Queridos amigos:
Perdonen la intrusión con una circular dos veces en un solo día, pero es que no quiero dejar de compartir mi "enhorabuena" a Francisco Goldman -gran escritor, gran amigo-, por el lanzamiento de su aclamado libro "El arte del Asesinato politico: ¿Quién Mató al Obispo?" en el idioma español, por Anagrama.
Este trabajo, el primer libro de no-ficcion del gran novelista Goldman, es resultado de 8 años de investigacion en el horripilante asesinato del obispo guatemalteco Juan Gerardi en 1998, y su encubrimiento posterior, a manos de un grupo de militares y civiles íntimamente ligados al poder. Una crítica en The New York Times calificó de "heroica" la investigacion; Daniel Alarcón, escribiendo en The San Francisco Chronicle, lo llamó "lectura compulsiva." Hay mucho más. Pero léanlo Uds. A mi juicio, es un ejemplar "maestro" de la crónica literaria moderna, y no solo vale la pena leer, da gusto. Ya está. Acaba de salir en librerias en Espana y toda América Latina. Mejores saludos, Jon lee.
44 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009
letter from andalucíaa
lorca’s bone s
Can Spain finally confront its civil-war past?
by jon lee ander son
In the Andalusian city of Granada, a little road leads uphill, past the forested
ramparts of the Alhambra, to a cemetery. The earth there is a deep, raw
red, and the olive trees that punctuate it are green and gray and very old. The
cemetery wall is high and long, the same color as the earth, and it is crowned with
rough clay tiles. Twenty feet or so along the wall from its southwestern corner, there are egg-size gouges in the plastered brick. The marks are impacts from bullets. In the summer
of 1936, more than a thousand people were brought to the cemetery in open
trucks, day after day, to be shot against the wall by firing squads. American tourists
who were staying in the little hotels down the lane later told of their horror at being
awakened before dawn by the grinding gears of the trucks as they went uphill, and
then, minutes later, hearing the volleys of gunfire. On August 16th, thirty people
were shot at the cemetery, while down in the city the poet Federico García Lorca
was taken into custody. Two days later, Lorca was murdered, along with two
bullfighters and a schoolteacher.
Lorca was handsome and dark-haired, and walked with a curious, flat-footed gait
that made him instantly recognizable in Granada, where he had grown up. He was
a son of the local élite; his father was a wealthy granadino landowner. But, in
what was a conservative, provincial city, the family was also associated with the
Spanish Republic and its liberal values;
one of Lorca’s sisters was married to
Granada’s Socialist mayor, who was
among those killed on August 16th. With
his 1928 book of poetry, “Gypsy Ballads,”
and his 1932 play, “Blood Wedding,”
Lorca had become Spain’s most renowned
poet and dramatist. Among his closest
friends were Salvador Dali, with whom he
had a turbulent love affair, and Luis Buñuel,
the film director. Lorca had toured
Spain since 1931 with his own theatre
group, La Barraca, for the Republic’s
Ministry of Education. At the age of
thirty-eight, and more or less openly gay,
Lorca was a highly visible figure with
known Republican sympathies. And that,
in the Granada of the summer of 1936,
was enough to get a person killed.
On July 17, 1936, a forty-three-yearold
general named Francisco Franco had
launched a military rebellion against
Spain’s left-leaning government. A cabal
of military officers seized control of
Granada three days later. In the threeyear
civil war that ensued, Franco and his
ultranationalist Falangists received military
assistance from Hitler and Mussolini,
and more than half a million Spaniards
were killed before the Republic
finally succumbed. In April, 1939, Franco
formally initiated his dictatorship. It
lasted until his death, in 1975.
The old execution ground at the cemetery
was deserted when I visited late one
recent afternoon, but a bouquet of red
roses lay drying against the wall, beneath
a cluster of bullet gouges. The impacts
were roughly at the level of a standing
man’s groin. I said as much to my companion,
Juan Antonio Díaz, a professor of
English and German philology at the
University of Granada. He remarked,
“Not if you were kneeling. They would hit
you at head height.”
