On the western end of the Sierra Morena, about seventy kilometers north-west of Sevilla, there are the vast open cast Rio Tinto mines, silent and abandoned for some years, but re-opened for copper extraction this year.. As you fly in to Spain from Lisbon, about twenty minutes into the trip the mines stand out like a great injury to the surface of the earth below. The mines have been worked since the Phoenicians began to extract the copper and silver three thousand years ago, taking it down the road to Huelva, some thirty miles away. Some sources suggest that it was the copper from these mines that began the bronze age. A few miles down this road from the mines is the small town of Zalamea La Real, which today has a population of three thousand people. Some say that the village name refers to King Solomon, and these were his fabled mines.

It was here, on the twenty eighth of August 2006, that Esteban Caballero and three helpers carried a small wooden box into the town cemetery. The box contained the bones of Francisco Caballero Gomez and Rosario Palmar Garcia. They had been the grandparents of Esteban, who had come from his home in Bercelona to help locate their gravesite in the fields outside of town and had stayed to recover the remains. Now, a modest crowd stood in silence as they were finally laid to rest in the cemetery. There were no religious elements to the ceremony. At the edge of the cemetery, someone had carried the red and black flag of the CNT; the anarchist workers union. It was almost seventy years since the fifty nine year old farmworker couple were shot outside their cottage, by Alfonso Doñoro Durán, Captain of the Guardia Civil in Zalamea, and two of his men.(1)

Such arbitrary killings were not unusual in the years after the military overthrow of the elected government of Spain in 1936 by a group of conspirators led by Francisco Franco, who then ruled Spain for the next forty years. Most such killings took place at night on the roadside, and the bodies were then dumped somewhere to be collected later and thrown into mass graves. Some sources estimate that as many as one hundred thousand Spaniards may have been killed in this way. The majority of the killings were the work of the rightist forces, the Falangistas, who supported Franco, although there were killings carried out by elements of the leftist Republicans as well.

What is unusual in this case is that there is an extensive documentary record of the circumstances of the killings, and also that someone was a witness to the burial in the shallow grave on the hillside near the farmworkers’ cottage and that knowledge of the precise location was passed on through two generations to Esteban Cabllero who got the informaton from his father.

The reason that there came to be an extensive documentary record, is not because two middle-aged farmworkers wer shot that day, but because Captain Doñoro ran over the boundaries of his own command structure and transgressed the rights and responsibilities of another agency. There was a judicial enquiry, yes, but not into the killing, but into the fact that Doñoro had arbitrarily seized the two farmworkers from another agency before the killing. The issue was closed by a finding of the Court in Sevilla that, since the people concerned were dead, there was no reason to continue the investigation. But the documents remianed on file for seventy years until discovered by researchers from the Asociación Memoria Histórica y Justicia de Andalucía.

Although Francisco and Rosario, were shot in the spring of 1938, we need to go back a couple of years before that to understand the political setting. Franco had landed in Sevilla in July of 1936 with a small force of Moroccan soldiers and some from the Spanish Foreign Legion. They were encouraged to spread terror among the working class population of the city, which was notorious for its left ideology, such that Seville was called “Sevilla La Roja.” The Rio Tinto mines, then worked by a British corporation, were also notorious for the radicalism of the workers. In fact, some fifteen years after the British bought the mines in 1873 they called in the army to quell a demonstration by the workers; the troops opened fire and a couple of hundred workers died.(2)

Francisco and Rosario had two sons, young men of military age, who probably worked at the mines. As the Falangista forces swept through Andalucia in the summer of 1936, spreading terror before them, the sons left Zalamea heading north to fight with the Republican army which was supporting the elected government of Spain.

Two years later, Zalamea and all of Andalucia was controlled by the Falangistas, and ruled under the Bando de Guerra (edict of military rule). Under this edict, any suspicion of leftist sympathies was considered evidence of rebelion militar, and was a capital crime.

