Stephen Phelan

TWO yellowed human skeletons lay close together in the freshly excavated grave. They looked awkwardly intimate, some bones crossed or gently touching – shin to thigh, arm to hip, rib to rib. Both bodies had been assigned numbers on plastic tags placed down beside them. The skull of Number One was turned almost face-up, a top row of dirt-dulled metal teeth still fixed into the mouth. This was very probably the head of Joaquín Sancho Margelí, whose family had requested his exhumation, and advised that he might be identified by his silver dentures.

Skeleton Two was likely to be Elías Mohino Berzosa, whose family also wanted him out of here. Neither set of kin had ever known for sure if these men were really buried where their killers said they were, almost 80 years ago. Even so, their descendents had long since dignified the plot with marble borders and nameplates. Back in 1947 it was unmarked – a mound of earth near the northeast wall in the cemetery of Caspe, a small provincial town on the plains of Zaragoza.

Now that mass grave was reopened, and it looked like Sancho and Berzosa were down there after all, though legal protocol required that DNA testing confirm the identities to a certainty. And so, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica) set about the delicate business of removing the remains, on this bright spring morning a few days after Easter in 2025.

Team members wore black jackets or hoodies with the acronym ARMH in bold white print on their backs. Most were unpaid volunteers with a marked professional affect, highly practiced as forensic and archaeological technicians. Working at a dig site cordoned off like a crime scene – which, to them, it was – they isolated and extracted each bone in turn, using blades and brushes from tupperware containers full of art supplies, kitchen utensils, and garden tools.

Around them, the sparrows in the cypresses were so loud as to sound almost aggressive. A constant industrial racket rose out of a colossal factory for animal feed that loomed high over the west wall. Across the graveyard, scattered crypts and tombstones were perforated here and there with bulletholes from the Spanish Civil War, or from shots fired in anger in the years that followed, targeting specific names among the epitaphs.

Down in the pit, a volunteer named David Ramírez López found a discharged pistol bullet among the remains. He held it in his fingers for the others to inspect. Impacting flesh or bone had flattened the soft lead to a squat, pluglike shape. Organic matter had since decomposed around it to make the resulting thing look fatty, or waxy, as if coated with candle grease.

Ramírez was specialised in identifying such artefacts from the civil war and the long ensuing dictatorship: the weaponry of the period, the various insignia of Falangist forces, the berets and badges worn by assorted Republican militias and anarchist groups. He had no personal experience of life under General Francisco Franco, who died three years before Ramírez was born. He had no formal training in the history of Franco’s regime either. “I’m self-taught,” he said.

“As a kid I never really thought about it, and they told us nothing about it at school.” But his home region, around Jaén in Andalucía, had seen severe cycles of violence and reprisal, and his grandmother used to tell stories from the postwar famine of her youth. “So, everything I know today comes from this passion I developed for finding out what happened.”

Ramírez now worked as an “environmental agent” in the wilds of Castile-La Mancha. “In other countries we’d be called ‘forest rangers’,” he said. For 17 the last years he had also given his free time to the ARMH, and taken unpaid leave where needed, running a metal detector over so many mass graves that he’d lost count at some point. The objective, as he defined it: “Helping families recover loved ones from oblivion.”

Since the association was founded in the year 2000, it had unearthed more than 150 of these sites, and catalogued the bodies found therein as “victims of Francoist repression”. Most were not killed in combat but in cold blood, whether during the civil war or decades after. Unknown numbers of executions were performed off the books, so to speak – deaths unregistered, burial sites unmapped. But Franco’s bureaucrats could also be quite proper with their paperwork.

In this case, the archives of the Third Territorial Military Tribunal of Barcelona recorded that Sancho, Mohino, and two other men were arrested as suspected members of the Guerrilla Group of Levante and Aragón (AGLA), popularly known as the Maquis, in the summer of 1947.
They were held and interrogated for weeks by the Civil Guard, which was then the regime’s paramilitary police force. In the pre-dawn hours of August 13, they attempted escape from a transport van along the rural highway between Alcañiz and Caspe, and all four were shot dead in a roadside ditch. Or, so attested the guardsmen. Their signed statement went into a file with autopsy reports filled out that morning in the morgue of Caspe cemetery.