A moment later, Díaz cursed. “They
have taken the plaque. I knew they
would.” He pointed to a blank patch on
the wall. A few months earlier, Granada’s
Association for the Recovery of
Historical Memory, of which he was a
member, had installed a small plaque:
“To the victims of Francoism who were
shot at this wall.” Without it, there was
no sign that anything dramatic or historic
had ever occurred here.
Lorca’s grave, by the side of a road at
the edge of a nearby village, was also long
unmarked—he and the bullfighters and
the schoolteacher were buried there together,
secretly and hastily. In 1966, Ian
Gibson, an Irish-born historian who be-
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009 45
came Lorca’s biographer, identified the
probable site, but the bodies remained
where their killers had dumped them.
Then, late last year, a Spanish judge,
Baltasar Garzón, ordered that Lorca be
dug up.
Garzón is famous for finding novel
ways to use the law in the name of historical
justice. In 1998, he invoked international
statutes to secure the arrest, in London,
of the former Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet. This April, he opened
a formal investigation into torture at
Guantánamo Bay. His exhumation order
was seen as a historic challenge to the silence
in Spain about the Franco years—
the first official inquiry into the dictatorship’s
repression. But it set off a raging
public debate in Spain. The problem is
that although the Spanish Civil War
ended seventy years ago, victor and vanquished
were never truly reconciled.
The conflict lives on in unexpected
ways. With Garzón’s order came the
news that Lorca’s own relatives—a group
of nieces and nephews—opposed his exhumation.
(In fact, they had said so before,
but only now did the matter acquire
urgency.) In a tersely worded press communiqué,
they said, “We reiterate our
desire, as legitimate as those of other
relatives, that the remains of Federico
García Lorca repose forever where they
are.” This was incomprehensible to many
in Spain and gave rise to all sorts of rumors—
that the family was embarrassed
about the poet’s homosexuality; that it
had already privately dug him up and reburied
him years before. His relatives had
said that they wanted to avoid “a media
circus.” Instead, they found themselves in
a fight over Lorca’s body.
Until Franco’s death, a textbook titled
“El Parvulito” was standard issue in
Spain’s preschools. In it, the civil war was
introduced to four- and five-year-olds on
a page labelled “The National Uprising.”
Under a picture showing a serious-looking
soldier, bayonet drawn, it reads, “Some
years ago, Spain was very badly governed.
Every day there were shots fired in the
streets and the churches were burned
down. To stop all of this, Franco rose up
with the army, and, after three years of
war, managed to throw out the enemies
of the Fatherland. The Spaniards named
Franco their Chief or Strongman”—Jefe o
Caudillo—“and he has been governing
Spain gloriously since 1936.”
More than four hundred thousand
Spaniards spent time in concentration
camps between 1939 and 1947. And
over the next three decades, Spaniards
continued to be persecuted for political
reasons; thousands were executed by
firing squad and garrotte. Half a million
fled the country. In the jittery, attenuated
glasnost that characterized the transition
to democracy after Franco’s death, however,
politicians adopted a don’t-lookback
policy. In 1977, Spain’s parliament
passed an amnesty law that sealed the
past in what became known as the pacto
de olvido, or pact of oblivion. That’s how
things stood until a decade ago, when
“historical memory” groups, formed by
the descendants of murdered Republicans,
Communists, and anarchists, began
to dig up some of their bodies.
The memory groups’ activities inspired
a national lobby for a reckoning with
Spain’s past, but the conservative Partido
Popular of President José María Aznar,
Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most renowned poet and dramatist, in 1935. He was shot a year later by a Nationalist firing squad.
Fundación Federico García Lorca
46 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009
who was in power from 1996 to 2004, was
hostile to such demands. Aznar was succeeded
by the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero, however, and in 2007 Spain’s
parliament approved a Law of Historical
Memory, which required the state to support
the exhumation of thousands of mass
graves. The bill also granted citizenship to
the descendants of Spanish Republicans
who had been forced to flee the country
between 1936 and 1955. More than a
million people, most of them in Latin
America, became eligible, including as
many as two hundred thousand Cubans.
