Word: war
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...located outside the southern town of Alfácar. For decades, the site has been suspected to hold the remains of the renowned poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by the Nationalist Civil Guard in the early months of Spain's 1936-39 Civil War. For a country that has long suppressed its public memory of the conflict, the exhumation represents one more significant step on the road to making peace with its past. But this being Spain, where nearly every attempt to commemorate the war's victims or punish its perpetrators is still...
...Civil War and the nearly 40 years of dictatorship that followed, few events were cast in thicker shadows than the death of Lorca, known for such works as Romancero Gitano and Blood Wedding. He was arrested in Granada on Aug. 17, 1936, for "subversive" activities (in addition to being politically progressive, Lorca was gay). He was later taken from his cell and pushed into the back of a Civil Guard squad car. What happened after that remained a mystery until years later. In the 1950s and '60s, writers Gerald Brenan and Ian Gibson interviewed witnesses who said that Lorca...
...past 15 years or so, this silence has gradually given way to a cacophony of demands to come to terms with the past. Books and documentaries have focused on everything from the mass executions of people on both sides of the Civil War to the plight of the "lost" children sent into protective exile in the Soviet Union. In 2007, the Spanish parliament passed the Law of Historical Memory, providing pensions to soldiers who fought in the Republican army, denying the legitimacy of Franco's political trials and requiring the removal of all symbols of the Franco regime from public...
...most literal example of this desire to unearth buried history comes in the form of disinterments. For several years now, volunteers with organizations like the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) have spent their weekends digging up the remains of Republican sympathizers who were executed during the war. "The exhumations are the best way of closing the wounds of the past," says Santiago Macias, vice president of the Madrid-based ARMH. "They offer the families of victims a way to heal...
...Lorente and his team will conduct on some of the remains. "If the family doesn't give us tissue samples for us to establish the [family] DNA, those remains will never be identified," Lorente says. It's a fittingly incomplete end for an emblematic figure in a war whose ghosts have yet to be put to rest...