A multidisciplinary team of 15 technicians will begin exhumation work this Monday in the Cuelgamuros Valley — the name given to the Valley of the Fallen in 2022 — to try to recover the remains of relatives of 128 victims, according to EL PAÍS civil war; the majority, reprisals of the Franco regime. Fausto Canales, whose father and uncles are buried in the mausoleum, has been waiting for this moment for 20 years. A complete forensic laboratory has been installed inside the basilica, complete with X-ray machine, microscopes, measuring tools, tables and special lighting to allow experts to work. In addition to six forensic scientists, a group of archaeologists, dentists, geneticists and four members of the scientific police are involved in the operation, which is sponsored by the government to comply with the Democratic Remembrance Act and whose specific task is to assist in the identification of the boxes in to help these places Victims are buried when the registration numbers are not clearly visible to the naked eye.
In December, workers from the public company Tragsa, architects and other National Heritage specialists began preparing the area to protect the altarpiece, secure the architectural structures and ensure the safety of technicians who work with personal protective equipment, goggles, etc become. and a mask. , insulating gloves and boots. Air filters were also installed to minimize inhalation of airborne dust in the columbarium area.
Fausto Canales poses with photos of his father Valerico and uncle Victoriano, both buried in the Cuelgamuros Valley. Victor Sainz
It wasn’t easy to get here. As with the October 2019 exhumation of dictator Francisco Franco’s grave, the court process stalled for months. First by Franco and anti-Memorialist groups and later by the mayor of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Carlota López Esteban, of the PP, who refused to authorize planning permission for interventions in the crypts, even going so far on Testified Jan. 25 before a judge accused of subterfuge. The Supreme Court did not allow the Franco Foundation’s last resort to impose precautionary measures and suspend work to be processed in March. The so-called Association for the Defense of the Valley of the Fallen is threatening lawsuits for desecration.
The device was designed to process the 128 claims for remains filed by relatives of victims from both Francoist and Republican sides, with the latter being the majority group. 78 people are wanted in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, where they will intervene from this Monday; and in the Santísimo, where a second phase would intervene, at 39. There are also remains of victims in other crypts, which the technicians will enter later. A total of 33,847 people were buried in Cuelgamuros, equivalent to the area of the city of Teruel.
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When Franco designed the monument to commemorate his victory in the Civil War, he thought the work would take five years, but it was 19 and by then many were widows of those who had “fallen in God and in Spain,” as those of them They were murdered in Paracuellos and refused to transfer the remains to the mausoleum. The Ministry of the Interior then wrote to the councilors asking for bodies to be placed in the crypts, and many of them replied that there were no Franco victims, but that there were “Red Army graves”. The regime accepted and mass graves were opened by Republicans throughout the country, unbeknownst to their families, to take the bodies to the valley. In some cases, as in the tomb where he had been buried along with six other people, in his haste Valerico Canales, Fausto’s father, left a skull, vertebrae, teeth … which were discovered by his descendants in 2003.
Document in which a city councilor replies to the regime that it has no national remains of the fallen to send to the Valley of the Fallen, but has graves belonging to the “Red Army”. Courtesy of Queralt Solé
When over the years, already in a democracy, the victims’ relatives found out that the remains had been transferred to the Valley of the Fallen, now called Cuelgamuros, they began to demand their transfer. In 2016, Manuel Lapeña obtained a verdict in favor of the exhumation of his father and uncle, but died in 2021 at the age of 97, unable to fulfill his wish due to the barrage of appeals. Franco and anti-memorial groups. His daughter, Purificación Lapeña, continued his struggle. Other relatives claiming the remains are also very old, such as Mercedes Abril, 89, who wants her father back.
Manuel Lapeña, first from left, showed a photo of his father, taken at his home in Zaragoza in 2016, accompanied by his family. BERNARDO PEREZ
The regime established four classes of dead: A, B, C, and D, depending on where they were buried and whether or not they were identified. Only moving Class A corpses required “Family Conformity”. The remains were kept in individual wooden boxes (60 x 30 x 30 centimeters) or in collection boxes (120 x 60 x 60 centimeters) with indications of their place of origin. The technical team, now designated by the government, has analyzed how the columbaria are with some poles and a camera, and in some levels – there are five in the crypt – the condition is better than expected. They will use the quest for the claimed remains to clean and renew other boxes that may be damaged. Only those matching family claims are transferred to the laboratory in the basilica to proceed with anthropological analysis.
The operators place the crates with the remains that were brought to the Valley of the Fallen from various provinces in the 1950s. In the foreground remains of Castellón de la Plana, Ávila and Aldeaseca. EFE
Working method and chain of custody
The historian Queralt Solé, author of several studies on the Cuelgamuros Valley, together with the historian David Tormo, have carried out a specific investigation into the biography and journey of the victims whose remains are claimed by the families. The six forensic experts (Elisa Cabrerizo, Enrique Dorado, Ignasi Galtés, Elisa Ruiz-Tagle, José Luis Prieto and Fernando Serrulla) with extensive experience will follow the United Nations Minnesota protocol to ensure the correct registration and chain of custody of the remains. Isolation sluices have been set up between the Columbaria area and the lab. The boxes are cleaned with aspiration, examined by the scientific police (from the outside) and by the coroner, who decide which piece (a bone, a tooth…) is the most suitable for sampling. In any case, in this first phase, no skeletons will emerge from Cuelgamuros, only those samples that will be analyzed at the National Institute of Toxicology in order to compare them with the genetic samples of relatives.
Inside the crypt, the boxes are arranged on five levels and, for safety reasons, work is carried out from bottom to top. They start with the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, because it is the one that houses the most claims to remains and because it is believed that the Lapeña brothers were buried there and a court judgment has been pending in this case since 2016. All the information collected is documented in an expert report that integrates the documents prepared by the various specialists, assisted by an Advisory Board chaired by the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory Fernando Martínez, and integrated by the Directors, among others Francisco Etxeberria, Head of the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences and the Institute of Forensic Medicine and one of the top forensic scientists in the world whom Chile has asked for help examining the remains of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, former President Salvador Allende and poet Pablo Neruda.
The photos taken by the CSIC in 2018 to analyze whether brothers Manuel and Ramiro Lapeña could be exhumed show the inside of the crypt of the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre
The work is expected to continue beyond the July 23 elections, when the executive will be in office, but from that moment its continuity will depend on the government that emerges from the elections. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has announced that he will repeal the Democratic Memory Law if he reaches the government. His eventual partner Vox was particularly aggressive against the norm. The current Minister in the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, whose department includes the Secretary of State for Democratic Remembrance, stressed last week that allowing families to recover the remains of their loved ones is “not politics, it is humanity,” stressing that ” A Democrat” should not oppose the advances that the law has brought.
The exhumations in the crypts of the Cuelgamuros Valley are part of a process to redesign the Franco monument that began in 2007 when civil war exaltation acts were banned in its surroundings. It continued in 2019 with the transfer of the remains of Franco, in March those of Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, and ended with an interpretation center or museum that serves to explain to the visitor what is national -Catholicism was and why and by whom (prisoner work) the memorial was erected. For the time being, the electoral initiative saved the Benedictine community, who were supposed to be expelled from the site by government decision, as their presence was “incompatible” with the new purpose of the monument. The pyramid, with which the dictator wanted to immortalize his victory in 1939, will become a forensic laboratory in the coming months.
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