Franco’s Disappeared

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Untreated Memories: Franco’s Disappeared

Some 114,000 Spaniards lay in unmarked mass graves strewn all over the Iberian Peninsula. Only Cambodia has more densely populated killing fields. These are not men and women killed at the front during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39); they are victims of systematic extrajudicial assassinations carried out by Francoist forces during and after that conflagration. Emilio Silva Faba was just one of these tens of thousands of civilians who were routinely rounded up, murdered, and thrown into unmarked ditches. The Silva family—Emilio’s widow, and their six children—like thousands of other families, never knew the precise location of Emilio’s remains, nor did they dare inquire during the four decades of dictatorship. Some 60 years would have to pass before Emilio Silva’s grandson and namesake would decide to take matters into his own hands. Read on ...

One of the mass graves discovered in an excavation from July–August of 2014 at Estépar (Burgos). The grave contains twenty-six republicans who were killed by nationalists in August-September 1936. Photo Mario Modesto Mata. CC BY-SA 4.0.