After 16 months of wrangling over Franco’s exhumation, the ceremonies of departure were performed with a dignity not accorded to the 100,000 victims of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war who still lie in unmarked graves. It contains almost 34,000 corpses, including thousands of Franco’s republican victims, interred there en masse without permission and inaccessible to relatives. The country remained neutral during the great conflagration and, under Franco’s long dictatorship, the losing side in its own vicious civil war was obliged to remain silent in order to survive. The Historical Memory Law was passed in 2007, enabling assistance to be offered to surviving victims of Franco’s dictatorship and their families. Spain’s deputy prime minister, Carmen Calvo, has pledged that the work to recover and identify the bodies of Franco’s victims will go on.

Source: The Guardian October 25, 2019 17:26 UTC