The bones of the tens of thousands of victims of the Franco regime buried in mass graves throughout Spain are now telling their stories.  Nicole Iturriaga, author of Exhuming Violent Histories: Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain’s Past, chronicles the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and how it is helping to shatter the silence about the crimes of the Spanish Civil War and Franco era.   Building on a movement originating in Argentina, organizations like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (ARMH), are using the power of forensic science to reveal the crimes of the past and to foster openness and reconciliation in the present. 

The Spanish Civil War stemmed from a backlash to modernization efforts by the newly created Republican regime during the early 1930s.  Efforts to implement a range of progressive measures, from land reform and wealth redistribution to divorce and legalized abortion, were deeply unsettling to the aristocratic elite and the Catholic Church which traditionally dominated Spanish society.   Growing tensions caused by the drive to transform Spain into a modern democratic republic were even more volatile in light of Spain’s long history of military coups.  It was precisely because of the fear of a military coup that Republican authorities relegated conservative generals, like Francisco Franco, to assignments outside Spain in Spanish Morocco.  

It was from Spanish Morocco, with the support of Moroccan troops, that Franco launched his attack on the Second Republic.  The zeal of Franco and the right-wing generals who backed the coup, was reminiscent of the Middle Ages and the reconquest of Spain from the Muslim Moors.  In fact, they used the code word Covadonga for the rebellion, a direct reference to the reconquest.  The generals viewed the Republic as a leftist cancer on the nation which needed to be cut out, at whatever cost, from the body politic.  

The cost was significant.  Massacres took place all over the countries—even where Franco’s forces met little resistance.  Anyone deemed to have a progressive background—from Freemasons and teachers in a Montessori school to members of a Rotary club or peasants learning how to read—could be targeted for murder.  Union members and large numbers of teachers were imprisoned then executed.  Many were tortured, stabbed, or thrown to their deaths from buildings and bridges.  Most were buried in unmarked mass graves scattered throughout the country.  Between 114,000 and 140,000 died in extrajudicial killings.  

Both during and well after the civil war, women of the left were singled out for especially cruel forms of violence.  Unknown numbers of women were raped in prison, allowed to give birth before being executed, then had their babies placed with conservative families.  The decades-long history of baby stealing in Spain began with the theories of Nazi trained Antonio Vallejo-Nájera, chief psychiatrist for the army, who believed that the Marxist “red gene” could be transmitted from parents to children.  Placing these children with healthy conservative families was thought to be a remedy for the defect.  In addition, women were subjected to a variety of gendered forms of violence and humiliation including having their heads shaved, being forced to drink castor oil and forced to walk through town centers while defecating on themselves.  

Holes are being opened in the silence.  May this hole begin to pierce that silence.  And may the sounds of what happened during those years arise.  Emilio Silva from Unearthing the Truth about Spain’s mass graves.  

Even after the fighting ended, as many as 20,000 were sentenced and condemned to execution by military kangaroo courts. Some 400,000 more were given prison sentences that, in some cases, lasted decades.  From canals to dams, many of Spain’s post war infrastructure projects were built with forced labor taken from the ranks of these Republican prisoners.  The Valley of the Fallen, Franco’s grandiose mausoleum and monument to the civil war war dead, was built with forced laborers, many of whom died during the construction.  To escape these reprisals, over 400,000 Republican and Republican sympathizers fled the country. 

In the years after the civil war former Republicans were reduced to second class citizens.  They were denied certain kinds of jobs and many had had their businesses and property confiscated.  The Franco regime waged a form of psychic war on the former Republicans.  National holidays were transformed into victory festivals used to anchor the memory of Republican treachery and betrayal.  Families of the victims were denied all forms of commemoration or mourning.  Widows were denied death certificates making it impossible for them to remarry.  While the surviving family members of the nationalist dead received pensions and jobs, the widows and children of Republican dead received nothing.  Beyond being perpetually shamed and humiliated as Rojos or Reds, most Republicans were reduced to poverty.  

The government dominated the narrative of the civil war.  In public school students were taught that the civil war was a Crusade and a war of liberation.  Government buildings across the nation became sites of memory used to reinforce the victor’s narrative.  Scrolls with the names of nationalists dead were inscribed on the walls of public buildings.  All Spanish churches added the name of right wing hero, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, on their walls.  Some even incorporated the Falangist flag into their stained glass windows.  The largest Francoists moment was the Valley of the Fallen.  A massive mausoleum that houses the bodies of 30,000 civil war dead.  It includes a basilica, a monastery, and 150 meter high cross (492 feet) built by 20,000 Republican forced laborers—many of whom died during the construction.  

