Among more than a dozen skeletons in a mass grave in the Víznar ravine (Granada), archaeologists have found the remains of a boy between 11 and 14 years old, shot in the Civil War. He was shot twice: one bullet passed through and broke his skull; the other was still inside. Next to the bones, a drawing pencil and an eraser appeared. “We are very shocked. He has touched us hard,” explains Paco Carrión, professor of Archeology at the University of Granada, who has been directing the search for missing persons in this area since 2021, near the place where the poet Federico García Lorca was murdered. “I thought it could be my grandson, I imagined such a defenseless being about to be executed. It was the last body we found, that is, they had killed him first.” He had 14 more bodies on him.
The little one has no name. “We do not know his identity because none of the sources we have consulted and those used by the historians working on the project spoke of a shot child,” explains Carrión. “The hypothesis we are considering is that one of the other 14 victims that we have found in the grave is his father. We will know when the genetic analyzes are carried out in the laboratories of the University of Granada.” Nobody claimed it. If they cannot find relatives, the remains will be reburied in a memorial with the other executed people who do not have living relatives. “At the moment, we have recovered the remains of 124 people, 34 of them women, in 17 graves in the Víznar ravine. We think there may be about 200 in total. We have arrived late, because until just ten years ago there were no funds to carry out this work scientifically, and now it is difficult to find all the families.” Fifty children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are still awaiting identification.
It is common for skeletons recovered in Francoist graves to correspond to young people, but not so much. In 2010, actor Javier Bardem gave voice to Francisco Escribano, an 18-year-old boy whose remains were recovered in February 2006 from a grave in Fontanosas (Ciudad Real) with those of six other people: his father, two of his uncles and a cousin of his. In 2004, one of the murderers had written an anonymous letter to the City Council in which he confessed to the crime and indicated the place where the bodies had been buried one early morning in July 1941. The letter, typed and sent from Barcelona, explained that one of The victims “were under 15 years of age.” The experts determined, when they exhumed the grave, that there were a few more and they corresponded to José Escribano's brother, a goatherd, like the rest of the executed men from his family.
The work in the Víznar ravine is financed by the central government and the collaboration of the Junta de Andalucía, chaired by Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, of the PP. “Unlike other places, where they govern with Vox,” Carrión celebrates, “here they have never given us a problem. On the contrary. I cannot understand what they are doing in other territories, repealing the autonomous memory laws and lending themselves to the historical revisionism of the extreme right. “This is a human rights issue.”
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