by INES BENITEZ
The remains of 2,840 victims exhumed from a common grave will be laid to rest in the memorial in the old San Rafael cemetery in Málaga. The families will be able to reclaim them after each body is identified. PHOTO/Inés Benítez/IPS
MALAGA, Spain, Sep 27 2013 (IPS) – A pyramid is being built in the old San Rafael cemetery in the southern Spanish city of Málaga – a monument to thousands of people shot by firing squads here during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.
Their bodies were exhumed from the biggest of the mass graves from that era scattered around Spain.
On a Wednesday Sept. 25 visit to the cemetery, which was closed in 1987, IPS saw the nearly complete mausoleum in the shape of a pyramid, which will be covered in slabs of white marble engraved with the names of the people buried there.
The rest of the abandoned cemetery will be a public garden.
The monument and mausoleum will be completed in a few weeks. But it will be many years before the remains of each body to be placed there are identified and, in some cases at least, handed over to the families.
“The only thing I remember are my mother’s screams when they took him away,” said José Dorado, 79, who was three years old when Franco’s troops shot his father, