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In August 2011, I attended the exhumation of Severiano Clemente González, conducted by the Forum for Memory in the Castilian town of La Toba, Guadalajara. Mr González was one of the over 130,000 civilian victims of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). Even after Spain's democratic stitution in most families could not recover their loved ones, owing to an unofficial 'Pact of Silence' whereby major political actors agreed not to legislate, litigate or discuss the still controversial past in the public sphere (Encarnación 2014). Since 2000, however, civil ety such as the Forum for Memory and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) have been leading a series of forensic exhumations - modelled after similar state-led interventions in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe (Ferrándiz 2010; Rubin 2014).
As is the organisation's custom, the Forum for Memory held their 'first homage' to Mr González in the recently emptied pit. The ceremony consisted of Republican ballads, speeches and the laying of tricolour wreaths in order to honour the dead. Among the speakers that day was the president of the association, José Maria Pedreño. Mr Pedreño recounted the difficulty they had in locating the grave. Oral testimonies placed the interment somewhere in a large open field. But in the ensuing seventy years, all of the landmarks that people used to describe its location had been erased from the landscape. As a result, finding the grave took quite some time. Mr Pedreño, however, offered an alternative explanation for the delays:
At first we did not put up any flag that represented his ideas, and I think that he was saying 'Let's see if these people above me are the people who killed me, trying now to kill me once again'. As soon as we put up the colour flag, I believe that Severiano must have said, 'these are my people that have come to find me and I am going with them'.
Mr. Pedreño here attributes the difficulty in finding the remains not to the imprecision of testimonial and documentary evidence, nor to the inherent challenges of trying to pinpoint an unmarked grave sev- unmarked grave sev- enty-five years after the fact, nor even to the technological and cial of civil society...