Among the clinically explicit descriptions of organ rupture and exit wounds, pages relating to Sancho and Mohino noted they were each shot multiple times in the back. (Another incidental detail: Sancho was wearing “beach shoes”, and Mohino “rubber-soled sandals”.) The file included particulars of their summary burial, and that relative abundance of evidence had given ARMH researchers more to go on than the anecdotal whispers so common to these cases.

“Technically, it’s been a fairly straightforward intervention,” said Marco Antonio González, team leader and vice-president of the ARMH. There had been a little difficulty months before, when the regional authority of Aragón appeared to drag its heels in granting the necessary permits. The ARMH spoke to the press about that protracted wait for a reply, and the application was approved soon after. (The authority claimed the delay was a simple matter of due diligence.)

Spain’s provincial governments, or “autonomous communities” were generally compliant, said González, in part because these exhumations don’t cost them a single céntimo. The association had always been self-funded, relying on donations from within and without its own ranks. Card-carrying members and like-minded citizens formed a broad logistical support network, offering beds in their homes, free lifts to mass graves in remote parts of the country, and lunches for the crews. Today it was takeout sandwiches and cold beers from a nearby tapas bar, spread out on an ad hoc picnic table made from mausoleum door planks laid across two wheelbarrows. “It shouldn’t be like this,” said González, sitting on a tombstone.

“This is work the Spanish state should be doing. But it’s not, so here we are. All we do is contribute our hands, and our knowledge, to remove these bodies from the places decided by their murderers, so their children or grandchildren can choose where they should go.”

He would wish the same for his own great-grandfather, who was taken out and shot for communist affiliations in the early days of the war, and whose body was never recovered. His son, González’s grandfather, was thereby orphaned at age 11. “He couldn’t finish his education, because he had to work,” said González. “In my family we’ve always been workers. We’re proud of our class traditions. But in the end we are also the children of people murdered by fascists, and the effects are still dragging out, three and four generations after July 18th. [The date of Franco’s coup against the Second Spanish Republic in 1936 – the inciting event of the civil war.] Meanwhile, some other families still make a living off July 18th, when this country was looted.”

His fellow team members took much the same positions. They seemed to share a view of Spain’s fascist past and present democracy – the former as insidious, the latter as inadequate, and the so-called “transition” between them as incomplete. They did not spend their whole lunch break lamenting the fall of the Second Republic. There was also idle banter about who forgot the pistachios and so on. But even off-duty they came across as comrades and partisans of the old school, wielding their socialism like an antique bayonet that was still sharp yet.

They were cutting about the core party of the modern left, the PSOE, and the ever-shaky coalition rule of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. When prompted, they got stuck into the Catholic Church too. Pope Francis had died a couple of days earlier, on Easter Monday, and the latest scenes from Rome on TV that morning showed his open casket carried through crowds to St Peter’s. Talk of this subject developed into caustic remarks on the abiding power of the Church over Spanish education, healthcare, and finance.

Team members characterised the nationwide religious parades of Easter week as annual rituals of cultish manipulation, and shook their heads at Spain’s two relatively recent “Memory Laws” – drafted by socialist-led governments in 2007 and 2022 to recognize the victims of Francoist repression, and enshrine certain rights for their relatives – because neither had even mentioned the active role of the church in propping up a military dictatorship for 40 years.

There was also some talk of burial in general. Asked if this work made them think of their own graves, most of the team expressed an emphatic preference for cremation. Smoking a cigarette in the shade of a cypress tree, ARMH investigator Magdalena García said she was not spooked by death itself. “I’ve seen a lot of bodies, it’s normal.”

But she’d also been present at graves that released a kind of psychic shock when opened, like an outward rush of unsealed air. There was one that especially bothered her, where they found several bodies buried unusually deep, “maybe six metres”, including a young woman curled in a foetal position. Ballistic impressions all around her showed where many shots had been fired down into the pit. “Qué horror,” said García.

The research process brought her into regular contact with now-elderly relatives who were still tending direct, if sometimes indistinct, memories of the people and events in question. “You learn a lot about the resilience of human beings,” she said. “How much suffering they can bear, and for how long. Some become more comfortable talking about it, but some never do.”

For those concerned, an exhumation might relieve the pain or aggravate the wound. Team psychologist Raúl de la Fuente Gutiérrez helped families prepare for either eventuality as far as possible in advance. A warm, placid man with a monkish air, de la Fuente had first trained for this sort of work around mass graves in Guatemala circa 2000, and now routinely volunteered his services to the ARMH. “You want them to express, express, express,” he said.

