The last identified in the Crptamuros crypts are a phalangist and a young man located by the DNA of his deceased sister | Spain

Two years after a group of forensic entered the crypts of the Cuelgamuros Valley, formerly known as of the fallen, To try to locate the remains of victims buried there, in many cases without the consent of their families, the team has managed to identify 31 victims and genetically identified 18 of them. The most recent cases correspond to a man who fought in the first century of Falange de Álava when he died in the civil war and a 25 -year -old boy killed in August 1936 by a group of Falangists. To identify the remains of the latter, a sample of DNA of her deceased sister, buried in the Alagón cemetery (Zaragoza) was taken. Until 199 families, the government has requested the remains of relatives buried in the old Francoist mausoleum.

The process has not been easy, as Francisco Etxeberria recalls, a forensic anthropologist who coordinates the work inside the crypts, and there are still months of task ahead. In 2021, when he gave the government the mausoleum intervention plan, he said, In conversation with this newspaper, which was « an unprecedented forensic challenge. » Today, however, it emphasizes that the greatest difficulties have been external, due to the cataract of resources presented by Francoist and Antimemomorialist groups against the intervention and precautionary measures imposed by some courts that slowed the procedure. « That matter cleared last April, but made us waste a lot of time, » recalls the coroner, referring to the Decision of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid to dismiss the resources presented and give the green light to the exhumations in Cuelgamuros. The work team includes personnel from the University of Granada, that of Barcelona, ​​the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences and the Scientific Police. In total, more than 20 people, including historians, anthropologists, geneticists, dentists … to date, 155 relatives of victims buried in Cazgamuros have visited the valley, where the forensic have answered their questions about the process.

The team has already located 36 boxes corresponding to claims made by relatives and that house the remains of some 470 victims, including Lopeña brothers, from Calatayud. In this case, the son and nephew of the deceased, Manuel Lapeña, obtained in 2016 a favorable sentence to the exhumation of the crypts, but He died in 2021, at age 97, without having come. Among the remains that have already been located and delivered so that they were reinhumated in their villages of origin are 17 neighbors of Magallón (Zaragoza)including its republican mayor, and another 12 of Aldeaseca (Ávila), among them, Fausto Canales’ father, which battled for 20 years with the administration to get him out of Coatamuros.

To feed the crypts of the monument that Franco devised to immortalize his victory in the Civil War, and before the refusal of widows of the national side to transfer the remains to the mausoleum, the regime resorted from the end of the fifties, to « red graves. » Without the knowledge of their relatives, they opened dozens of clandestine burials and transferred the bodies to the Valley of the Fallen, which houses about 33,800 victims, the equivalent of the city of Teruel.

The Government announced last March an international ideas contest to resignify the entire complex. After negotiating for months with the Church, finally, against his criteria of the last five yearsHe accepted that the Benedictine community remains in the valley. The resignification project has a budget of 30.5 million euros.