Exhumation may let a poet's bones speak

By Giles Tremlett, The Guardian, Saturday 6 September 2003

Is a pit near Granada the resting place of the writer Federico Garcia Lorca and other Franco victims? Tests should soon give an answer

One of the mysteries of the Spanish civil war may soon be solved by the excavation of the communal grave in which the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is believed to have been thrown after his execution by one of Franco's death squads in August 1936.

Considered by many the greatest poet and playwright of 20th-century Spain, the author of Blood Wedding and Poet in New York was killed by members of the Escuadra Negra (Black Squadron) for his left-wing sympathies and homosexuality.

His family have always resisted the disturbance of the grave as too painful, but the families of the other victims thought to lie there have come together to organise their exhumation.

The grave at Viznar, near the southern city of Granada, was found by a historian, Ian Gibson, 30 years ago. He was guided by a man who at 16 had been forced to dig it by those who took Lorca from a police cell in Granada and shot him.

“I have heard oral testimony of what happened, but I think it is essential to find the body, out of respect for Garcia Lorca,” Mr Gibson said yesterday.

The gravedigger also remembered burying a one-legged man, believed to be a local schoolteacher, Dioscoro Galindo. Two bullfighters, members of an anarchist trade union, are also said to buried there.

The grandchildren of Galindo and of Francisco Galadi, one of the bullfighters, have petitioned the council for permission to exhume the bodies. The Socialist mayor, Juan Caballero, says he will grant it, despite the controversy in digging up civil war graves. “There is still fear here. The ghosts of that war are still about,” he said.

Nieves Galindo, a granddaughter of Dioscoro, told the newspaper El Pais yesterday: “My father was 27 when they took my grandfather. He tried to save him and paid for that with prison. They ruined my father's life. He was going to become a doctor, but had to be a bricklayer. He always wanted to dig up the grave and give my grandfather a proper burial.”

Up to 30,000 people were killed by the death squads and official executioners during and after the civil war. Many, like Lorca, are believed to be in anonymous graves scattered around the countryside.

But a movement has grown up in recent years to find and dig up the graves so that the victims can be identified and buried properly. More than 200 bodies have been exhumed in the past three years.

“Nobody was interested in things like this before. We have to make the most of the moment,” a spokesman for the Galadi family said.

Mr Gibson said that an exhumation would help to show whether Lorca was tortured before he was killed. “I think they beat him badly before killing him. You can just imagine the visceral hatred that these people felt towards homosexuals and ‘reds'.”

DNA tests and morphological examinations of the bones could prove whether Lorca is, as most people believe, buried at Viznar.

Emilio Silva, a spokesman for the national association dedicated to exhuming the victims of Franco's execution squads, said he was sure the exhumation would go ahead. “I think even Garcia Lorca's family will end up joining in,” he said. “It will be a symbolic moment, but we must not forget that Spain is full of victims like this, full of Lorcas.”