In February, the first of the new passports
were issued.
Despite the law, Spain’s mass graves
remain largely unexhumed. Maribel
Brenes, a historian who is the president of
the Association for the Recovery of Historical
Memory in Granada, has compiled
a map of a hundred and twenty-five of
them in Granada Province alone, containing
twelve thousand victims. Her motive
wasn’t personal; one of her grandfathers
had fought for Franco. “It’s not about revenge,
it’s about documenting history,”
she said. “We Spaniards are hypocrites.
We threw our hands in the air over what
Pinochet did in South America, but no
one has done anything about our own
desaparecidos”—disappeared ones.
Last October, Baltasar Garzón, in response
to a petition filed by thirteen historical-
memory associations, decreed
that Franco and thirty-four others were
guilty of crimes against humanity—“a
preconceived and systematic plan of
elimination of political opponents through
mass killings, tortures, exile, and forced
disappearances.” He tallied more than a
hundred and fourteen thousand victims.
Declaring Spain’s 1977 amnesty null and
void with regard to human-rights violations,
Garzón ordered an investigation
and the exhumation of nineteen mass
graves, including the one believed
to contain
Lorca’s remains.
Emilio Silva, who founded Spain’s
historical-memory movement, called
Garzón’s order “the condemnation of
Francoism that Spain’s parliament has
never dared to do itself.” But there was
also anger at Garzón. Former President
Aznar, whose grandfather and father
both served under Franco, spoke darkly
about people determined to “destroy”
Spain. Then Javier Zaragoza, Spain’s
prosecutor-general, filed an appeal against
Garzón’s order, challenging his jurisdiction
and accusing him of carrying out an
“inquisition.”
Zaragoza managed to put a temporary
halt to the exhumations. If his appeal succeeded—
and there was a decent chance
that it would—Garzón’s investigation
would be dead. Garzón responded with a
preëmptive and risky move. On November
18th, he suddenly announced that he
was dropping his federal case and instead
referring the crimes he had identified
to Spain’s provincial courts. By doing so,
Garzón kept the investigation going.
There was no doubt, however, that he had
suffered a setback.
Two days later, on the thirty-third anniversary
of Franco’s death, around fifty
people gathered in a rooftop room in a
cultural center in Madrid to express their
support for Garzón. An elderly woman
who had spent time in Franco’s concentration
camps spoke, as did Ian Gibson.
The Valencian folksinger Paco Ibáñez, famous
for putting Lorca’s verses to music,
got up and sang.
Afterward, I went with Ibáñez and
Fanny Rubio, a poet who had helped to
organize the gathering, to meet Garzón
in Riofrío, a café across the street from
the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s high
court. We sat in a corner booth. Garzón
arrived a few minutes later, with one of
his bodyguards. (The militant Basque
separatist group E.T.A. has targeted
Garzón for assassination; one plot, revealed
last week, involved a bottle of poisoned
Cognac.) The bodyguard, a young
man wearing a duster, stood about ten
feet away. Garzón, who is fifty-three and
has a distinctive gray streak in his hair,
ordered chamomile-mint tea. For legal
reasons, he could not speak to me directly
about the case, but he allowed me to sit
in on his conversation with Ibáñez and
Rubio.
Garzón said that he had found himself
on his own in the high-court case, without
any allies. Senior officials in the Socialist
government felt that he had gone
too far, and were not willing to back him.
But the battle was not over. Transferring
the cases to Spain’s provincial courts was
a sort of force multiplier. Now it wasn’t
just up to him. Judges all over the country
would be obliged to investigate, and to do
so seriously, whatever their personal beliefs.
Presented with a crime, they were required
to look at all available evidence, including
the grave sites. He had made a
thousand Lorcas possible.
