In April, 1939, Franco formally initiated his dictatorship in Spain. It lasted until his death, in 1975. More than four hundred thousand Spaniards spent time in concentration camps between 1939 and 1947. And over the next three decades, Spaniards continued to be persecuted for political reasons; thousands were executed by firing squad and garrotte. Half a million fled the country.
Several hundreds of Spaniards were shot point-blank in open roads and streets across Spain, which then also became their gravesites. For example, one of Spain’s most influential poets, Federico García Lorca, was shot with three other people and all four of them were buried there together, secretly and hastily. Without plaques identifying it, there was no sign that anything dramatic or historic had ever occurred here.
In the event of Franco's death, Spain began its tentative restoration to democracy. In 1977, Spain’s parliament passed an amnesty law that sealed the past in what became known as the pacto de olvido, or pact of oblivion. That’s how things stood until a decade ago, when “historical memory” groups, formed by the descendants of murdered Republicans, Communists, and anarchists, began to dig up some of their bodies.
In 2007 Spain’s parliament approved a Law of Historical Memory, which among other things, required the state to support the exhumation of thousands of mass graves.
There has been divergence of opinion in the descendants of the people buried in these graves: while some want their family members’ remains to be exhumed and restored to proper burial sites, others don't want to disturb their heads’ remains.
Here’s a conversation between the New Yorker reporter Anderson and one of Lorca’s descendants:
“But why,” I insisted, “leave him in the ditch where his killers dumped him?”
“What ditch?” Laura retorted. “It’s a sacred place. They’re all in good company there.”