Forgotten Franco victims to be memorialised four decades after dictator’s death

More than four decades after the death of Francisco Franco, the Madrid city government has documented almost 3,000 people executed in the early days of the dictatorship, whose names will be engraved on a memorial to be inaugurated this year.

The comprehensive study lists 2,934 people condemned to death by the Franco regime between 1939 and 1944, as it tried to entrench its power following the Spanish Civil War.

They will now be memorialised at the cemetery of La Almudena, where almost all were executed by firing squad following military show trials.

The list includes local mayors, officials, political leaders and activists, as well as the Thirteen Roses, a group of young women belonging to the Communist Party or the Unified Socialist Youth, executed against the cemetery wall on the morning of August 5, 1939.

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Many such cases had already been documented by historians but the new list identifies hundreds of previously unknown, or unnamed, victims.

Mauricio Valiente, third deputy of the Madrid mayor, said their memorial would be “a show of this recognition, of reparation, and a right to the truth that not only all the victims have, but all the people of Madrid”.

Fernando Hernández Holgado, a historian from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid who worked on the study, lamented that the victims of Franco’s repression in the city had been “forgotten for such a long time”.

“Almost 80 years have passed since these executions took place in Madrid, almost 80 years, and 40 years of those have been democracy,” he said at the launch of the report.

The initiative by the Left-wing administration of Manuela Carmena is at odds with the policy of the national government, which has resisted efforts to address the crimes of the Franco era.

After Franco’s death in 1975, the so-called Pact of Forgetting smothered any investigation of the past. In 2007, the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero passed the Historical Memory Law, which included a state effort to exhume and identify the estimated 115,000 missing victims of the Civil War and dictatorship, believed to be buried in around 2,500 mass graves across Spain.

But Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy defunded the programme in 2012, leaving any such initiatives in the hands of local governments, NGOs or private individuals.

Mr Valiente said the Madrid administration’s aim was to finally bring restitution for the “forgotten victims”. “It is a debt that had to be paid, the right to the truth and to reparation,” he added.

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