By DPA
Madrid : In August 1936, one month after General Francisco Franco’s right-wing nationalists had risen against Spain’s leftist republican government, four men fell to the bullets of a Francoist firing squad near the southern city of Granada.
The executioners reportedly vented their fury especially on one of the victims, spitting on his body and calling him a “red queer” as he lay in the mass grave.
The 38-year-old victim was Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain’s most beloved poet, whose verses on love and death are still read all over the world.
Seven decades after Lorca’s death and 32 years after Franco’s dictatorship, which followed his victory in the 1936-39 Civil War, the poet’s remains are still buried in the forested area, littered by empty bottles left by drunkards, near the village of Barranco de Viznar.
A new law aimed at rehabilitating Franco’s victims, however, could lead to Lorca’s bones being exhumed from the unmarked mass grave.
Many Spaniards find it a scandal that the legendary poet lies buried “like a dog” as author Manuel Vicent once put it, but Lorca’s family disagrees.
“The memory of Garcia Lorca should live through his works and not his bones,” says the poet’s niece Laura Garcia Lorca, who wants to leave the grave as it is.
Franco’s uprising in 1936 sparked the Civil War in which a total of more than half a million people were killed on both sides.
Among the first victims was Lorca, a left-wing intellectual and homosexual, who had done Francoists “more damage with his pen than others with a gun”, as one officer said.
Lorca wrote about the downtrodden such as gypsies, criticised the narrow-mindedness of the conservative bourgeoisie and even complained about the Catholic re-conquest of Muslim Granada five centuries earlier.
The poet’s work is haunted by a premonition of violent death, which became true when nationalists tracked him down at a friend’s house in Granada.
He was arrested, questioned, imprisoned, taken to Barranco de Viznar and shot dead together with three anarchists, who included a teacher and two bullfighting assistants.
Lorca’s premature death helped to turn him into an international cult figure, posing such a threat to the Franco dictatorship that his works were banned in Spain for over a decade.
The Franco regime paid tribute to nationalists who were killed in the war, but tens of thousands of republicans remain buried in anonymous mass graves scattered all over the country.
The new law pledges official backing to associations, which have already dug up the remains of more than 1,000 people to enable their families to give them honourable burials.
The families of two of the people killed together with Lorca, teacher Dioscoro Galindo and bullfighter Francisco Galadi want their bones to be exhumed. The request has sparked a controversy about what should be done with those of Lorca.
The mass grave constitutes a befitting monument to Lorca’s violent death and to his role as a “people’s poet,” some have argued.
“We are not talking about Garcia Lorca the artist, but about someone equal to the rest of the thousands of bodies which are buried there, and we do not want him to be differentiated, made to stand out” among the others, Laura Garcia Lorca told the daily El Mundo.
Historian and Lorca expert Ian Gibson, however, has disputed the Lorca family’s conviction that examining the poet’s remains would not yield any new information to researchers.
The exhumation could, for instance, clarify whether Lorca was tortured before being executed, Gibson has argued.
Lorca’s remains did not only belong to his family, but to Spain and all of humanity, said Francisco Gonzalez of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory (ARMH), which has spearheaded the campaign for reopening mass graves.
It would hardly be possible to identify the bones of the teacher and the bullfighter without also identifying those of Lorca, Gonzalez pointed out.