A Spanish judge on Thursday ordered the grave of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca dug up as, for the first time, the repression unleashed by the dictator General Francisco Franco was formally declared a crime against humanity.
In a controversial reversal of Spain’s traditional refusal to seek out those responsible for the killings of Lorca and more than 100,000 other people, Judge Baltasar Garzon also asked investigators to provide him with information on Franco’s chief henchmen and generals. Franco and his chief collaborators, Garzon said, had been responsible for “mass killings, torture and the systematic, general and illegal detentions of political opponents.”
Death squads, military courts and other tribunals sent 114,000 people to their deaths during and after a three-year civil war in the 1930s that traumatized Spain for generations, the judge said.
Several thousand lie in unmarked mass graves, despite the attempts of volunteers over the past eight years to disinter corpses and hand them over to relatives for reburial. The judge ordered the digging up of 19 such graves, including one on a hillside overlooking the southern city of Granada where Lorca is thought to have been shot in 1936.
Lorca’s family do not want the poet exhumed, but recently promised not to oppose a petition from relatives of two men shot and buried alongside him for the grave to be dug up.
“I’m very pleased. I’ve been waiting 10 years for this,” said the granddaughter of one of them, Nieves Galindo.
Garzon requested formal proof that 35 generals and Francoist ministers are no longer alive. He also ordered the interior ministry to provide a list of those in charge of the pro-Francoist Falange movement up until 1951.
The judge explicitly said that his investigations included repression carried out until 1952, 17 years after Franco had won the civil war and established his dictatorship. Many Spaniards still find the period hard to talk about and some fear Garzon’s investigation will reopen old wounds.
The right has been critical of the judge and of a recent “historical memory” law to help Franco’s victims passed by the Socialist government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
An unwritten “pact of forgetting” underpinned Spain’s rapid transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975.
Garzon’s critics claim that all civil war and Francoist repression is covered by a 1977 amnesty law and by rules that mean that most crimes lapse after 20 years. However, Garzon declared on Thursday that where a victim’s body had not been found a crime of kidnapping was still being committed and had not lapsed.
The attorney general’s office, which has opposed the judge’s investigation, is expected to appeal against the decision. It argues that international human rights laws do not apply to the civil war as Spain was not signed up to them at the time.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was