When Franco died in 1975, two years after his chosen military successor was assassinated, Spain began a three year transition to democracy that ended in 1978 with the drafting of a new constitution.  Fear of a coup and return to military rule were real and rampant throughout this period.  The El Abrazo (the Hug) monument in Madrid commemorates the four lawyers and a trade unionist linked to the Communist Party of Spain who were assassinated by a fascist gunman on 24 January 1977.  In 1981, military officers attempted a coup in which 150 soldiers of the Guardia Civil occupied and held members of Spain’s Congress of Deputies hostage for 22 hours.  

In light of the extreme instability of the period and the fragile nature of the new democracy, both the political left and right decided to extend a general amnesty for all past crimes associated with the Franco regime.  The Pact of Forgetting (pacto del olvido) was regarded for many years as the gold standard for regimes transitioning from authoritarian rule to democracy.  An emphasis on truth and reconciliation and transitional justice did not come until years later, following the wars in the former Yugoslavia and after the end of apartheid in South Africa in the mid-1990s.  However, rather than simply forgiving and forgetting, this pact perpetuated the fears and silence of the Franco years.  

Everything began to change in the 1990s due to two developments—the international universal jurisdiction law and the international forensics human rights movement.  The international universal jurisdiction law had its roots in the immediate postwar period and efforts to establish a legal response to the horrors of the Holocaust.  Universal jurisdiction is based on the conviction that some crimes are so grave that they transcend international borders—war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, piracy, hijacking, terrorism, etc…Universal jurisdiction gives domestic courts the right to initiate and pursue criminal cases against persons or regimes beyond their borders.  It was through the recourse to universal jurisdiction, for example, that the state of Israel prosecuted the former high ranking Nazi official, Adolf Eichmann, for his role in the Holocaust.  Universal jurisdiction, however, was not widely used until the 1990s, following the end of the Cold War.  

In Spain, it was judge Baltasar Garzón who used universal jurisdiction, in 1998, to call for the extradition and trial of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.  Pinochet, then receiving medical treatment in England, was charged with the disappearance of thousands of Chileans and several Spanish citizens.  However, the perceived hypocrisy of attempting to prosecute a foreign dictator while ignoring crimes at home triggered outrage in Spain.  It was at this point that the Spanish citizens began to more actively challenge the official policy of silence about the past.  

The international forensics human rights movement had its roots in Argentina following the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1983.  Victims groups, and most importantly, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Maya, demanded information about the over 30,000 “disappeared” by the military dictatorship.  The transitional government invited forensic scientist Clyde Snow, who had made his name for identifying the skull of the infamous Nazi scientist Joseph Mengele, to form a forensic science team in Argentina.  Snow established the Argentine Forensic Science Anthropology Team known better as EAAF after its Spanish acronym.  The EAAF would used DNA blood testing to reveal that the military dictatorship had stolen hundreds of babies from their murdered mothers.  This was the first time that forensic science was used to challenge and shatter an official narrative and reshape the collective memory of state terror.  By the 1990s the EAAF had worked in over forty countries, participated in a number of  truth commissions, and set up other teams in countries like Guatemala, Cyprus, and Peru.  

The convergence of the rise of the international forensics human rights movement and universal jurisdiction in Spain happened through the person of Emilio Silva.  Silva was a journalist who was outraged about Spain initiating a criminal case against Pinochet but doing nothing in response to its own Francoist past.  As a journalist he used his platform to write an article entitled “My Grandfather too was a Desaparecido (disappeared person).”  He was later contacted by a forensic anthropologist who offered to help locate the remains of his grandfather.  After finding the bones of his grandfather in 2000, along with the remains of twelve other victims in the shared mass grave, Silva together with Santiago Macias, went on to found the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH).

Using the methods developed in Argentina and with EAAF support,  ARMH would go on to become one the leading drivers of the historical memory recovery movement in Spain.  By embedding herself within the ARMH, Nicole Iturriaga offers unique insights into their memory work.  She divides her findings into three parts.  The first reveals how ARMH uses its fieldwork to attract local participants and to encourage and facilitate the sharing of difficult stories.  Second, she shows how ARMH excavation sites become mobile classrooms that use science as an apolitical tool to expose the crimes of the past.  Third, she discusses how homage and reburial ceremonies for the recovered victims and their families offer a means of truth and reconciliation that get amplified and conveyed to larger audiences through the media.  

