61 Spanish Civil War mass graves found in old hospital
Battle of the Ebre soldiers unearthed as 20,000 soldiers of conflict still remain in unknown burial places
mass graves
Josep's uncle returns from the war after more than 80 years
In a simple ceremony, Sabatés family receive the remains of a relative killed in the Civil War, thanks to government's genetic identification program
Government to dig up six more Civil War era mass graves
Located in Lleida and Tarragona provinces, they will be excavated by September of this year
Spain’s takeover of Catalonia casts uncertainty on exhumation of Civil War mass graves
The creator of a DNA bank to find the disappeared said that even the possibility of historical memory policies being in danger is “an attack on democracy”
First Civil War mass grave exhumed in Catalan government initiative
17 bodies found in common burial in Pyrenees to be genetically analyzed and identified
Spain’s ‘systematic’ failure to address historical memory denounced at EU-Parliament
On the 80th anniversary of the Guernica Bombing, Spain’s denial of historical justice or reparation of its civil war victims was the focus of a conference at the European Parliament. NGO’s, relatives of Spanish Civil War victims and the Francoist dictatorship, and MEPs called on the European Parliament to help promote “truth, justice, and reparation”. Roger Heredia, co-founder of the DNA bank for civil war victim identification in Catalonia said that “the Spanish State systematically violates human rights” and insisted on the necessity of raising awareness among the European MPs about how Spain ignores reports from both the Human Rights Council and the UN-Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
Catalonia begins DNA testing to identify Spanish Civil War victims
80 years after the Spanish Civil War broke out, there are still 4,912 missing victims and more than 5,000 families continue to search for their relatives. The Hospital Vall d'Hebron in Barcelona has started to perform genetic tests on relatives of the missing in order to identify remains buried in mass graves. In the past two weeks, specialists have taken samples of the saliva of 80 elderly people in Barcelona. Most of them are siblings or children of the victims of the Franco regime. Isabel Domènech, a 79 year-old resident of Santa Coloma de Gramenet (a municipality near Barcelona), was two years old when her father died at the end of the Civil War. She has been looking for him for many years and claims her right to know where his remains rest: “it is the minimum we ask for”. The DNA profiling programme announced by the Catalan Government last September has requested more than 1,100 people to do these tests throughout the four Catalan provinces. The genetic profiles obtained will be cross-referenced with samples from the remains found and those which are still yet to be found in mass graves.
Organisations claim to open mass graves to identify 4,700 missing, 80 years after Spanish Civil War
The location and identity of 4,700 disappeared during Spanish Civil War remains unknown, 80 years after the conflict broke out. In order to recover historic memory and prevent these facts and its consequences from being forgotten or neglected, many organisations have claimed to reopen mass graves and cancel the martial courts applied to many citizens who were against Franco's dictatorship. "Spain continues to be the second country in the world, after Cambodia, with the higher number of people who underwent enforced disappearance and whose mortal remains have never been recovered nor identified", stated ‘Judges for Democracy' spokeswoman, Begoña López.