Since 2019, 9,000 bodies of victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent Franco dictatorship have been exhumed from mass graves, according to a government report, which approves new funds this Tuesday for municipalities to continue this work.
In 2019, a group of experts prepared a report commissioned by the Ministry of Justice that proposed that the State assume the exhumation of the remains of some 20,000 or 25,000 executed victims who are in mass graves throughout the Spanish geography.
Of them, according to those experts, perhaps between 5,000 and 7,000 people could be identified.
The Democratic Memory Law, approved in 2022, states that it will be the responsibility of the General State Administration “to search for people who disappeared during the war and the dictatorship, without prejudice to the powers of other public administrations related to said activity”.
In this regard, the funds that the Government will approve today are intended for the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces and the city councils.
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Before, most of those exhumations, protected by the previous Historical Memory Law of 2007, were carried out by private entities, above all, memory associations.
To the people buried in unidentified mass graves throughout Spain, those already identified in recent decades should be added, a task that the previous Historical Memory Law promoted.
According to the 2019 study, between 2000 and 2018, 740 mass graves had been opened and more than 9,000 bodies had been recovered.
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Since 2019, according to new data provided by the Executive, 6,000 more bodies have been exhumed thanks to the funds from the four-year plans approved by the Government and 3,000 within the framework of initiatives promoted by other historical memory entities.
