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Juan Chueca Sagarra was buried for the third time late on Wednesday afternoon, his tiny coffin, topped with a single white rose, stowed in a crypt in his home town of Magallón, which sits among vineyards and wind turbines under the huge, low skies of Aragón.
His homecoming was as overdue as his murder was savage, and his afterlife has been peripatetic. The farm worker, trade unionist and father of five was 42 when he and five other men were shot dead by Francoists in the cemetery in the neighbouring town of Borja in August 1936.
The general’s coup against the Republican government had triggered the Spanish civil war a month earlier, unleashing a wave of terror against its ideological opponents, among them union activists and teachers. The six bodies were tossed into a mass grave, where they would lie for almost a quarter of a century.
In April 1959, the remains of Chueca and 16 other murdered men from Magallón and the surrounding area were removed from the pit in Borja – without the knowledge or permission of their families – and packed into two large crates. Boxes 2,034 and 2,035 were then taken to the mountains outside Madrid and buried in the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, the monument to Francoism and its creed of National Catholicism where the dictator himself was buried from 1975 to 2019.
Spain’s largest mass grave holds the remains of some 33,800 people from both the Nationalist and Republican sides, their bones crammed together under the basilica’s gargantuan cross in a hollow attempt at postwar reconciliation. Only the Nationalist dead were labelled with names and surnames; the remainder, like Chueca and his companions, arrived in the valley in anonymous crates inscribed with nothing but the number of bodies they held and name of the town from whose mass grave they had been taken.
Chueca’s belated return, 89 years after his first burial and 66 after his second, followed a long campaign by the Association for the Relatives and Friends of Those Murdered and Buried in Magallón (AFAAEM). It also came almost three years after Spain’s socialist-led government passed a Democratic Memory law intended to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to Franco’s victims and to address the lingering and still poisonous legacy of the war and the dictatorship.
To date, 160 requests have been made for the return of remains from the site – now known as the Valley of Cuelgamuros – and 29 sets of bones have been recovered and handed over. Fifteen of the 29 bodies have been positively identified using archive information, family statements and DNA tests.
Wednesday’s solemn ceremony, which took place in a ruined 14th-century church in Magallón, was the largest handover of Cuelgamuros remains so far. The bones of the 17 people who were taken from Borja to Cuelgamuros were formally returned by Ángel Victor Torres, Spain’s minister for Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, and by Fernando Martínez, the secretary of state for Democratic Memory.
Four of those 17 have been identified. As well as Chueca, names have been put to the bones of Esteban Jiménez Ezpeleta and Felipe Gil Gascón, who were also from Magallón, and to those of Pedro Peralta Gil, who was from nearby Añon de Moncayo.
As the ceremony began, Magallón’s mayor, Esteban Lagota – the grandson of Esteban Jiménez Ezpeleta – was at pains to stress that the event was not about partisan politics, or blame, or revenge.
“The return of a person’s remains to their family and to their home town is a small act of reparation that anyone can understand,” he told the 300 or so people who had packed the skeleton of the church. “I would not like this to be used to divide society still further, nor to bring confrontations between different groups. Some essential, universal human values define us as people – and these values are above any political interest.”
Such interests, however, are inescapable – even nine decades after a civil war that left 500,000 people dead.
Last year, the conservative People’s party (PP) and the far-right Vox party, which both opposed the Democratic Memory law, announced plans to replace it with so-called “harmony laws” in three regions where they then governed in coalition, including Aragón. The move led three UN experts to warn that the law proposed in Aragón could thwart public historical memory projects and paper over the atrocities committed during the Franco dictatorship because it made no mention or explicit criticism of the regime’s dictatorial nature.
Other political interests are more personal. Shortly before the Magallón ceremony began, a local man made his own politics clear by quietly taping the red, yellow and purple tricolor flag of the Second Republic to the balustrade of the church’s choir.
The ever-restless ghosts of the past were stirred to life once more in January after the government announced that it would use the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death – which falls in November this year – as an opportunity to celebrate Spain’s rebirth as a vibrant, tolerant and progressive democracy. The initiative has not gone down well with the opposition.
The PP, which proudly boasted of cutting Spain’s historical memory budget to zero when it was last in office, is shunning the celebrations. Vox, meanwhile, has refused to participate in what it called an “absurd necrophilia that divides Spaniards”. Critics of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, have also suggested that the anniversary plans were concocted to distract from the corruption allegations his administration faces.
But as he addressed the audience on Wednesday, Torres said the “50 years of freedom” initiative had one simple objective: “To celebrate democracy and not to let anyone snatch it away from us or try to rewrite history.”
Before the minister spoke, Francisco Etxeberria, the renowned forensic anthropologist leading the Cuelgamuros team, had made an eloquent defence of the need to keep bringing up the bodies and, with them, the buried truths of the past. He brandished an old pencil to make his point.
“This pencil has an extraordinary symbolism,” he said. “It’s not a piece of DNA or a document from an archive. It’s a pencil found among the belongings of those 17 people. This pencil compels us to keep writing this story … Why do we do this? We do this to consolidate our democratic values and to strengthen our defence of human rights. Who doesn’t get that?”
An hour later, the crowd moved to the cemetery on the outskirts of Magallón. There, amid red and white roses and the odd, pointedly red-yellow-and-purple floral arrangement, the 17 sets of remains were reinterred.
Ezpeleta, murdered at age 31, was laid to rest in the same tomb as his wife, Emilia, who died in 1976. The inscription beneath their photographs – which show Emilia as an old woman and Esteban a young man – reads: “They cut short your life but your memory is ever present.”
A few metres away, Pilar Chueca, 49, watched her grandfather’s coffin as it was carried down into the crypt built by the AFAAEM, which has worked tirelessly to reunite the dead with their descendants.
Chueca’s father, Enrique, was four when he caught a final glimpse of his father being bundled into the back of the truck bound for Borja. “My father said that his mother, Eulalia, suffered a lot as a widow with five children,” said Chueca. “It wasn’t just the way his father was killed.” To make an example of his widow, the Francoists shaved her head, made her drink castor oil – employed for its humiliating laxative effects – and paraded her through town.
After her husband’s murder, Eulalia and the children fled to Zaragoza, where she supported the family by working as a servant and taking in washing.
“They never went back to Magallón because of all the bad memories of that place,” said Chueca. Enrique died in June last year at 92, not long after giving the DNA sample that would identify his father’s bones.
As the afternoon light began to fade and the crowds drifted away, Pilar Gimeno, the president of the AFAAEM, walked over to the niche where the remains of her uncle, Felipe Gil Gascón, had just been placed alongside those of his mother, Inocenta. Gimeno hopes that tests will soon identify the bones of Felipe’s murdered father, Conrado, so that he can join his wife and son.
The veteran campaigner said the aim of the ceremony and the reburials was to give the victims back their long-denied dignity, to close the generational “circles of pain” and to tell the truth about what happened – and about what could happen again.
“The proof of what happened is in the bones and in the bullet holes in those bones,” said Gimeno. “Who can deny the truth of that?” If you have the truth, she added, perhaps you can stop these things from happening again.
“That’s the danger right now,” she said. “It’s all getting very close again. That hatred is so great.”
