Spain exhumes victim of Franco-era killings in ongoing recovery effort

By Susana Vera and Emma Pinedo

VEGAS DE MATUTE, Spain (Reuters) -Jose Luis Cubo watched as forensic scientists dug up the body of a man his grandfather had helped to bury at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 after an execution by fascist forces.

The remains pulled from a muddy pit in Vegas de Matute farmland, 75 km (47 miles) north of Madrid, are either those of Luis Garcia Hernandez, a 42-year-old teacher and union member, or of Julio Maroto Ortega, 60, a road worker, activists from non-profit group Historic Memory Recovery Association believe.

The exhumation is part of a drive started by victim associations in 2000 and picked up by the Socialist-led government in 2018 to revisit and resolve past crimes under fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

In Vegas de Matute, Cubo, 83, said his grandfather Lorenzo Cubo had seen a truck from the Falange fascist militia arrive in the area, then heard gunshots, and locals found the bodies and buried them when night fell.

"This area was known as the death zone. We continued to cultivate and harvest it. And where we thought they were buried, the wheat grew much more than around it," Cubo said.

Spanish society remains polarised by the legacy of Franco, whose death 50 years ago on Thursday led to democracy in Spain and its eventual accession to the European Union and NATO.

The government, which has been paying homage to victims, estimates it is roughly halfway through the ambitious project to dig up and dignify the bodies of people buried in mass graves during the 1936-39 civil war and Franco's four-decade-long rule.

There is no official tally of people who disappeared during that time, but in 2008 former High Court Judge Baltasar Garzon put the likely number of victims at around 114,000.

The government believes only 20,000 are recoverable due to the passage of time, road construction and other factors.

Around 9,000 bodies have been found and the rest should be dug up in the next four years, State Secretary for Democratic Memory Fernando Martinez Lopez told Reuters.

Although only 700 have been identified, the government says every body's recovery is valuable, and that those which remain unidentified are placed in more formal memorial sites.

"Every mass grave we open, it's a wound that we close," Martinez said.

(Writing by Emma Pinedo; editing by Aislinn Laing, Andrei Khalip and Mark Heinrich)