Digital freedom visited the Los Mártires de Paracuellos cemetery (which manages Brotherhood of Our Lady of Martyrs and Fallen at Paracuella del Jarama) to recall those nights of November and December 1936, when thousands of Spaniards were shot in the field for being “dissatisfied” with the ideological regime of the Popular Front.
At the start of the civil war, the prisons of Madrid and the so-called Czechs, centers of illegal detention and torture, were overwhelmed with people arrested in their own homes for their alleged links with the political right or for participating in mass gatherings. … They also include hundreds of retired soldiers from the reform of Manuel Azaña and religious leaders targeted by the left since the beginning of the Second Republic. Thousands of men, around the age of 16, were extrajudicially executed in the rear.
The extraction of prisoners was carried out prudently and under the pretext that they were going to be transferred to prisons on the outskirts of the capital. Communists, socialists, trade union or anarchist militias arrived with the lists and, after saying their first and last names, put them on the City Transport Company double-decker buses, famous bags, etc. death convoys… They tied them in twos with wire at the elbows.
It is estimated that in the sacred field of Paracuellos there may be up to 8000 corpses… Whole families, parents and children who shared a cell or a Czech for weeks and who were shot together are not always fatal. Many died suffocating in the pit itself under the weight of the corpses that fell on them. By the way, at gunpoint, militiamen forced residents of nearby towns to dig graves, move bodies and pour earth over them. An injury that is also remembered.
Tell a story about these seven mass graves It would be easier if the victims were from Franco, and not from the Popular Front government of Largo Caballero and Santiago Carrillo (public order adviser to the Madrid Defense Council), but from the work of trade union, communist and socialist militias. V Democratic Remembrance ActDesigned by the moral heirs of the totalitarian politicians of the Second Republic, it would not have spared an epic or lyric to describe mass executions and selective killing of entire families, genocide in the rear. By the way, this is undoubtedly up-to-date data, Francisco Franco has never been to the areatucked away in the cemetery by victims who never received grants. There is no harm that does not come forever, and at this point, there is little that Pedro Sánchez’s government can do here.
Los Mártires de Paracuellos Cemetery is a secluded place devoid of recognition and compassion in the face of pain, which is preserved thanks to widows who began making pilgrimages in the 1940s when rumors spread that this was the fate of their loved ones.
We spent several hours traveling through an amazing and symbolic place. It’s hard to believe that these seven mass graves do not matter to anyone, it’s not a shame. Digital freedom pay tribute to these victims, all innocent people.
The cycle of five reports ends with a meeting with Federico Jimenez Losantos Pedro Corral, Miguel Plaon and Nuria Richart.
Direction and letter: Nuria Richart.
Image: Daniel Palacios.
Version: Ivan Martinez Huetos and Juanma Bonake.