Joe Anderson
It looked like an ordinary field you might see on a construction site—clay-tinged mud puddles, broken gravel, a rolling terrain on the road to Fuente Grande. But eighty years ago, it was a field where members of the Falangist militia mustered in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Today, archaeologist Javier Navarro Chueca and historical researcher Miguel Caballero Pérez are looking for the remains of Spain’s most famous poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca.
“The bodies should be right below us here,” said Caballero as we walked across the wet field together one afternoon in March 2015. He and Navarro had combed this region using a radar-type device that probed the ground for changes in density. Caballero’s research into the final hours of the poet’s life, compiled in his 2011 book, Las Trece Últimas Horas en la Vida de García Lorca, led him to this field near the small town of Alfacar in Spain’s Andalucia region. The spot is close to a different location, proposed by Lorca scholar Ian Gibson, which was unsuccessfully excavated in 2009.
Finding Lorca’s bones is a passion for Caballero.
“The bones,” he says, “will give us anthropological and forensic information of the last moments in the life of Lorca.”
As of this writing, the bones of García Lorca and the three others killed with him that day have not been found, but Caballero is convinced they will be. His goal in this quest is “to get as close as possible to the truth, which is difficult, after so many years.”
Getting closer to this “truth” is part of an ongoing struggle in Spain, and throughout the world, to come to some reconciliation with a brutal past.
In July 1936, several generals, including Francisco Franco, staged a coup against Spain’s democratically elected government. Lorca was killed by a firing squad on August 19 for his opposition to Franco and, many believe, his homosexuality. Even Spain’s fascist forces knew that his death would reflect badly on their cause, so his murder was concealed.
“The fact of the matter is . . . this writer died in Granada mixed up with the rebels,” Franco told a Mexican newspaper in November 1937 (as quoted in Ian Gibson’s 1973 book, The Death of Lorca), claiming “the Reds have used his name for propaganda purposes.”
Such redirection of blame by agents of repression is a familiar pattern. The government told a similar story to the press when six Jesuit priests were murdered in a militarized section of El Salvador in November 1989. Salvadoran writer Jorge Galán recently fled his home in San Salvador to seek asylum in Spain after the publication of Noviembre, his historical novel about those murders. He now lives in Lorca’s home city of Granada.
The Jesuit murders are now the subject of legal proceedings in Spain, where five of the six priests were citizens. This case is part of Spanish efforts to prosecute human rights violators from Latin America, beginning in 1998 with the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte in London. Almudena Bernabeu, a Spanish-born international human rights attorney and former transitional justice program director for the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, has been a part of many of these trials.
The group, she says, has filed four cases, including a case in U.S. courts for the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero. Bernabeu sees these cases as an important part of closing a dark chapter in El Salvador’s history:
“It really brings an end to the civil war and precipitates changes in a lot of the things that they are still struggling with.”
“It really brings an end to the civil war and precipitates changes in a lot of the things that they are still struggling with.”
Steve Stern, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and scholar of the efforts to reclaim historical memory in Chile.
The Progressive, in a shocking 1984 cover story, reported on the links between El Salvador’s death squads and U.S. intelligence agencies. But many of the atrocities committed during this time, including the March 1980 assassination of Romero as he said Mass in a hospital chapel, remain largely unresolved.
The Center for Justice and Accountability has been instrumental in pursuing the killers of Romero and others. A new book by Matt Eisenbrandt, the group’s former legal director, details the history of their investigations and the difficulties of bringing perpetrators of human rights crimes to justice (see Best Books, December/January issue). Romero is now on the way to becoming the first Central American-born saint.
El Salvador’s controversial amnesty law protecting war criminals, passed in 1993, was overturned by El Salvador’s Supreme Court in July. Now, old cases, like the 1981 massacre of more than 800 civilians at El Mozote, are being revisited.