“What about Lorca’s relatives saying
they don’t want him dug up?” Ibáñez
asked.
“Imagine if, as an investigating judge,
I was shown to a house where a body was
buried in the basement,” Garzón said.
“And, when I ordered it to be dug up, the
family living in the house said, ‘No, you
can’t, that’s our uncle, and we want to
leave him there!’ Would I leave him there
just because they said so?”
Francisco Galadí, the grandson of one
of the two bullfighters killed with
Lorca, is a ruggedly handsome man of
sixty. When I met him in Granada, he
was wearing jeans and a black leather
jacket. He had worked in the local brewery,
Cerveza Alhambra, until recently,
when he had been forced to take early retirement.
With time on his hands, he had
joined the historical-memory association.
Before his father had died, a few years
ago, he had begged Francisco to recover
his grandfather’s remains. “He told me,
‘Don’t leave him lying there like a dog,’ ”
Galadí said. “I’ve been fighting for that.
What I didn’t expect was that the Lorca
family would object.”
Galadí ’s grandfather, also named Francisco,
had been a popular banderillero—a
torero who makes the bull charge, plunging
darts adorned with bright flags into its
neck. He was also an anarchist. For a few
futile days in July, 1936, he had led the
only resistance in the city of Granada to
the military takeover. He and a handful
of fellow anarquistas had held out in the
Albaicín, the old Moorish quarter, under
a withering artillery barrage, but eventually
their ammunition ran out. “They
were in a cave at the foot of the Alhambra,
and my father, who was twelve at the
time, had gone there to say goodbye. He
told him, ‘Vete, hijo’—‘Go, son.’ ” After his
son left, the bullfighter surrendered. “They
say that he was tied to a horse-drawn cart
and that they drove him through the
streets, beating him with sticks,” his
grandson said. “They say he was one
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009 47
of the bravest, most fearless, of men.”
Once, when the younger Galadí was
doing his obligatory military service, in
the late sixties, a colonel had asked him if
he was related to “the famous Galadí.” He
smiled proudly. “You know, in those days,
Federico García Lorca was known only by
other members of the élite, those people
who could read and go to the theatre. But
my grandfather, a bullfighter, was well
known by everyone, because this was a
workers’ city, and they liked the bulls.”
Galadí paused, and then added, “I’ve
lived with my parents’ fear all my life. My
mother is eighty-five now. She was twelve
when it happened. They killed half the
people in her neighborhood! But it wasn’t
just the war, it was the years of repression
afterward, of fear and humiliation. She
used to say ‘Shush!’ whenever I tried to ask
about my grandfather. ‘It’s that they are
real hijos de puta,’ she would say. And the
rancor is still there today, you know? But
they are the rancorous ones. I’ve heard
there are some who are going around saying,
‘We should have killed more of them.’
But I’m not interested in looking for the
grandchildren of those who did the killing.
All I want is to exhume the remains
of my grandfather and to give him a dignified
burial. The Francoists can express
themselves as they like, as they always
have.”
Along with Franco, Ramón Serrano
Súñer was one of the men Garzón
charged with “crimes against humanity.”
He was Franco’s brother-in-law, and
served as Interior Minister during the
civil war. As Foreign Minister from 1940
to 1942, he negotiated personally with
Hitler and Mussolini. He was instrumental
in arranging the Gestapo’s arrest of
Spanish exiles in Occupied France. Some
were returned to Spain and, in many
cases, summarily shot; at least fifteen
thousand were sent to Mauthausen and
other concentration camps. In 1948, Serrano
Súñer was the first public figure in
Spain to admit that Lorca had been killed
by Nationalists, though he blamed “uncontrollables.”
Until then, Franco’s regime
had denied any knowledge of the
crime, and the Nationalist media had
tried to blame it on “the Reds.”
Serrano Súñer died in 2003, at the age
of a hundred and one, but his son, Don
Fernando Serrano Súñer y Polo, agreed
to meet me at my hotel in Madrid for tea.
