On ENTR: Living with the ghosts of Spain’s dictatorship

Driving through the low, rugged mountains of the Spanish region of León, Javier Voces Vega, 28, points to the side of the road. “That’s where the mass grave is,” he says.

We’re in Priaranza del Bierzo, a small village in north-eastern Spain. A discreet stone plaque below a flowering rosemary bush is the only marker of the atrocities that occurred here in 1936.

“They came in trucks, stopped, made all the people get off, shot them and buried them in this grave. For 64 years they were here under the ground,” Javier says. The remains, uncovered in October 2000, belong to 13 civilians who defended the republican cause, and were killed for it by General Francisco Franco’s repression.

Javier was only four years old when his family brought him to witness the opening of the mass grave, the first to be exhumed in Spain. That moment marked him forever. Now he volunteers for the Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory, an organisation formed by the families of the victims of Francoism whose mission is to find and identify the remains of the disappeared of that time, and reunite them with their families.

The search for the disappeared

General Francisco Franco brutally rose to power in 1939 at the end of a bloody civil war that began on July 17, 1936, when he ignited a coup to remove the democratic government of the Second Spanish Republic. The dictatorial regime he imposed, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, lasted until his death in 1975.

The Spanish Civil War claimed many victims: probably more than half a million dead, combatants and civilians combined, and between 300,000 and 500,000 refugees. The ensuing repression, which lasted until the dictatorship’s end, is thought to have killed between 130,000 and 160,000 more people.

Passionate about history, Javier started to ask questions about his family’s past very early on. His great-great-uncle Fidel was one of the regime’s victims.

“He was one of the first people from his town to be arrested, then executed and thrown into a mass grave … He was very young, 36 years old. It was a huge personal wound for my grandmother’s family,” he says. To this day, the family does not know for certain where his remains are buried.

The Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory lists 4,444 mass graves across the country. In 2024, only 892 had been fully exhumed. The Association for the Restoration of Historical Memory alone has opened 150 graves and unearthed 1,400 remains.

The next generation’s fight for memory

Nearly 50 years after Franco’s death, historians still can’t rely on any register or precise data about the regime’s victims. 

The difficulty of quantifying and identifying victims makes the duty to remember the dead and pass on their legacy all the more vital. 

David Fernández de Arriba, 39, is also a member of the association where Javier volunteers. He teaches history at a high school in Barcelona. For him, the challenge is to pass on this piece of history to the next generation. 

In 2023, he set up an educational project to get his students more involved with the subject of Franco’s repression.

“I remember a case where we discovered that a great uncle of one of my students had been in a Nazi concentration camp, for example, and the student hadn’t known,” he says. “It is necessary for Spanish society, especially future generations, to be aware of this recent past.”

But for this, the teachers can’t count on institutional support.

“In education in Spain, it’s a subject that depends very much on the individual effort and will of teachers,” he says. “At an institutional level, there is a lack of commitment to this issue and to bringing memory into the classroom, and this shows in the curriculum.”

The generations who haven’t lived through the dictatorship themselves are the ones who have to keep alive the memory of the crimes committed during that time, David says.

“There needs to be commitment to avoid history repeating itself and above all, for young people to know where we come from, and understand the country we live in today, keeping in mind those roots, which are very recent in reality,” he says.

Click on the video to watch Javier and David’s full testimony.

France24