“Whatever they’re feeling, especially the negative emotions. And if they can’t, you just try to calm them a little, help them past the fear or resistance. In the end, this is a meeting with a loved one who they haven’t seen for a long time.” De la Fuente had lately come to know the two daughters of Joaquín Sancho Margelí, who both greeted him with affection when they turned up.

Josefina and María Pilar Sancho were one and three years old, respectively, when their father was killed. Now elderly women of 78 and 81, they had come to see his mortal remains lifted out of the ground. María Pilar, the elder sister, walked slowly to the edge of the grave and stood there for no more than a minute, one hand clasped over her mouth and the other holding a handkerchief at her eyes. Josefina, the younger, seemed less upset and more engaged.

She moved among the team at ground level, effusive and inquisitive as they talked her through the process. Groups of bones from each body were now being transferred from buckets into clear plastic bags, which were then placed in cardboard boxes labelled with the name and number of the relevant skeleton. From here they would be taken for genetic testing at an affiliated laboratory on the University of León campus in Ponferrada.

Josefina told them that she didn’t need to wait for the results. When she looked into the pit and saw what was left in there – spine and cranium had not yet been removed – she opened her arms wide and almost wailed it: “I know that’s my father.”

The ARMH stepped back and gave her a moment to say or do whatever she felt compelled to. Josefina climbed down a little wooden ladder to the excavation. Treading carefully in her trainers, she leaned in close enough to run a finger along a bare vertebrae. Then she bent right over in the dirt, closed her eyes, whispered something, and kissed the skull.

This is not for my eyes, I was thinking. I had never seen anything like it – the rawest human tenderness pressed up against the void. I looked away, and took a walk around the graveyard. Near the centre was a tall granite cross to honour local men who fought and died for Franco. At the margins, by the west wall, a rust-red metal obelisk dedicated to foreign volunteers of the International Brigades, killed at the Battle of Caspe in March of 1938.

Here I will confess that I’m a long-lapsed Irish Catholic who leans left and tends to romanticise the Brigades on reflex. A family legend tells of my grandfather and his friends, still in their teens, stockpiling shotguns from their farms in County Waterford to go and fight in Spain; the plan was only foiled when they tried to smuggle their cache aboard a ferry in Rosslare.

I was proud of this story until I heard another version, in which my grandfather actually wanted to join Franco and kill communists. To be honest, this sounded more like the man as I knew him. He died in Spain only after getting old, fat, and tanned down in Estepona. My father retired to the Med coast too, and I followed them both as far as Madrid, where I’ve lived for a decade now.

In that time, I have often heard the civil war debated as a numbers game. Today’s left cannot deny atrocities committed in nominal defense of the Republic – the Paracuellos massacres and other wholesale butcherings of prisoners and priests, of unarmed civilians and of rebels shot mid-surrender – but any such admission usually comes with a qualifier about the right racking up a much higher body count. Conservatives claim the reverse, and I’ve met plenty who seem to believe that a full and frank accounting would show a bloodier ledger on the other side. But there has never been such an audit, and the bodies can’t be tallied with multitudes still missing.

As decisive victor of the war, Franco won a lifetime’s dictatorship in which to further prosecute or execute his enemies. Some of them are now said to moulder under the concrete pilings of the dams and motorways that changed the Spanish landscape from the mid to late 20th century. And no-one knows how many Republican corpses were transferred to the Valley of the Fallen, the monumental necropolis built to Franco’s orders on a mountain outside Madrid.

Estimates range from 5000 to 12,000, effectively bodysnatched from wherever they lay (invariably without permission or notification) to be reinterred alongside a larger cohort of casualties from his own Nationalist factions. Presented by the regime as a gesture of reconciliation, it read to the defeated as something like forcing dead soldiers to shake hands.

“There can be no reconciliation between fascist and anti-fascist,” said Emilio Silva, founder and president of the ARMH, when we spoke a few months after the Caspe exhumation. “It’s impossible, and this country’s transition to democracy was based on that great lie.”

We sat outside a cafe in Parque de Santa María, the northern suburb of Madrid where he’d lived for 40 years. Pointing to the high-rises overhead, Silva said this whole neighbourhood was built by Franco’s good friend José Banús. He listed other major construction contracts, seats on the board of national energy suppliers, and senior government positions awarded to the Generali’s former allies and officials long after his death in 1975, and well into the present democratic era.

