Victims of the Civil War and the Franco Repression in Asturias: A Provisional Balance

Volume 1 - Issue 3

Carmen Garcia*

Received: May 24, 2018;   Published: May 29, 2018

DOI: 10.32474/PRJFGS.2018.01.000115

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Abstract

Counting and naming the dead of armed conflicts, massacres and any historical traumatic event is not yet an easy task; even less if they mediated long decades with a dictatorship of almost forty years in between. More difficulties involve the localization in space of a large part of the fatalities resulting from irregular repression (“walks”), as well as that of hundreds of soldiers fallen on the front and so often poorly buried in improvised trenches or trenches. Counting, naming and, as far as possible, locating the burial sites were the basic objectives of the research project that since 2003 we have been carrying out at the University of Oviedo under the direction of who signs these pages. The initial impulse came from the petitions that descendants of the losers and associations committed to the signification of the victims of Franco’s repression made to the Government of the Principality. The insistence of the so-called “memory entrepreneurs” prompted the signing of an agreement with the University of Oviedo, signed in 2003, and which aimed to locate the mass graves scattered in cemeteries, mountains, “praos”, ditches, wells and natural chasms. In a first phase the project, called “Identification of common graves and other places of burial of missing persons as a result of the civil war”, had only two fellows, Pedro Luis Alonso Garcia and Gustavo Alvarez Rico whose only stipend barely covered the expenses derived from the investigation.

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