Where are more than 20,000 victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship who are still missing in Catalonia?
The starting question is complex. And to search for answers, the latest technology – drones, georadars, artificial intelligence – is already being mobilized, with the aim of locating the mass graves that remain hidden, in an undetermined number. It is the first step that will lead, over time, to the opening and exhumation of the bone remains found to proceed with their identification. Along with the genetic and anthropological analysis, personal items are examined – glasses, jewelry, wallets –, clothing, survival tools such as canteens or cans, but also remains of bullets or shrapnel. Objects that speak about their owners and the circumstances of their death because the graves have their own language, which must be deciphered.
So far, the Generalitat's grave map already has more than 900 located and documented. Since 1999, 90 of these mass graves have been opened and the remains of 862 people have been recovered, according to data from the Department of Justice, Rights and Memory. This year alone, 15 graves have been excavated and 124 bodies have been exhumed, of which seven have been identified and returned to their families. Another 180 – most found in previous years – have been buried with dignity in cemeteries.
That is the goal, to give dignity to the dead and allow families to move forward in the cycle of grief. In Catalonia there is no cemetery like in Normandy with ten thousand white crosses, with names, with dates, that honor the victims of the war. Here many families were unable to bury their dead: soldiers, maquis, executed civilians, whose remains were thrown into common graves. The Generalitat has more than nine hundred documented, but there are more to find, scattered in forests and roads, also in cemeteries.
They are unnamed tombs that, through successive editions of the Pla de Fosses, work is done to locate, excavate and rescue the remains, to give them a name. Of those more than 900 known graves, there are about 700 left to intervene, since before opening they are exhaustively documented, a necessary process but one that adds complexity.
Since this year and in a pioneering experience in Spain, georadars have begun to be used to detect the presence of bone remains, and drones if it is a matter of inspecting large surfaces, which allows reducing time and costs and being more effective, as he explained. Last Friday, the Minister of Justice, Gemma Ubasart, presented the results of the first phase of the current 2023-2026 grave plan, which has a budget of 4.5 million euros, double that of the previous one.
The numbers also grow in the results. In recent years, progress has been made in the identification of exhumed remains. Since 2016, the genetic identification program implemented together with the Department of Health now has a bank of 3,703 DNA samples from living donors (relatives), which has allowed 25 people to be identified in these seven years, in addition to ten others from previous years. The DNA donated by relatives, free of charge and painless, is compared with the genetic profiles carried out on the buried remains and helps in their identification.
Next year, the Generalitat will also create a census of the objects found in the excavated graves – there have been 1,200 this year alone – which provide information about the circumstances of that person's death and their daily life. The benefits are for the entire community. society, not only for historical value. Also to satisfy the right to the truth.
