When Diego González became ill and had very advanced dementia, he stopped remembering all his loved ones, but there was one story that still echoed in his head and that he continued to verbalize: that of his brother Braulio. Diego was only eleven years old when he and his brothers saw how the dawn brigades came to search his house on Christmas Eve in search of his father, Francisco González. They thought that this union member, who was then hiding in a cave in San José del Álamo, would return home around Christmas 1936 and they could arrest him. They didn’t find him, but they spread terror in his home.
Braulio’s nephew, whose name is Francisco González like his grandfather, reminds this editorial team that this story caused a lot of pain and a lot of impact in his family. He points out that they have always told him that the Falangists arrived around 9:30 p.m., that they first shot the dog that was at the door and then entered the house, turning it “upside down.” They searched everything and a Falangist tripped over Braulio’s crib, which was hanging from the ceiling to prevent rats from entering. Then, he states that the child began to cry and that there was a moment of tension in which the Falangist took him out of the crib and hit him against the wall.
Braulio did not die at that time. The little boy’s mother, Lola, and his aunt Rosa, took him to a doctor in the Guanarteme neighborhood, where there was a doctor who treated poor people since they could not take him to a hospital since it was a Franco attack. The doctor told them that there was nothing that could be done for him, that he would not resist the damage to his brain and that they should shelter him. They returned home and the baby died in his crib the next morning.
Francisco González points out that the news soon spread and generated commotion in the Tamaraceite neighborhood. Shortly after finding out, his grandfather, the unionist Francisco González, surrendered and was later shot along with the then mayor of the then municipality of San Lorenzo, Juan Santana Vega and with Antonio Ramírez Graña, municipal secretary; Manuel Hernández Toledo, police chief, and unionist Matías López Morales: “the San Lorenzo five.”
“They threw my brother away and turned him into dust,” Diego González said in a 2010 documentary about the Shots from San Lorenzo. In 2018 he died without being able to fulfill his dream of recovering his father’s mortal remains, as he told this editorial office several times.
After the child had died, Lola looked for a priest to give him a blessing and burial. But the doors were closed since no one wanted to have anything to do with a crime that was known to have been committed by the Francoists. Finally, they told him about a small cemetery, that of San Lorenzo. “The funeral was the next day. My grandmother, my aunt Rosa, and the brothers walked along the Camino de San Lorenzo. But no one from Tamaraceite came to the funeral: there was a lot of fear,” highlights Francisco González.
“The murder was a decisive event, not only in my family, but in Tamaraceite. Because at that time Tamaraceite did not have more than two thousand inhabitants. So, it was a very strong story and it was also hidden from minute one,” says Francisco González. In this neighborhood, not only were there people shot, but there are also missing people, like the 14 carnations.
“But the fact that he murdered a baby, the way he was murdered, had a lot of repercussions. And there are many older people that I interviewed. I got to interview them at the time, in the nineties, eighties, 2000, who remembered, and there are still people who remember the topic. What happens is that it is a topic that was very silenced. Because of the magnitude of the death of a child,” says Francisco González.
The family does not have the baby’s birth certificate, because they explain that back then it was common for children to be registered earlier in the registry due to the high infant mortality rate.
An association named after the child
Now, 88 years after the crime, a group of young and committed people have created the Niño Braulio associationwhich already appears in the registry of associations by the Historical Memory of the Canary Islands. This is an initiative that does not come from Braulio’s family but that he has welcomed with great pride. Alejandro Ferrer Alfonso, president of the association, points out that the idea started in 2023 and that since then they have been working on the procedures to formalize the association.
“We have several fronts, among them, for example, the issue of the Vegueta grave, to try to get the matter taken up again, because relatives, Paco González, for example, is one of them, were not satisfied with what was done” , recalls Alejandro Ferrer. For this reason, he points out that they have requested the report that concluded that it was not viable to exhume the grave and that they will fight for the issue to be taken up again and a new “tasting carried out in conditions to be able to see how many remains are left there and identify.”
He explains that they decided to give this name to the association because “it is one of the most significant cases, not only of Franco’s repression in the Canary Islands, but also of non-reparation, understanding reparation as a minimum of dignity for the victim. To this day, the family has an idea of where the child may be, but it is not even known which grave is where Braulio’s remains are in the San Lorenzo cemetery.” “Now we are moving pieces to try to see if the parish can help us locate Braulio’s grave and from there, carry out the necessary procedures to find out if there are remains that can help identify him,” he says.
“Our association was born with the firm purpose of working tirelessly to recover the memory of those murdered and retaliated against during the military coup d’état and the subsequent fascist dictatorship, as well as due compensation and respect for their families. Through our research, publications, exhibitions, commemorative events and works of all kinds possible, we have the objective of making visible the atrocities committed during the Franco era and promoting dialogue and reflection on the events, seeking to create awareness, desire and commitment to justice and democratic values, as well as making it difficult for such crimes to happen again in the future, given the worrying whitewashing and glorification of such a nefarious ideology that we are experiencing worldwide in in recent years,” the association expresses in its cover letter.
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