In neighboring Guatemala, the 2013 trial of former dictator General José Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity was earthshaking. “The small country of Guatemala tried and convicted a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people and was the first country in the Americas to do so,” says trial observer Pamela Yates, a documentary filmmaker and co-producer of the films Granito and Dictator in the Dock. “The Ríos Montt genocide conviction was vacated on a procedural technicality, though no evidence was ever called into question, and so the Guatemalan Mayans believe that the guilty verdict stands as is.”
The outcome of that trial has opened the door for other trials of human rights abusers from that period in Guatemala’s history. Yates explains, “The Ríos Montt trial was a sea change that ushered in a justice initiative extending to the arrest, detention, and in some cases conviction of high level military officers for crimes from the 1980s.” She says the Sepur Zarco case, reported at Progressive.org on February 29, 2016, “was the first criminal trial for sexual slavery as a weapon of war, heard in a national court. And a military officer and military commissioner were convicted and sentenced to 120 years and 240 years in prison, respectively.”
The South American nation of Chile also suffered under years of brutal dictatorship led by a military general. Even after Pinochet stepped down, he retained immunity from prosecution for life. “He stayed on as commander of the army and in a constrained transition in which the elected civilian president couldn’t fire him,” notes Steve Stern, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a longtime scholar of the efforts to reclaim historical memory in Chile.
But suddenly, in October 1998, Pinochet was placed under arrest while on a visit to London. Stern says Pinochet’s arrest “created a different climate in Chile” and opened up the possibility “of bringing some of the greatest human rights violators to trial.” The process was slow, and it involved chipping away at amnesty.
“It was as much through interpretation, rather than a repeal of the amnesty,” Stern reflects. “So what you have is a history of very slow, hard-fought struggles to erode and wear down the legal effect of an amnesty law, even if the amnesty law couldn’t be repealed.”
The deaths of two American citizens in the early 1970s, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, brought the reality of Chile’s military coup home to people in the United States. But it took until 2015 for a judge to rule on compensation for the victims, and even that has yet to be delivered.
The will to reopen the books on historical crimes as part of a process of reconciliation seems to be gathering momentum. The most recent of these cases was tried on U.S. soil.
Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez, accused of being the lead officer in the 1973 torture and death of beloved Chilean songwriter Victor Jara, was found liable in a civil trial in Florida this past June. Stern, who served as an expert witness in that case, notes that Jara’s family has been trying for decades to open a case in Chile. But, he says, “they could not identify the front line officer until 2012, although many of his accomplices had been identified. And then he turned out to be living in Florida, rather than Chile.”
The civil trial, a culmination of years of work by the Center for Justice and Accountability in partnership with the law firm Chadbourne & Parke in New York, took place in U.S. Federal District Court in Orlando. In the end, the jury found Barrientos responsible for Jara’s death and awarded $28 million to his family. There are ongoing efforts to extradite him to Chile for criminal prosecution.
Meanwhile, in Spain, the grandchildren of Franco’s victims are seeking to revive historical memories and come to some reconciliation with their past.
“When Franco died, the prevailing wisdom in some quarters, including among elites on the left, was that the way to resolve conflicts is to create a pact of forgetting, and say we’re just not going to reopen that bitterness,” Stern says. “Not everybody agreed with that, of course, but that was a kind of common wisdom of that era.”
But over time, Stern explains, “Latin Americans pushed at this notion and pushed it hard, especially with the idea that actually you cannot found a civilized society, or a democratic society, based on a pack of lies. When this kind of mass atrocity and violence has been committed, you have to come to grips with it.”
During the 1980s and 1990s, Stern continues, many Latin Americans pushed the idea “that victims and their survivors have a right to the truth, and that memory actually cannot be swept under the rug or buried.” And while there are different paths to this end, “what was no longer negotiable was the idea that the truth itself about atrocity and violations of human rights could just be shoved aside.”
Nor can the quest for justice. That is why Javier Navarro and Miguel Caballero continue to dig, looking for Lorca’s bones. Reflects Caballero, “It is important to know what happened, and the bones are the end of what happened.”
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive. His reports on efforts to seek justice in El Salvador and Chile have appeared in The Capital Times, The Tico Times, Toward Freedom, and The Progressive.