Benita Navacerrada does not remember what color the eyes of her father, Facundo, were, because he was only seven years old when he was killed, in May 1939. The photo that she has looked at thousands of times and that now determines, with other portraits of those shot, the perimeter of an exhumation in the cemetery of Colmenar Viejo (Madrid), is in black and white and there is no one left to ask. Her mother, Margarita, and her brothers have died. “I don’t have many memories of him alive, but I do have memories of losing him,” she explains at the foot of the grave. Benita hesitates —“I think they were brown”—, but what she has not forgotten is the feeling of injustice, the hunger, the insults… And for that, 83 years after the execution, when there is no one left alive who remembers what color they were the eyes of Facundo Navacerrada, she still cries for him and proudly faces the mission of giving him a decent burial. “I would like him to go with me when I leave. And if it’s not possible, at least I’ll know I’ve tried.”
Last Monday began the exhumation of one of the two mass burials in Colmenar Viejo where, between April and December 1939, 107 men and one woman were shot after being sentenced to death. They were residents of that town —where prisons were improvised to house dozens of prisoners awaiting trial— and also of San Sebastián de los Reyes, Soto del Real, Manzanares el Real, Miraflores de la Sierra, Moralzarzal, Hortaleza and Fuencarral, in Madrid. They had, as historian Roberto Fernández explains, co-author of the book the convulsive mountain, three things in common: “They were peasants, stonemasons, workers. They were the trade union and political elite of Madrid: mayors, councilors, leaders linked to the PCE, the PSOE, UGT and CNT. And they were very young: 70% were under 40 years old when they were killed.” Some families were able to bury them after the execution. Others did so after Franco’s death. Many others hope to be able to do so now, although only five bodies have been found so far. The daughter of Martina Aparicio Bastero, the only woman among those 108 sentenced to death, managed to transfer the remains to the family tomb in the eighties. “They basically sentenced her for being the wife of Blas Colmenarejo del Valle, a great leader of the Colmenar workers’ struggle who was also shot,” explains Fernández, who has read her court-martial. “All Spaniards should read one to know how Franco’s system of repression worked,” he adds.
Benita says that in the town they were told that Facundo had been killed. “My mother was in prison at the time and my older sister, who was 16 years old, came to pick up her body. She entered a room where there were many deceased and washed their faces to find out which one was our father, but she did not appear. A guard told him: ‘In that corner someone has died’, but there was only a black shadow there. Word spread around the town that they had doused it with gasoline and burned it,” she recounts through tears. Facundo was a formworker and had founded the UGT in San Sebastián de los Reyes. He was 37 years old when he was killed. Margarita López, his wife, spent three and a half years in jail, convicted of having destroyed a cloak of the Virgin of the parish. She explained that she had used it to make a shawl for one of her children. “My father’s family were fascists and they didn’t want to help us. We are alone. My brother, who was 11 years old, started working as a shepherd and slept with the sheep. When I was 10, I started working as a babysitter. We went through a lot of hunger and a lot of contempt. They disowned us. They said: ‘You don’t play with us, you are red’. I didn’t understand what they meant at the time.” Now yes.
In his last letter, Facundo insists that he is innocent of all the charges for which he was convicted in one of those court-martials that, once the new democratic memory law is approved, will be null and void. He says goodbye one by one to his children. “So little you are left without a father”, he writes to Benita from prison. He and Margarita had eight, but three died as babies, two of them on the same day, August 18, 1936.
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Carmen Carreras, secretary of the Truth Commission of San Sebastián de los Reyes, says that the association was created after the woman who had been working in her house all her life, Esther Mateo Cabrero, told them one day that her grandfather had been mayor of the town and had been shot in 1939. “We began to investigate, and Roberto [Fernández] He told us that there were 25 neighbors in the graves of Colmenar. There we began to move to promote the exhumation, which has been possible thanks to a request from the different municipalities to which the victims belonged and a grant from the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory. Carmen does not have any direct relatives among those shot, but she cares about them just the same: “I have 108 families,” she explains.
