Nobody could imagine in January 2020, when the excavations began, the magnitude of the Pico Reja trench in the Seville cemetery. The latest report from the Aranzadi Science Society, responsible for the exhumations and dated January, makes it clear: the The amount of evidence found of bodies and reprisals caused “a significant distortion in the planning of the work from day one & rdquor;.
The figures of the finds in those 700 square meters are overwhelming: 1,786 murdered with obvious signs of repression, remains of more than 10,000 bodies, 4,781 coffins, 3,342 ossuaries and 163 pieces of “isolated material& rdquor;. The largest mass grave opened in Western Europe since the genocide of srebrenica in the Bosnia and Herzegovina war the largest in all of Spain. A grave that from the capital of Andalusia attests to the massacre that was the Spanish Civil War.
This Tuesday, relatives of those subjected to reprisals have been in charge of throwing the shovels with earth that have symbolically marked the end of the exhumation work and the sealing of the grave, on the surface of which will be built an ossuary-memorial and a columbarium. With this gesture culminates in the Sevillian cemetery “the largest project to recover historical memory that has been carried out in the entire Spanish territory”, recalled the mayor of the city, Antonio Muñoz.
evidence of violence
Matilde Hermoso, the granddaughter of the former mayor of Seville; Josefa and Carmen Amado, the daughters of Councilor Rafael Amado; Purification Oliver, the granddaughter of another councilor, José Manuel Puelles; They were among those present. Like Miguel, grandson of Miguel Guerrero, a member of the Mining Column or Ángel, son of Eugenio Rodríguez, a trade unionist from the La Cartuja factory who was shot in 1936; or like Ana, niece of Ramón and Antonio Sánchez, two residents of Cerro del Águila, from the Communist Party who were assassinated. Everyone came excited an act that heals wounds and that has had behind it the drive of the memorialist associations from Andalusia.
The brutality remains attached to the bones found, some broken, hands tied behind the back, bullets at point blank range in the skull or in the extremities, thrown as if in a dump, on their backs, without a coffin, some with their belongings. It is estimated that there are remains of murdered people from all over Andalusia and other parts of Spain.
Among the exhumed remains are those of the fighters of the Mining Column, which led the miners from Huelva to Seville to liberate the city from General Queipo de Llano, recently exhumed from the Macarena Basilica.
There are still no results from the DNA tests, there are a thousand samples in the gene bank set up at the University of Granada, which depend on the Junta de Andalucía. To date, no identification has yet been achieved, neither through the skeletal remains, nor through any characteristic described by the next of kin.
“My father got up and said ‘Anita, give me the jacket’, to my mother. The jacket for what if we are going to ask him a few questions and that’s it. Until today. I was four years old and asked and dad and dad and dad. It seems that I am listening to him & rdquor ;, says Josefa Amado, one of the daughters of the victims, who still breaks down today, at a very advanced age and sitting in a wheelchair. “I have been waiting for two years saying to see if it can be, to see if I would arrive, of course, I am 97 years old & rdquor ;. “My father was 28 years old when he was murdered. My mother was widowed at 26. I was left without a father when I was two and a half years old and my sister with one. Based on the date he was murdered, we believe he is here,” adds another son of the murdered.
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The City Council, the Provincial Council, the Junta de Andalucía and the central government have co-financed the 1.5 million euro investment in the exhumation tasks, carried out by the Aranzadi Foundation, since 2017, when work began on other nearby graves. Pico Reja is one of the eight burials in the cemetery. “And we have discovered that the reality was much worse than what was estimated in the initial forecasts and in the studies that served us as a reference to start this action,” admitted Muñoz.
The Pico Reja ossuary-memorial will be triangular, a peak with three edges and three entrances, which will refer to the “truth, justice and reparation”. It will also have a memory tree, a cypress, in the middle.