The parish priest of Albatera (Alicante, 12,864 inhabitants), Manuel Serna, informed his colleague in Antequera (Málaga, 41,184 inhabitants), Pedro del Pozo, of the execution of Francisco García Parejo, a prisoner in the concentration camp in Alicante where Francoism was imprisoned Tens of thousands of Republicans between April and October 1939. The intention of the sending priest was for Del Pozo, the deceased’s uncle by marriage, to break the news of the execution “in the best possible way” to García Parejo’s wife and niece, so that she made it less painful The descendants of the murdered Malaga railway worker have kept the letter as a family treasure to preserve his memory. Moreover, according to Felipe Mejías, the archaeologist who works on the site that once occupied the concentration camp, the note is a documentary gem “The letter is dated June 22, 1939,” explains Mejías, “more than a week before the first ten executions officially recorded in the Albatera Register.” And therefore “it confirms that the testimonies of the prisoners who said there were executions that were not recorded were true.”
García Parejo was a lieutenant in the Republican Army who was born in Fuente de Piedra (Málaga), according to his granddaughter Mari Cruz García Martínez EL PAÍS. From a young age he worked as a day laborer until he got a job as a railroad engineer and settled in the Antequera neighborhoods of Bobadilla and Colonia de Santa Ana. “He always made it clear that he was involved in the workers’ struggle,” he says Granddaughter “and according to neighbors has joined the CNT union”. After the rebels invaded Antequera in August 1936, García Parejo “threw himself into the mountains” and his wife Teresa “ran to Malaga with their four children”. In 1937 he went to the front to fight for the Republic and his family lost sight of him until he was imprisoned in Albatera, where Teresa visited him, accompanied by his four-year-old son Ramón, Mari Cruz’s father.
Letter announcing the execution of Francisco García.
The portrait of the shot soldier presided over the homes of his four children throughout his life, but his story remained silent until the Transition arrived. The letter was kept by Teresa until her death, and later by one of her sons, “who carried it folded in his wallet until they convinced him it wasn’t the right place to keep it,” says García Martínez, who Legacy The document in 2004. Before her death, Teresa revealed the final stage in her grandfather’s life: “He ran away [del campo de Albatera] because they deceived him,” he recalls, “they told him there was a ship” that was probably heading for the Algerian city of Oran, “and they took her off the coast, but it was a trap”. “Without a trial,” the victim’s granddaughter continues, “they sentenced him to death for being a part of the war.” Teresa and her children, aged between 4 and 12, also suffered another condemnation, “that of misery and vulnerability”.
In the letter, Serna points out that García Parejo was “executed in a concentration camp” because he “escaped a month ago.” He also says he was “by his side” during his final moments, which were “of sincere remorse.” In the same postal parcel he included “the wallet” given to him by the executed man before his death, “with his railway ticket, a photograph of his children and thirty-three pesetas on paper”. Finally, the priest from Albaterense says that García Parejo was “buried in the cemetery of this parish”, in “a place that can be seen”. More historical contribution in the opinion of the archaeologist, since in this way he confirms that “in the old Albatera cemetery”, currently hidden under a park, “there is a common grave full of corpses that have not been transferred to the new one”. .
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Copy of Francisco García’s execution letter. for the 1979 court.
Mejías is preparing the fourth research campaign at the site of the concentration camp, which currently belongs to the municipality of San Isidro (2,154 inhabitants), located about 20 kilometers from Orihuela, in the Vega Baja region, south of the province of Alicante. The expert, who has already spotted some of the facility’s barracks and is probing the country in search of the mass grave, explains that Albatera’s civil register lists only 10 deaths that occurred between the “6th or April 7 and October 26, 1939”. , the dates Franco kept the detention center open. “On July 1 there were four executions”, to which are added another four “on September 14, 16 and 29 and on October 15”. All of them were recorded as “firearm injury” deaths. Official documentation also reports “one deceased from typhoid peritonitis and another from acute anemia”. However, both prisoner testimonies and ammunition shells found in the area suggest that “Francoism hid many more deaths”. In Albatera, where about 15,000 detainees were overcrowded, many of them from the port of Alicante, where everyone was thronging to flee Spain at the end of the civil war, “it is suspected that there were dozens, hundreds of dead”. And of them “the estimate, based on the prisoners’ reports, is that there were about 50 shots”.
The intention of the family is to deposit the letter in the field of Albatera “when it becomes a museum”, which is Mejías’ ultimate goal. On the 15th, the Department of Democratic Quality of the Generalitat Valenciana included it in the regional catalog of places and paths of democratic memory, guaranteeing not only its protection but also that of “all those elements, present or future, that settle” . inside. This protection would give the family “rest”. “We want the letter to go back to where it came from,” García Martínez continues, “that the memory of my grandfather stays there, what he can’t do is lie in a drawer.”