The administrations replicate the Pico Reja formula for the exhumation of Monumento, the largest Franco grave in Seville

“It is great news that we have agreed.”

This is how the president of the Seville Provincial Council, the socialist Javier Fernández, summarized the importance of the signature by the representatives of the Government of Spain, the Junta of Andalusia, the Seville City Council and the entity that directs the initial protocol to undertake the exhumation of Monument, the largest Francoist grave in the city of Seville.

The four administrations thus reissue the collaboration formula that was launched for the work on the neighboring Pico Reja grave, which, after extracting 10,076 remains of human beings, 1,786 reprisals, have turned it into the largest mass grave in Spain and the second in Western Europe, after Srebrenica, in Bosnia Herzegovina.

This agreement, which must now be specified in a protocol that will then give way to the definitive agreement, has pleasantly surprised the memorial associations that had denounced in recent months the stoppage of the actions in the Monument grave by the Seville City Council.

The entities had drawn attention to how, with the arrival to power of José Luis Sanz (PP), the council had diverted to other works the budget item reserved by the previous Government team (PSOE) for that burial because it understood that the memory democracy was a regional competence and that allocating those funds to exhumations would imply “a bit of waste,” according to the mayor.

Finally, the council has joined the project - claiming that they did not want to lead it, but did want to accompany it - which is estimated at around 1.8 million euros, as confirmed to this newspaper by sources familiar with the agreement, which will be put out to tender by the council itself. town hall, since the cemetery is located in its municipal area, and to which the rest of the institutions will transfer their respective contributions.

The work will last, according to those same sources, over three or four years.

2,613 retaliated

“This grave is absolutely complex,” warns historian José Díaz Arriaza.

According to his calculations, in Monument, which was active between September 1936 and January 1940, 7,440 people were buried, including 2,613 reprisals from Franco's regime.

A quantity much higher than the initial ones with which work began in Pico Reja, where it was expected to find 850 victims of repression and another 253 people killed for other reasons.

The team of archaeologists soon confirmed that these figures were much lower than what they were going to find later - more than 10,000 corpses and almost 1,800 murdered during the Civil War and the dictatorship - and that experience is what leads Díaz Arriaza to think that What Monument throws out exceeds the initial forecasts.

“Pico Reja was more controlled because there were initially people murdered by war parties and a court-martial, but in Monumento the perimeter is larger because there are deaths by court-martial and deaths in prison and those are more difficult to investigate because they do not have signs of violence and it is not possible to know if they come from prison or from hospitals," he explains about the complexity of the work that the team of archaeologists and technicians who have to carry out the exhumations will face.

“In addition, as happened with Pico Reja, the dates of the burials could change,” he explains.

“This is not a question of one or the other, but a question of humanity and human rights,” said the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, after signing the agreement.

The Deputy Minister of Tourism and Culture, Víctor Fernández, also wanted to emphasize the importance of the agreement between four administrations of different political colors.

“This is a problem that goes beyond numbers, since these are families that need to have the remains of their loved ones and restore their dignity,” he assured.

On February 21 of last year, the Pico Reja grave was closed.

The three years of work brought to light not only more victims than expected, but also “the morphology” of what Franco's repression was like.

“It is an indifference that we have not seen in other graves and it represents the seed of hatred that was going to germinate later, the sadism that entails not considering the victims as people worthy of consideration and continuing to remove their corpses with the remains of other people who were also the outcasts of society,” Juan Manuel Guijo, the head of the Aranzadi Society team that led the exhumations, explained to this newspaper.

We will see what certainties will emerge from Monument.