Thousands of victims of political executions lie in anonymous graves. Forensics offers hope for the ‘forgotten’ ones

n 11 September 1939 in the city of Guadalajara in Spain, 13-year-old Ascensión Mendieta Ibarra opened the door to a group of ‘well-spoken’ men who had come to talk with her father, Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá. Timoteo, 41 years old, was a butcher, president of the local union, and father of seven. Upon gaining entrance to the house, the men arrested Timoteo and took him to a makeshift prison where he was beaten and put through a military tribunal. He was convicted of having given ‘aid to the rebellion’, that is, fighting for Spain’s democracy during the Civil War (1936-39). He was executed against the wall of the Guadalajara civil cemetery on 15 November, and buried in a mass grave. Ascensión blamed herself for her father’s death. She spent the rest of her life fighting for the right to exhume and rebury his body in accordance with her family’s wishes – not his murderers’. The tragedy of Timoteo, and the other 23 people executed and buried alongside him, was a common story. By the end of the Spanish Civil War, more than 500, 000 Spaniards had died, including an estimated 120, 000 to 140, 000 killed in extrajudicial executions – a purge of progressives, democrats, artists, teachers and the unlucky. During the immediate postwar period, more than 400, 000 people were imprisoned, at least 20, 000 of whom were executed. Hundreds of thousands more likely died while incarcerated, from neglect and disease. The almost 40-year dictatorship that followed (1939-75) ensured that General Franco’s power infiltrated every aspect of Spanish society. He was relentless in punishing and repressing the defeated republicans – supporters of the Second Spanish Republic. Franco’s regime enacted a series of economic policies that effectively created second-class citizens. War widows and orphans, or those wounded on the Francoist side, received pensions or jobs, while their republican counterparts received nothing. The regime seized the property and assets of republican families, crushed unions, declared strikes to be acts of state sabotage, and purged ‘Leftist’ professions. These economic policies left most republican families in abject poverty. In a particularly cruel form of psychic violence, the regime also banned all death rituals, including any kind of public mourning for those who died on the republican side during the war and those executed during the immediate postwar era. Simple markers of respect for the dead, such as placing flowers on unmarked graves, had to be done secretly, for to do so publicly was to risk one’s life. During my time in Spain, I heard a story of a widow who, after having her life threatened for erecting a memorial that was destroyed multiple times by the local police, scattered seeds over what she thought was her husband’s grave. Every spring since, for more than 80 years, a flood of lilies sprouts up over the hillside. A beautiful, but silent, protest. After Franco’s death in 1975, the Spanish political elites decided, in the hope of maintaining political and economic stability, to pass what came to be known as ‘the pact of forgetting’. This agreement, made between the Right and the Left, asserted that the atrocities that had occurred during the Civil War and the Franco regime were to be forgiven and forgotten. This institutionalisation of sanitised silence preserved the status quo of victors and losers. Some victims’ families, like that of Ascensión’s, were able to finally place a headstone over the mass grave they assumed held their loved ones. But many more were left with nothing but fading pictures and deafening silence from their government. For almost 30 years, the Spanish population internalised the ‘pact of forgetting’. Then, in the new millennium, the forensics-based human rights movement reached Spain. The silence that had long kept away the past began to break down, and those who had been killed by Franco spoke once again.