On the 05/05/2011 the Spanish Government released the long announced map of mass graves from Dictator Franco’s regime.
It is an open-source database detailing the position of the 2,232 sites and their current status. Most corpses have not been touched yet (green); others have been already completely or partially exhumed (red) and others are disintegrated or bodies are still missing (white).
Yet there is a remarkable amount of yellow sites showing the corpses that were transferred to Franco’s Mausoleum at El Valle delos Caídos (outskirts of Madrid). This hybrid between a cemetery and a monument aimed to praise the victory over his adversaries by taking as many remains from the mass graves as possible into his “valley of the fallen”.
The map is to be found on the Government’s website, and it is possible to search victims by name, surname, year or town. The exact coordinates of each site cannot be openly accessed, so that relatives do not try to exhume the remains themselves and anticipate to a forensic team (as it has been reported in recent years). Not only does this map show the hotspots of a past conflict, but it also reflects the current grade of collaboration of the different autonomous regions, either willing or unwilling to carry out effective action in order to prove the evidence of crimes from the past. It is an invisible piece of 20th Century in Spain that lies on the ground and a series of events that urge to be clarified.
You can access the interactive map to the Government’s website by clicking here. The map enables you to find the geographic location of the graves or burial places in Spanish territory on which information is available, represented with different coloured symbols based on the actions undertaken on each one.
Adapted from, source: http://www.deconcrete.org/2011/05/10/invisible-mass-graves
