Spain’s Disappeared

Two human skeletons​ lay in the newly excavated grave, with numbers on plastic tags placed beside them. One of the skulls had a row of metal teeth. Joaquín Sancho Margelí’s family, who requested the exhumation, had said he could be identified by his silver dentures. The other skeleton was probably that of Elías Mohino Berzosa, whose family also wanted his remains exhumed. They had never known for sure if the men were buried near the north-east wall of the cemetery in Caspe, a small town in eastern Spain, as some family members seem to have been told soon after their disappearance in 1947. But they had erected headstones in the hope they had been told the truth. Now that the grave had been reopened, it looked like Sancho and Mohino really had been buried there, though DNA testing was required to confirm their identities.

Volunteers from the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) set about removing the remains a few days after Easter. The volunteers, who wore black jackets or hoodies with ARMH printed on the back, carefully extracted each bone in turn. The sparrows in the cypresses almost drowned out the racket from the animal feed factory next door. Crypts and tombstones across the graveyard were pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war and the years that followed; specific gravestones seemed to have been targeted.

A volunteer called David Ramírez López found a pistol bullet in the grave. He held it up for the others to see. The lead had been flattened by impact into a squat, pluglike shape and the decomposition of organic matter around it had made it look waxy, as if coated in candle grease. Ramírez specialised in identifying artefacts from the civil war and the dictatorship: weaponry, the insignia of Falangist forces, the berets and badges worn by Republican militias and anarchist groups. He had no personal experience of life under General Franco, who died in 1975, three years before he was born. ‘As a child I never really thought about [Franco’s regime], and they told us nothing about it at school.’ But his home region, near Jaén in Andalucía, had been the site of serious violence and reprisals, and his grandmother had told him stories of the postwar famine. ‘Everything I know today comes from this passion I developed for finding out what happened.’ He worked as a forest ranger in Castile-La Mancha, but for the last seventeen years had been giving his free time to the ARMH.

Since the ARMH was founded in 2000, it has unearthed more than 150 mass graves, and catalogued the bodies found in them. Most victims were killed in cold blood, either during the civil war or in the decades after it. An unknown number of executions were carried out in secret, the deaths unregistered, burial sites unmapped. Others were documented: the archives of the Third Territorial Military Tribunal of Barcelona recorded that Sancho, Mohino and two other men were arrested as suspected members of the Agrupación guerrillera de Levante y Aragón, popularly known as the Maquis, in the summer of 1947. They were interrogated for weeks by the Civil Guard, the regime’s paramilitary police force. Before dawn on 13 August, the four men tried to escape while they were being driven from Alcañiz to Caspe, and were shot dead in a roadside ditch. At least, that’s what the guardsmen said. Their signed statement went into a file with the autopsy reports filled out that morning in the morgue at Caspe cemetery. Sancho and Mohino were both shot multiple times in the back. The file included the dsetails of their summary burial, giving the ARMH’s researchers more to go on than the rumours more common in these cases. (The autopsy reports also noted that Sancho was wearing ‘beach shoes’ and Mohino ‘rubber-soled sandals’.)

Marco Antonio González, vice president of the ARMH, said that the exhumation had been straightforward. The only difficulty had been that the regional authority of Aragón was slow to grant the necessary permits. The ARMH had got the story into the press and the application was approved soon afterwards (the authority claimed the delay was merely a matter of due diligence). Spain’s provincial authorities were usually compliant, González said, in part because the exhumations don’t cost them any money. The association relies on donations, and its members run a support network, offering beds in their houses, lifts to mass graves in remote areas and lunch for the crews. That day it was sandwiches and cold beers from a nearby tapas bar, spread out on a picnic table made from planks from a mausoleum door laid across two wheelbarrows.

‘It shouldn’t be like this,’ González said. ‘This is work the Spanish state should be doing. But it’s not, so here we are. All we do is contribute our hands, and our knowledge, to remove these bodies from the places decided by their murderers, so their children or grandchildren can choose where they should go.’ The body of his own great-grandfather, who was taken out and shot as a communist in the early days of the civil war, has never been recovered. González’s grandfather, an orphan at eleven, ‘couldn’t finish his education, because he had to work’, González said. ‘In my family we’ve always been workers. We’re proud of our class traditions. But in the end we are also the children of people murdered by fascists, and the effects are still dragging out, three and four generations after 18 July’ – the date of Franco’s coup in 1936.