Franco himself was only removed from his grand Catholic-Pharaonic tomb in the Valley of the Fallen as recently as 2019, and reburied in a family plot at El Pardo, albeit at public expense.

“Another insult to the victims who are still in ditches,” said Silva. His own grandfather and namesake had been one of them. Emilio Silva Faba was a store-owner, electoral organizer, and avowed Republican in the province of León. Arrested by the Falange for his politics early in the civil war, he was driven to the edge of a field and executed with a dozen others on the night of October 16, 1936. They were buried where they fell, beneath an overgrown walnut tree, from which dread folk tales dispersed like seeds across surrounding farms.

Two generations later, in March 2000, Emilio the grandson – then working as a journalist – pieced the story together by tracing the coldest possible trail of scant archival information and half-remembered ancestral hearsay back to that spot. There he found the remains of his long-lost grandfather, just outside the village of Priaranza del Bierzo. It took six months to arrange an exhumation, and longer to confirm the identity by DNA testing, by which time Silva had written about it as the first such case in Spain.

Many readers responded with stories of their own missing persons, and the ARMH came to exist because Silva felt obliged to help repeat, improve, and formalise the process of recovering those he called desaparecidos, or “the disappeared”.

“That word was important in creating the association,” he said. Habitually used as a collective noun for those made to vanish by exterminating tactics of junta rule in Chile or Argentina, the term sounded shocking to many in the context of postcolonial Spain. “We had progressive historians telling us, ‘no no no, desaparecidos is for Latin America’. But how is it different? My grandfather was illegally detained, tortured, and killed, and his body was hidden. For me, it’s the same whether it happened in Buenos Aires, Santiago, or Manila.”

Silva noted too that Spanish jurisprudence and forensic expertise had been brought to bear on human rights abuses in Chile without ever being so deployed at home. In the early days of the ARMH, a judge in León contended that to dig up the dead of the Franco era was to breach the Amnesty Law, which had, for practical purposes, forgiven all acts of political violence committed before its signing in October 1977. (Spain’s present democratic constitution was signed into effect the following year.) “I learned that the Amnesty Law was for the perpetrators,” said Silva.

Which is to say, the winners. And while the Memory Laws since enacted by Spain’s mainstream political left would seem to further legitimise the ARMH by offering support for Republican exhumations, Silva dismissed all this as so much tokenistic box-ticking and electoral calculus.

“There is still no public office for people to go and ask for help finding their loved ones. So we are that office, completely independent, treating them with dignity and empathy. For me, for all of us I think, the human feeling comes before the politics. These people were the losers in the war, the losers in the dictatorship, the losers in democracy. And I’m including my own family.”

Back in Caspe cemetery, months earlier, I helped to refill the pit with dirt once the bodies were extracted. While thanking the team members, the younger daughter of Joaquín Sancho Margelí gripped my right arm with both hands and burned through her life story in about 15 minutes.

Growing up without her father, Josefina had no clear memories of him and inherited none from her mother, who couldn’t talk about her husband, and never remarried. The guerilla group he was said to belong to had killed people, she knew, and she didn’t dispute or defend it.

“Everyone told us he wasn’t guilty of anything, he was just a driver and they caught him by mistake, but I don’t know. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, he paid with his life.” When she said he was a saint, she meant as a totemic figure that she had prayed to in convent school, and later at the tombstone that her mother somehow paid for, above the mass grave that he might not even be in. Josefina and her sister lived close by, in Alcañiz, and she’d sometimes take her husband’s car to come here on a sudden obsessive whim.

“I’ve had such horrible depressions,” she said. “Like dying, or worse.” She gestured around her to the ARMH volunteers. “I’m so grateful, I’ll never forget it. They’re probably thinking, ‘this little girl, she’s finally seen her father and she can’t cry’. But today I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it.” Her mother died more than two decades ago, and was buried in Alcañiz.

“Her dream, and my dream, was for my father to come lie beside her. Now it’s going to happen, and it will be the best day of my life. It will be a party. And then I can die happy.” In July of 2025, the lab confirmed that Skeleton One was Joaquín Sancho Margelí. His funeral, and reburial, is scheduled for October.