Nicole fitting entitles her chapter on ARMH excavation sites as a “Scientific Trojan Horse.”  ARMH only goes to communities after first being invited by victims’ families then doing the historical and archival research to identify the birth and death dates and possible location of the remains.  After posting announcements in local papers, ARMH teams use their excavation sites to spark interest and curiosity as a means of drawing and implicating local participants.  Everything from the safety vests with ARMH logos to the special tools and equipment used by the site workers are meant to entice and invite onlookers.  Anyone who does approach the site is welcomed and encouraged to ask questions.  Moreover, large standing posters display the pictures of the victims and explain the work of ARMH.  It is this Trojan Horse strategy of drawing crowds that encourages and helps locals to feel safe enough to share stories they may have never told beyond their family circle.  

Once visitors gather at the excavation site ARMH specialists offer impromptu classes.  Classes are used to cast the work of ARMH within a depoliticized framework by stressing that the aim of the association is to give families closure. The right to grieve and bury the dead is regarded as a universal right that transcends politics.  Rather than trying to impart a pre-established narrative, the classes convey how the tools of forensic science simply reveal the causes of death—tools that have much credibility due the popularity of CSI dramas.  However, visible proof of a bullet hole in a skull or an earring and a hair pin still resting on the skeletal remains of a head are a powerful means of letting the dead tell the story of the gruesome and indiscriminate nature of past violence.  Given the sensitivity of this past there are always those who will denounce efforts to open unhealed wounds.  Yet the objectives and methods used by ARMH help them initiate long overdue conversations among all parties in the former conflict.

While the details of homage and burial ceremonies are left to the family members of the victims, both are an important part of the work of ARMH.  Homage and burial ceremonies are a means of reclaiming the names and identities of those who were erased by the Franco regime.  By voicing and reincorporating these names and lives into their communities and into the narrative of the nation, ARMH plays an instrumental role in breaking the silence of the past.  In many instances these ceremonies are reported and communicated to larger audiences by the media.   Media coverage not only amplifies the work of ARMH but the choice of words such as victim or murder and the use of active rather than passive voice helps lift the shame and burden long placed on the victims and their families.  Finally, homage ceremonies give local authorities the opportunity to air views about the past.  In some instances, Nicole was surprised to witness how members of conservative parties historically inclined to maintain the pact of silence, voiced their sorrow for the suffering and pain caused by past violence.  The expression of these sentiments offered the closest substitute to date for an official apology to the victims and their families.  

Nicole concludes her book by highlighting how we cannot fully understand the work of ARMH without taking into account its connections to transnational networks.  She uses the case of Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá to make this point.  Timoteo was a local union president and one of the thousands tried and executed by the Franco regime after the civil war and buried in a mass grave.  Seventy four year later, Argentinean Judge Maria Servini de Cubría recorded the testimony of Timoteo’s then eighty-seven-year-old daughter Ascensión, along with 150 other testimonies, and initiated a case against the Franco regime for a long list of crimes  ranging from torture to the stealing of babies.  It was through the relentless work of Juge de Cubría that Spanish courts finally gave permission to exhume the body of Timoteo—the first time in history, Nicole notes, that Spanish authorities complied with the decision of a foreign magistrate to exhume a victim of Francoist violence.  The case of Timoteo reveals both the power of the international law of universal jurisdiction and transnational advocacy networks to shed light on difficult national pasts.  

Spanish authorities did pass a historical memory law in 2007 but it lacked teeth.  It didn’t revoke the 1977 amnesty law and didn’t not require the state to take responsibility for identifying and exhuming the bodies of the victims of the Franco regime.  It did offer limited funds for exhumation efforts which contributed to over 9,000 bodies being exhumed between 2000 and the writing of Nicole’s book.  However, larger crises, Nicole notes, undercut efforts by the state to pursue more aggressive memory strategies.  The housing crisis of 2008, for instance, caused so much hardship that it derailed earlier aims of the government to remove fascist symbols from across the country.  After Franco’s body was exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen in October, 2019, covid struck the following year once against sidelining plans for more aggressive memory initiatives.  

In recent weeks the Socialist government of Spain has taken dramatic steps to confront the past.  Spain’s New Democratic Memory Law, which came into effect on October 21st, pardons the victims of the Franco regime sentenced for political or religious beliefs, sexual or ideological orientation.  The state will now promote the search for and exhumation of the remains of victims of the Franco regime, work until now done primarily by memory associations.  Under the new law, the legacy of the Franco era will be incorporated into the compulsory school curriculum and required for anyone seeking civil service employment.  Critics argue that the law does not go far enough, pointing out that it does not address key legal issues such as the identification and prosecution of perpetrators of past crimes.  Still, for a country that, for decades, used the pact of forgetting to bury the crimes of the past, the New Democratic Memory law is a significant step in the direction of confronting the past.