González and his team were scathing about the country’s main left-wing party, the PSOE, and the coalition government headed by Pedro Sánchez, its leader. Pope Francis had died a couple of days earlier, on Easter Monday, and the group spoke about the abiding power of the Church over Spanish education, healthcare and finance. They described the religious parades of Easter week as annual rituals of cultish manipulation, and criticised the Memory Laws drafted by PSOE-led governments in 2007 and 2022 to recognise the victims of Francoist repression and enshrine rights for their relatives for ignoring the role of the Church in propping up the military dictatorship for forty years. They claimed that the only tangible result of the Memory Laws has been a new system of government subsidies for exhumations. The government often subcontracts these exhumations to private firms owned by families that are known to be historically Francoist, or at least unsympathetic to the left; the team cited recent cases near Valencia. They also claimed that the government isn’t very good at the job: the official figures as of October 2025 show that though there have been 8741 state-ordered exhumations, only 70 bodies have been formally identified.

One of the investigators, Magdalena García, talked about a site that had particularly affected her, where several bodies had been buried unusually deeply, ‘maybe six metres’, including a young woman in the foetal position. Ballistic impressions showed that many shots had been fired into the pit. ‘Qué horror,’ García said. Researching the cases had brought her into contact with now elderly relatives who still had memories of lost family members. ‘You learn a lot about the resilience of human beings,’ she said. ‘How much suffering they can bear, and for how long. Some become more comfortable talking about it, but some never do.’

The team psychologist, Raúl de la Fuente Gutiérrez, helps families prepare for exhumations. He did his training during the excavation of mass graves in Guatemala around 2000. ‘You want them to express, express, express, whatever they’re feeling, especially the negative emotions,’ he said. ‘And if they can’t, you just try to calm them a little, help them past the fear or resistance.’

De la Fuente had counselled Sancho’s two daughters, who greeted him affectionately. Josefina and María Pilar Sancho were toddlers when their father was killed. Now 78 and 81, they had come to see his remains lifted out of the ground. María Pilar, the elder sister, walked to the edge of the grave and stood there for a minute, one hand clasped over her mouth. Josefina, the younger sister, moved among the team, effusive as they talked her through the process. Groups of bones were being transferred from buckets into clear plastic bags, which were put in cardboard boxes labelled with the name and number of the skeleton. They would be taken for DNA testing at the University of León.

Josefina said she didn’t need to wait for the results. When she looked into the pit and saw the cranium and ribcage, she opened her arms wide and almost wailed: ‘I know that’s my father.’ The ARMH volunteers stepped back and Josefina climbed down a wooden ladder into the pit and ran a finger along the vertebrae. Then she closed her eyes, whispered something and kissed the skull. I felt that I shouldn’t be watching and went for a walk around the graveyard. Near the centre was a granite cross honouring the local men who had fought and died for Franco. By the west wall was a rusty metal obelisk dedicated to the volunteers of the International Brigades who had been killed at the Battle of Caspe in March 1938.

There’s a family legend that my grandfather and his friends, still in their teens, stockpiled shotguns from their farms in County Waterford to take to Spain, but were foiled when they tried to smuggle their cache onto a ferry at Rosslare. I was proud of this story until I heard another version, in which my grandfather wanted to join Franco’s forces in order to kill communists. This sounded more like the man I knew. He died in Spain after retiring to Estepona. My father retired to the Costa del Sol too, and I followed them both as far as Madrid, where I’ve lived for a decade. There, the civil war is often discussed as a numbers game. The left can’t deny the atrocities committed by their side – the Paracuellos massacres and other butcherings of prisoners and priests, unarmed civilians and rebels shot mid-surrender – but any admission usually comes with the qualifier that the right racked up a much higher body count. Conservatives claim the opposite. The ARMH uses the estimate given by the National High Court in 2008, that 114,226 people disappeared during the war and dictatorship. A survey co-ordinated by the historian Santos Juliá Díaz in 1999 found that around 150,000 were killed by Nationalists and around 50,000 by Republicans – this is now known as the 150:50 ratio.

