By Eva Manez and David Latona
PATERNA, Spain (Reuters) – Exhumations are set to end at one of Spain’s largest mass grave sites holding thousands of victims of General Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship after the regional coalition government that included the far-right Vox party withheld funding.
Excavations at the cemetery believed to hold over 2,200 bodies in Paterna, a suburb of the Mediterranean port of Valencia, had expanded with funding introduced since 2020 by a pioneering regional law addressing the legacy of Francoism.
Archaeologists have so far exhumed nearly 1,500 victims from dozens of mass graves at Paterna who were executed in the two decades following Franco’s victory in the 1936-39 Civil War.
However, the regional government changed hands in May 2023. In July, the conservative People’s Party (PP) and Vox replaced the democratic memory law with what they dubbed a “Law of Concord” that slashed subsidies for exhumations.
“What they achieve with this is that the people who are still alive and already old end up dying and are forgotten,” Antoni Antoni, the great-grandson of a victim, told Reuters. “The past that isn’t resolved is the present, not the past.”
EQUAL FOOTING
The new law puts all Civil War victims, including those who fought on Franco’s side, on an equal footing and covers people killed after the Spanish Republic’s creation in 1931 up to victims of Basque separatist group ETA.
“The main problem with the law is an economic issue, because families don’t have the means” to privately fund exhumations, said Daniel Galan, 67, who heads Paterna’s Platform of Mass Graves.
The platform has promoted a memorial – the inauguration of which has been paralysed by the local government – to house unidentified remains instead of returning them to the graves.
The PP was co-founded by former ministers in the Franco regime, and Vox’s think tank Denaes has published articles praising the general who ruled Spain with an iron fist until his death in 1975. Both parties opposed a 2022 national law that pardons people punished under Francoism and created remembrance days to honour victims.
Valencia’s special prosecutor for democratic memory, Susana Gisbert, said that giving closure to victims’ relatives “isn’t about revenge – the important thing is to restore to the victims the dignity they’ve always had but has never been recognised.”
(Reporting by Eva Manez; Writing by David Latona; Editing by Charlie Devereux and Peter Graff)
