Spain

Photo courtesy Flickr user Elfer. Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon is asking the European Court of Human Rights to overturn his prosecution for looking into Franco-era crimes — the latest indication that the ghosts of the Spanish civil war are still alive in Spain. Garzon had launched a probe in the disappearance of tens of...
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Sanchez wanted us to meet another man whose loved ones were believed to have been thrown in into the Wells of Caudé. He drove us into a new housing development where Jáures Sánchez and his wife had built a summer home. Soon we were driving aimlessly into the countryside. “I’ve been here one or...
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The surrounding countryside was littered with the graves of Franco’s victims, Francisco Sánchez told us. Some had just two or three bodies. One had many more. Six miles from Teruel, sandwiched between fields and factories along a highway, rose a whitewashed monument. The red, yellow and purple flag of the Spanish Republic rose overhead....
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Jerónimo Barquero was not in Teruel when it was being bombed. When nationalist forces seized Teruel, he sneaked from his home disguised as a woman and joined the Loyalist army. He was 16, one of those young faces Orwell saw in Aragon. At 90, he was one of the few civil war veterans still...
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“I can’t handle the emotion of this,” a woman was saying as she accepted the remains of her father, “so many years being with the fascists trampling over us, insulting us, and it’s still going on. It’s still going on.” The ceremony was already in process when we arrived. We rented a car and...
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In 2000, Silva, a journalist, had left his magazine job and began to write a novel about his grandfather. He started interviewing people who knew him. One man, a childhood friend, was the brother of the man who escaped that night. The two set off to find the grave. “In this town, there are...
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