Don Fernando, who is in his seventies,
wore a sharply tailored English suit.
His mother and Franco’s wife were sisters.
He remarked that Spain’s Falangist
movement had been “misinterpreted,”
and that he found Garzón’s inquiry into
the past “a little depressing.” “It is very
pitiful that we are like we are, all these
years later,” he said. “Two of my father’s
brothers were fusilados and buried in a
mass grave outside Madrid. In other
words, not all the victims are Franco’s.”
Don Fernando said that he admired the
way that Americans had reconciled after
their Civil War, and he proceeded to recite,
from memory, Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address in Spanish.
The closest thing to a national civilwar
monument in Spain is Valle de los
Caídos—the Valley of the Fallen—centered
on a vast subterranean basilica that
Franco ordered built in 1940. Burrowed
deep into the granite of the Sierra de
Guaderrama mountains outside Madrid
and topped by a five-hundred-foot stone
cross, the monument took almost twenty
years, and the labor of thousands of Republican
prisoners of war, to complete.
Although it was billed as a resting place
for the dead of both sides, and contains
the remains of some forty thousand Nationalists
and Republicans, it commemorates
nothing so much as Franco’s megalomania
and triumphalism. When he
inaugurated the necropolis, in 1959,
Franco spoke about how his enemies had
been made to “bite the dust of defeat.” In
the main hall, the only marked tombs are
those of José Antonio Primo de Rivera,
the founder of the Falange Party, and,
since 1975, of Franco himself. (The other
remains are in sealed catacombs.) Not
surprisingly, Valle de los Caídos has
become a sanctuary for Spain’s diehard
Falangists.
Last November 20th, the anniversary
of Franco’s death, his followers came, as
they always do, to pay their respects, although,
in accordance with the new Law
of Historical Memory, police had been ordered
to prevent openly Fascist displays.
Franco’s tombstone was a slab of granite
“Come on, we’re all going to sit around the campfire and play our iPods.”
• •
48 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 22, 2009
in the floor, etched with only his name and
a cross. There were bouquets of red and
white roses, and a wheel of carnations.
Several well-dressed older people bowed
their heads. A small group of plainclothes
policemen stood watching. A man in a red
jacket approached, gave a Fascist salute,
and dropped to one knee. He then stood
up, and saluted once more. One of the policemen
came trotting over, but did nothing.
A moment later, two more men, with
closely cropped hair and small, trimmed
mustaches, met at the tomb and gave simultaneous
Fascist salutes of their own.
Lorca was buried less than five miles
from Granada, on the outskirts of
the village of Alfacar. Following the route
that Lorca’s executioners took, Juan Antonio
Díaz and I drove first to the nearby
village of Víznar. We parked in a little
square next to an eighteenth-century
archbishop’s palace, which, in 1936, was
turned into a military command center. It
will soon be converted into a five-star
hotel. A small road, cut like an elbow
around a deep gulch, led to Alfacar past
what had once been a children’s summer
camp called La Colonia. In the summer
of 1936, La Colonia was used as a holding
center for the victims of the Nationalists’
purge in the area. (There were other
execution grounds, including the city
cemetery.) According to Gibson, Lorca
arrived as a prisoner before daybreak on
August 18th, as did the bullfighters and
the schoolteacher. They were then driven
a short distance down the road, and taken
for a paseo—a stroll.
We walked on that same road. Below
us was the vega, the greensward that surrounds
Granada, which Lorca wrote
about in his 1921 “Meditations and Allegories
of Water”:
I was returning from the dry lands. Down
in the hollow lay the vega, swathed in its blue
shimmer. Through the recumbent air of the
summer night floated the fluttering ribbons
of the crickets.
We saw rectangular stands of white
poplars, as well as the shining roofs of new
industrial warehouses, strung along the
way to Lorca’s birthplace, the village of
Fuente Vaqueros. This view, minus the
warehouses, must have been one of the
last things Lorca saw.