Franco had decades in which to deal with his enemies. Sancho and Mohino weren’t killed until 1947. Some victims are thought to lie under the concrete pilings of the dams and motorways that changed the Spanish landscape from the late 1950s onwards. And no one knows how many Republican corpses ended up in the Valley of the Fallen, the monumental necropolis built to Franco’s orders on a mountain outside Madrid. It’s estimated that between five and twelve thousand Republican corpses were reinterred there, without permission or notification, alongside a larger number of Nationalist dead. This was presented by the regime as a gesture of reconciliation, but Emilio Silva, the founder and president of the ARMH, doesn’t see it that way. ‘There can be no reconciliation between fascist and anti-fascist,’ he told me when we spoke a few months after the Caspe exhumation. ‘It’s impossible, and this country’s transition to democracy was based on that great lie.’

We sat outside a café in Parque de Santa María, the northern suburb of Madrid where Silva has lived for forty years. Pointing to the high rises around us, Silva said that the neighbourhood had been built in the 1960s by the property developer José Banús, a friend of Franco’s. Silva listed other major construction contracts, seats on the boards of energy suppliers and senior positions in government awarded to Franco’s former allies long after his death. Franco’s body wasn’t removed from his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen until 2019. It was reburied in a family plot at El Pardo at public expense.

‘Another insult to the victims who are still in ditches,’ Silva said. His grandfather Emilio Silva Faba had been a Republican shop-owner and election organiser in the province of León. Arrested by the Falange early in the civil war, he was driven to the edge of a field and executed with a dozen others on the night of 16 October 1936. They were buried where they fell, under an overgrown walnut tree. In March 2000, his grandson, then working as a journalist, pieced the story together and found his grandfather’s remains just outside the village of Priaranza del Bierzo. It took six months to arrange the exhumation, and longer still to confirm the identity by DNA testing. Silva wrote about it in the Crónica de León and readers responded with stories of their own missing relatives. He set up the ARMH to improve and formalise the process of recovering the desaparecidos, ‘the disappeared’.

‘That word was important in creating the association,’ he said. The term is more often used of those killed by the juntas in Chile or Argentina, and many were shocked by its being used of Spain. ‘We had progressive historians telling us: “No, no, no, desaparecidos is for Latin America.” But how is it different? My grandfather was illegally detained, tortured and killed, and his body was hidden. For me, it’s the same whether it happened in Buenos Aires, Santiago or Manila.’

In the early days of the ARMH, a judge in León argued that to dig up the dead of the Franco era was to breach the Amnesty Law, which forgave acts of political violence committed before its signing in October 1977. ‘I learned that the Amnesty Law was for the perpetrators,’ Silva said. The Memory Laws might appear to offer support for ARMH’s exhumations, but Silva emphasised their shortcomings. ‘There is still no public office for people to go and ask for help finding their loved ones. So we are that office, completely independent, treating them with dignity and empathy. For me, for all of us I think, the human feeling comes before the politics. These people were the losers in the war, the losers in the dictatorship, the losers in democracy. And I’m including my own family.’

Josefina had no clear memories of her father. Her mother, who never remarried, couldn’t tell her much. The guerrilla group he was said to belong to had killed people, she knew, but ‘everyone told us he wasn’t guilty of anything, he was just a driver and they caught him by mistake, but I don’t know. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, he paid with his life.’ She used to visit the cemetery in Caspe, where her mother had somehow paid for a tombstone to be erected above the mass grave her husband might not even be in. ‘I’ve had such horrible depressions,’ Josefina said. She gestured at the volunteers. ‘I’m so grateful, I’ll never forget it. They’re probably thinking: “This little girl, she’s finally seen her father and she can’t cry.” But today I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it.’ Her mother, who died twenty years ago, is buried in Alcañiz. ‘Her dream, and my dream, was for my father to lie beside her. Now it’s going to happen, and it will be the best day of my life. It will be a party. And then I can die happy.’ In July, the lab confirmed that one of the skeletons was Joaquín Sancho Margelí. His funeral, and reburial, were held in October.