The statement of Captain Doñoro was that, on March 11 he had gone to the farmworker’s cottage to carry out a search. His men had found that, in a drawer, there were a number of publications which were of a revolutionary character. The possession of these was equivalent to guilt of the crime of military rebellion at that time.

The Captain took the couple into custody and delivered them to the jail in the nearby town of Valverde el Camino, which is few kilometers further down the hills towards the coast. They were held there for the next two weeks. On the 26 of March a functionary of the court from Huelva arrived at the jail to take a deposition from the couple. Much to his surprise he found that they were no longer at the jail, and the jailer explained that, at five or six in the morning they had been taken from their cells by officers from the Guardia Civil of Zalamea and removed at the point of a gun.

In another deposition by Captain Doñoro he attested that he had taken the couple from the jail in Valverde in order to have them present while he carried out another search of their cottage. On arrival at the cottage, he asserted, the couple tried to escape, and failed to halt when commanded to do so and were then shot by his officers. There was an investgation of the circumstances by several judicial authorites in the months following the killings, but rather than trying to find out why Captain Doñoro had killed them it was more focussed on why he had exceeded his authority when he removed them from the jail in Valverde. The investigation closed with a ruling from various judicial bodies that the deaths of Francisco and Rosario, far from being a reason to believe that a crime had been committed, removed any reason for further investigation, and the case was closed.

Looking back at these seventy year old documents, one concludes that we still don’t know why things happened the way they did. Having arrested the couple, and sent them to jail, why did Captain Doñoro not leave the system of military justice to take care of them? He had already submitted evidence of their possession of revolutionary literature. He didn’t go through the proper channels, if in fact he had reason to take them back to the house for another search, but showed up at the jail with armed men. Why did he think he needed them there anyway, for another search? The story that they tried to run away is implausible since he and the two officers that were with him could easily have chased down the ageing couple.

It seems like Doñoro had some kind of anger against the couple, and was concerned that the judicial authorities might in the end not sentence them to death, so he decided to do it himself. We shall never know. If there had not been some watcher from the village who saw their burial on the hillside seventy years ago, and was able to communicate that to one of the sons, probably before the Republican armies collapsed and their remnants took refuge across the French border, then the bones of Francisco and Rosario would still be there, and not in their little casket, together in the cemetery of Zalamea la Real.

After Francos death in 1975 Spain made a remarkable recovery to become the liberal and open society it is today. At that time, it was generally felt that the wounds caused by the civil war were too fresh, and the subject lay hidden. Now, however there are increasing attempts to bring out the truth of the terrible crimes that were committed, and to find the remains of the thousands, like Francisco and Rosario, who were hurriedly buried in unmarked graves. These efforts have been largely the work of Judge Baltasar Garzon, who works as a prosecutor attached to Spain’s Audencia Nacional (Supreme Court). (He earlier was involved in the attempted extradition of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to be tried for crimes against humanity committed in Chile.)

Now, however, his work has aroused the enmity of others who would prefer that the past crimes of the Franquistas should remain in the past. Some have suggested that he be transferred to the International Court in the Hague, where he would be less dangerous. The conflict has escalated to street demonstrations in the streets of Madrid, and is likely to continue.(3)

Notes:

1. http://www.todoslosnombres.org/doc/documentos/documento71.pdf accessed May 2010. This the main source for this article, but is not without problems, starting with the title page which says: Exhumacion de Esteban Caballero y Rosario Palmar. Esteban Caballero is, of course the one who came from Barcelona to find the grave of his grandfather Francisco Caballero, and supervise the exhumation. Some of the material in this source is drawn from the blog: http://zalamealareal.blogspot.com/

2. http://ecoethics.net/hsev/200003txt.htm Joan Martinez-Alier Environmental Justice, Sustainability and Valuation a massacre by the Army on the 4th February 1888 of local farmers and peasants, and syndicalist miners, was the culmination of years of protests against sulfur dioxide pollution. Historians still debate the number of deaths caused when the Pavia Regiment opened fire against a large demonstration in the plaza of the village of Rio Tinto

3. http://www.elpais.com/global/ accessed May 13 2010, and earlier