Behind an apartment building, we
came to a fenced-in sliver of hillside
which, some years ago, was belatedly
preserved as a Lorca memorial park. At
its far edge was a lone olive tree, and near
it a small stone marker: “To the memory
of Federico García Lorca and all the victims
of the civil war.” It was the approximate
spot where, according to Gibson’s
sources, including one of the gravediggers,
Lorca and the others had been shot
and buried in a trench “behind an old
olivo on a bend in the road.” There was
nobody else around; a pair of motorcyclists
came racing past, breaking the stillness.
Walking deeper into the park, we
found a stone wall inlaid with Andalusian
blue, green, and white tiles painted
with Lorca’s verses. One, from a 1918
poem, “Autumn Song,” reads, “If death
is death, what then of poets, and of sleeping
things, if no one remembers them?”
On May 29th, the Granada judge assigned
to rule on Lorca’s exhumation recused
herself from the case. This would
have sent it to the Supreme Court of
Spain, which was viewed as unsympathetic
to Garzón. (Two days earlier, the
court had agreed to hear a lawsuit, filed
by a far-right group, charging Garzón
with “prevarication” in the course of his
investigation.) But, on June 9th, Granada’s
prosecutor filed a grievance appeal-
ing the judge’s decision, potentially
returning the case to her. Granada’s historical-
memory association, meanwhile,
declared that if Spain’s courts continued
to stonewall its efforts, it would request
that the graves be opened as an “archeological
site.” Amid these developments,
Lorca’s family was silent.
When I asked Juan Antonio Díaz
about the Lorca family, he shook his
head. “Any normal person, with a close
relative—a father, an uncle, a son—who
has been mysteriously disappeared, and is
known to have been murdered, has to feel
the minimal interest in where he might
be. In the case of Lorca, this is even
greater, because Lorca isn’t only the patrimony
of one family but of all decent
people of this world. Normal people want
to know what happened, and where Lorca
is. But it seems there are people who are
not normal, and are incapable of resolving
their personal and family traumas.”
Laura García Lorca, the poet’s niece,
has a breathtaking view of the
Alhambra from the living room of
her apartment, on the top floor of a
building in central Granada. A former
actress, with the large, expressive brown
eyes of her late uncle, Laura heads
the Federico García Lorca Foundation.
On the day I visited, she appeared
overwrought. All of the media attention,
she said, had been extremely
stressful.
“We have, I think, never communicated
our feelings well,” she said, with a
sigh. “So—why don’t we want him dug
up? As far as the remains of Federico
García Lorca are concerned, for us—
and these are things that are perhaps
a little irrational—we will not gain
any consolation from knowing exactly
where his remains are,” she said. “We
would like to leave him there.” She
went on, “A great deal has been said
about all of this; it is said that we don’t
want to stir up history. This is an infamy!
As a family, we have done everything
in our power for the history to be
known.”
Laura’s tone turned sarcastic. “But
no, it seems it is conservative to not
open a tomb, and progressive to open it.
They have even said we are homophobes.
This is defamation, just plain
crazy. It’s not that. It’s that there is a
prurient interest in this search for Federico
García Lorca. And it is logical; he
was a symbol. But we want him to be
respected. For us, the prospect of exposing
further the degrading circumstances
in which he was murdered is very disagreeable.
To violate him further would
be, for some—very unpleasant.” Laura
wept.
After she had composed herself, she
said, “We don’t want this to become a
spectacle. But it is very difficult to imagine
that the bones and skull of Federico
García Lorca will not end up on You-
Tube.”
Laura remarked that those whose
relatives happened to be buried with
Lorca seemed much more interested in
exhuming them than were other victims’
families. “Isn’t it strange?” she said.
“The question is, Why do people want
to dig him up? Is it that they want the
relic, the bones of the saint? Because it
adds nothing to history.”
“But why,” I insisted, “leave him in
the ditch where his killers dumped
him?”
“What ditch?” Laura retorted. “It’s a
sacred place. They’re all in good company
there.” 