The discovery of mass graves is reviving memories of Spain's Civil War, writes Paddy Woodworth
Emilio Silva's grandfather saw nothing very sinister in a summons to go to his local town hall on the evening of October 16th, 1936.
Gen Francisco Franco's rebel troops had recently taken over his village, Villafranca de Bierzo in the northern Spanish province of Leon. He thought that the new authorities probably wanted to requisition some provisions from his shop. He felt confident enough to bring his eight-year-old son, Emilio's father, with him.
"Go home," the guards told the little boy when they arrived, "your father is under arrest." The next morning his mother went to the town hall, bringing some breakfast for her husband. "He is not here," she was told, "he escaped through a window." No one in his family ever saw him again, until Emilio Silva found his bones in a ditch last year, with the remains of 12 other men.
"I never heard my grandmother mention him," he says. "We felt his absence, but in my family only my parents talked about him. His name used to pop into conversations, as if by magic, and silence would fall."
Breaking that silence, at a national as well as a personal level, has become a vocation for Silva, a journalist who had previously worked on a celebrity gossip magazine. He has established that his grandfather was taken from the town hall that night in a truck with 14 other prisoners. They were driven 30 km to a wood on the outskirts of the village of Priaranza. Four pistoleros took positions around a car behind the truck, headlamps focused on the tailgate.
As the prisoners scrambled out, two of them ran towards the woods. One was shot, but the other escaped. He survived long enough to tell the story of how he had watched his comrades being shot in the head and hastily tumbled into a mass grave.
Silva's grandfather (also called Emilio) had been killed for being a local activist in a moderate democratic party, the Republican Left, and campaigning for secular education. One family succeeded in bribing the Francoists to return a body. The others lay unrecognised and were mourned in fear and in secret. It was only after Franco died in 1975 that someone dared to begin leaving anonymous bunches of flowers on the ditch on the anniversary of the killing.
Emilio Silva was 10 years old then, and so is part of a generation which has no adult experience either of Franco's 40-year dictatorship or of the much-praised Spanish transition to democracy.
The price of that relatively peaceful negotiation between democrats and former fascists was national amnesia, a pact of silence about the horrors of the civil war. There were legitimate fears that digging up the past, figuratively or literally, could lead to the unthinkable prospect of reliving it.
If the sons were afraid of repeating the sins of their fathers, however, Silva believes the grandchildren have a right, and a duty, to give the dead a decent burial, and recognise their deaths as the ultimate sacrifice for democracy.
The civil war exacted a grim toll in human life on both sides. But, as Silva points out, the victorious Francoists were, in most cases, able to find and bury their dead, and were given state subventions to do so. In contrast, the victims of Franco's repression lie in unmarked ditches in many parts of Spain.
This month, Silva's Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory has opened another grave in Piedrafita de Babia, in the same district as Priaranza, and found 14 more skeletons. Most of the skulls have two holes in them, a method of execution uncannily reminiscent of shootings today by the Basque terrorists of ETA, though ETA has never had the opportunity to carry out killings on this scale. Silva believes that there are hundreds more unmarked graves to be excavated, containing anything between 3.000 and 30,000 victims in total.
Silva's association is a voluntary one, borrowing expertise from local historians, archaeologists and forensic specialists. It has made a breakthrough in securing the assistance of the Phoenix programme, an advanced DNA research unit attached to the Guardia Civil. Ironically, this force was closely linked to repression throughout the Franco period.
Other state agencies have been less forthcoming, however, and most of the political parties are positively bashful on the issue. He is as almost as scathing on this score about the traditional left as he is about the centre-right Partido Popular, currently in government, some of whose leaders are children of prominent Francoists.
"The Socialist Party had an absolute majority in the 1980s, and democracy was consolidated. They owed it to their own dead to do what we are doing now, at a time when many more relatives were alive."
The UN has ruled that there is no statute of limitations on forced "disappearances", and this has led to successful prosecutions of military authorities in Latin America. However, Silva says that he does not "want to see old men go to prison. We are working to heal wounds, not reopen them." But he stresses that his association's work is a critique of the transition to democracy.
"The Spanish victims disappeared twice," he says. "First when they were taken away, and then again since the 1970s. Next month, he will ask the UN Commission on Forced Disappearances to request the Spanish government to fund a full investigation Spain's hidden graves. There is no doubt that this will be deeply embarrassing for the Partido Popular, which is so sensitive about the past that it has refused to endorse parliamentary motions condemning the Franco regime. The vista of the Spanish countryside yielding up the bones of thousands of victims of right-wing terror may seem appalling to conservatives, and may also make comfortable left-wing politicians decidedly nervous. However, Silva's association has now gathered critical mass and powerful momentum.
Paul Preston, the eminent English historian of the Franco period, believes this new movement is a healthy and fully justified one. "It is crucial that the truth comes out while the relatives are still living," he told The Irish Times yesterday.
"I might have advised caution in the 1970s, but people have an absolute right to mourn and bury their dead, and I have massive confidence in the stability of Spanish democracy today." Nevertheless, the coming months and years are likely to be very testing ones, as small villages try to come to terms with secrets that have been buried for nearly 70 years.