All those who are not Lorca
A few months ago, through the help of an archaeology student and thanks to the kindness of Professor Francisco Carrión and his team from the University of Granada, I had the opportunity to visit the excavation and exhumation of Civil War graves being carried out in the Víznar ravine in Granada. The site is famous because it was somewhere in this still-undiscovered area that the poet Federico García Lorca was murdered on August 18 or 19, 1936.
When you arrive at this place of memory, a pine forest that hides the horror of the graves beneath its beauty, you find a monolith with the inscription "Lorca was all of them", installed on August 18, 2002. Someone always leaves flowers. Nearby, there are other stone pedestals on which commemorative plaques have been placed in honor of people known to have been executed at this site. Some of these have been able to be closed, and those that have been recovered and identified years later, a history of repression, torture, and death. This year marked the fifth campaign of the project.
"Lorca was everyone", reads the inscription on the monolith, but the truth is that the poet's remains remain hidden to this day. They may be close to the monolith or quite far away, because the fascists, who killed some 300 people in this spot in the first year of the war, buried their victims in any way and place. Tree roots and landslides could make it impossible to recover all the bodies.
But for now, the work continues. It's possible that the search for García Lorca has saved this project from the right-wing governments' crusade against democratic memory."Lorca was all", proclaims the inscription on the monolith, but if it weren't for Lorca, it's very likely that those who aren't Lorca and who still remain underground wouldn't have had the opportunity to be exhumed and returned to their families. Since the right-wing government in Andalusia has taken over with the support of the far right, the regional budget for memorial projects has been drastically cut.
The same archaeologist who invited us to Víznar is now working, under the same director, at the La Soledad Cemetery in Huelva, on a project that the State Secretariat for Democratic Memory has commissioned from the University of Granada. In this case, there is no support from the Regional Government of Andalusia, despite the fact that it is estimated that more than 1,400 victims of Franco's repression between 1936 and 1944 are buried there. The archaeologist tells me, with a heavy heart, that the other day they exhumed the body of a vest. He was still wearing his shoes. His ruptured skull showed that he had been shot in the head. The next day, the project workers held a moment of silence around the empty grave and laid flowers. A few days later, they finished exhuming another grave in the same cemetery with thirty bodies. The following morning, before starting the workday, they also laid flowers in tribute to these unknown individuals. The archaeologist tells me that every time they've just emptied a pit, they make this gesture of respect. It moves me to know.
The archaeologist recalls the remains of a woman found in a Víznar pit: beneath the abdominal bones were a thimble and a pair of scissors. She could have been a seamstress, or a housewife kidnapped while mending socks, who knows. Like the boy from Huelva, this is the abundant profile of the victims of the storm of fire, blood, and hatred unleashed by the fascists in the summer of 1936: ordinary, anonymous people, perhaps neighbors of their executioners. And it's when you learn details like these that you realize that doing away with democratic memory policies, and especially the campaigns to exhume and recover the bodies of disappeared victims, which deprive their families of the right to a decent burial and preserve their memory, isn't a simple change of political priorities; it's an act of repudiation of policies, it's an act of repudiation.
"Lorca was everyone", says the monolith, but all those who are not Lorca wait, in the dark silence of ninety years of oblivion, for someone to take pity on them.
