Carolina Martínez was a nervousness difficult to control when she thought on the morning of Thursday, February 20: she was going to become the first relative of a victim of forced disappearance during Franco in testifying before a Spanish court. However, a few hours before taking a statement, the head of the Court of Instruction number 5 of Paterna told her the suspension of the same. “I didn’t expect it. You stop, you don’t know how to react, because you don’t expect a few hours before they tell you no. I feel they are playing with me, who are playing with my feelings and those of my family, ”he says.
“It is strange,” says Aradia Ruiz, lawyer of the El Rogle cooperative, which is part of the legal team of Ceaqua (State Coordinator of Support to the Argentine complaint), an entity that denounces that the magistrate has argued that the paralysis of the statement responds to the lack of reports requested from the National Archive and the Archeoantro scientific association. In the complaint, Martínez’s statement was requested, as well as these two reports. “The judge told us in a car that requested the three measures, but at no time did she know that one was the causal of the other. I asked the three in parallel, ”he argues.
To know the causes of this paralysis, Ruiz appeared on Thursday morning with Lucila Aragó, a member of Acció Ciutadana against the impunity of Franquisme (integrated in CEAQUA) in the courts of Paterna. “We knew that Arqueoantro’s report was presented since February 14. And it has been to arrive and that they told us that it just had just arrived at that time. ‘I apologize’, it has been your answer, “explains the lawyer, who insists that Martínez could have been made” regardless of having the reports or not. ”
Carolina Martínez presented in May 2024 a complaint for crimes against humanity for the murder and forced disappearance of her grandfather, José Manuel Murcia Martínez, who was shot on November 6, 1939 in the Terrer de Paterna. He remained 79 years in grave 94 of the Valencian town cemetery, along with 38 people, all of them handcuffed and with a shot in the chest and another in the head. “This statement was good for everyone. Not only I denounced my grandfather’s case, but it was a complaint, one more step, for all the victims of Franco, ”he says.
In 2018, after a year and a half of procedures, the archeoantro team began the excavation and exhumation of fossa 94 of the Paterna cemetery. And, three years later, José Manuel’s remains were identified after digging up one of his daughters to obtain valid DNA tests. Since 2021, his body rests in the Castelló cemetery, along with his wife, Carolina Ródenas Ortiz. “There are together, which is what they wanted,” says Martínez, who remembers that his grandfather was 47 years old when he was killed. As a day laborer, he had been a councilor for Agriculture for the PSOE in the City of Ayora and was part of the UGT and the agricultural cooperative of the municipality. Arrested at the end of the war, subject to a very summary trial and locked in the València Model prison, he was sentenced to death for “adherence to rebellion.”
José Manuel’s granddaughter discovered the story of her grandfather through her wife’s words, who never succumbed to the silence imposed by the regime: “When I was little, I slept every night in the same room as my grandmother. ‘Grandmother, tell me more things. And of the grandfather, can you tell me something? And why isn’t it? Why isn’t he here with us? ” He said, and she replied that he couldn’t be with us. ” “As a child they never told me what had happened, but then. We were going to the Cemetery of Paterna once a year and then I have gone with my children.
Memory has passed from generation to generation, ”recalls the years of struggle to know the whereabouts of that man made disappear.
“Break the impunity wall”
The summons to Carolina Martínez to declare before the magistrate was “a very important step forward in the attempt to break the impunity wall, because until now the vast majority of complaints have been inadmitted; Virtually none of the complainants has been heard by any court, ”says Aragó, for whom“ Carolina could explain in front of a court what has been the history of his family and his grandfather’s murder was an important step even in the field of repair ”.
The complaint for the forced disappearance and murder of José Manuel Murcia Martínez, who was presented by Martínez together with the complaints of three other relatives, claiming the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the murders of Ulpiano Alonso Preas, Juan Pérez Gavidia, Miguel Pérez Gavidia and Fausto Viana Cañada, also produced in the vicinity of the Cemetery of Paterna, adds to the most of 115 complaints presented in the Spanish State for different crimes, such as forced disappearances, torture or stolen babies, during the Franco dictatorship.
All of them have been inadmitted to process, “despite having occurred in a context of generalized and systemic repression against the civilian population, which leaves the victims in total judicial helpless,” they point out from Ceaqua. Ruiz alludes to the case of Julio Pacheco, the first victim of police torture of Franco in declaring in court and recounting torture at the hands of several agents in the dungeons of the General Directorate of Security in Madrid. Julio Pacheco’s statement was also suspended, “in his case at the foot of the door and not even the day before.”
“They alleged that the titular judge was on low and the substitute did not want to take care. When the magistrate returned to her position, she set a date for the statement, but then it ended up archiving, ”he emphasizes.
“A new revictimization”
Ruiz and Aragó agree that now “there is no other than being patients.” “We are confident that the judge calls Carolina again. We are clear that this is the way and we will not leave it despite the difficulties. It is the only way we have to advance in the conquest of the right to judicial protection that corresponds to us, ”says Aragó, who states that he hopes that“ the public policies of this country support us at some point ”. “We will continue, and we will wait to see what the judge tells us,” says Carolina Martínez.
El Rogle’s lawyer adds that the judge has said that she first wants to receive the two reports “but it is not certain that she summons Carolina again.” “They have informed us that they will give us space to claim and, then, will decide whether or not to make a statement,” he says, while Lucila Aragó denounces that “it is hard for Carolina’s situation, it is very painful from the human point of view, as a person who trusted that that step could be taken. ”
“This paralysis is a revictimization. Again, Carolina feels dispossessed again of her fundamental rights; And it is one more manifestation of that inhuman treatment that their families have been suffering for more than 80 years, in which these people are suffering from an action of a state, which is ours, which was at the time occupied by a dictator, by A genocidal dictatorship, ”Censorso Aragó, to conclude:” The State owes Carolina and the rest of the victims to ensure at least the rights that correspond to him. ”
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