Commutation of sentence after execution
Esther Mateo Cabrero, 55, is not only looking for her grandfather but also her uncle and cousin. “We know that my grandfather, in addition to being mayor, was a day laborer and bricklayer, and that he was shot one Sunday in 1939. My father, who was nine years old at the time, said that the next day, when he was no longer of any use, the commutation of the death penalty”. Historian Roberto Fernández explains that in that repressive maelstrom “that kind of chaos was common”: “Sometimes, for example, they kept looking for someone they had already shot.” Esther, who did not know her reprisal relatives, considers herself a “militant of memory.” “It hurts me a lot to talk to people and realize that they have no idea what so many families have suffered. The exhumations must serve to give the victims a decent burial, but also so that what happened is known, ”she says. Luis Pérez, president of the association and resident of San Sebastián de los Reyes, often goes to institutes to give talks to kids and talk to them about the torture of the policeman nicknamed Billy el Niño, that is, about his personal experience and the history from a country. “The ignorance they have is total. One day, when I showed up and told them that I had been sentenced to 13 years in prison because they found me some leaflets calling on workers to fight for freedom and democracy, one boy said to another: ‘You’ll see when your grandfather I found out that today you had a talk with a red’. At first they do not fully understand the seriousness of all this. I explained to one who laughed a lot that with Franco they would have given him a good shake for having long hair and to others who were talking that it was an illegal meeting”.
desperate letters
Carlos López Nieto, 52, and his cousin Gerardo Díaz, 49, are looking for the remains of their grandfather, Felipe Molpeceres. “My mother never got to know him, but she always wanted to know where she was so she could bury him,” says Carlos. “He was a bricklayer, from the PCE, we don’t know much more.” Gerardo is still overwhelmed by the letters he wrote from prison desperately asking his family to talk to each other to intercede for him, without success. He was 31 years old when he was shot. “That’s where the ostracism for the family began,” he says. “Everyone in Hortaleza stopped talking to them. Two years later, my grandmother remarried an older man, to protect herself from her, to rehabilitate herself. And there are thousands of stories like this. Getting to know such complicated lives is also an exercise in repair,” he adds.
The first skeleton found in the exhumation corresponds to a boy under 25 years of age. Archaeologist Almudena García-Rubio, from Aranzadi, explains that the skull injuries point to violent death. But the work, in which the Archeology A team collaborates, is not going as expected. So far they have found the remains of five people, in wooden boxes, and part of the trench is empty. In that case, most of the victims they are looking for could be lying a few meters away, in another grave known as “el paseo” that would require a month of work. The city councils -governed by PSOE, PP and an independent- and the affected families have helped them with the logistics to sleep and eat while they do this preliminary study of the grave.
On Friday, as a sign of gratitude, the Argentine singer Ximena Villaro came over to play on her guitar while the experts worked on the skeletons. Some of those present wept with emotion when listening to her with the portraits of those shot in hand and the first bones in sight of her. Facundo Navacerrada looked directly at three generations of relatives, with his brown eyes.
The Argentine singer Ximena Villaro accompanies the archaeologists who work on the exhumation of victims of Francoism in the Colmenar Viejo cemetery. pic.twitter.com/8moIMF0acs
– Natalia Junquera (@nataliajunquera) August 27, 2022
The Madrid Anomaly
The study on the exhumations carried out between the years 2000 and 2019 coordinated by the coroner Francisco Etxeberria only includes three in the Community of Madrid, with seven victims in total, compared to the 233 open graves and 1,936 skeletons recovered in Castilla y León, for example . The historian Roberto Fernández explains: “Madrid was a republican zone and there were not so many shot in ditches at the beginning of the Civil War, but there are graves in El Escorial, in Torrelaguna, in Getafe, in Alcalá de Henares, and in Madrid there are 3,000. shot in the Eastern Cemetery. What has been lacking is political will.
While other communities have developed their own legislation on historical memory and promoted reparation for the victims of Francoism in recent years, in Madrid, governed by the PP, nothing has been done. In 2021 the Madrid Government did not propose any project to benefit from aid from the central Executive. This year the community chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso requested a grant to exhume in an old labor camp for the construction of a republican government railway where the Madrid Executive assures that several people died (prisoners forced to carry out the work) who were buried in a pit The central government granted the requested aid, as well as subsidies to open four graves at the request of the municipalities of Torremocha del Campo, Brunete, Colmenar Viejo and Ciempozuelos. In the case of Torremocha, to recover the remains of a murdered priest. The Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, explains that when the memory law speaks of victims, it refers to “all of them”, including those on the Francoist side. “What happens is that most of them were exhumed and their families repaired during the 1940s, so the majority of the graves that remain to be opened are of Republican victims,” he explained.
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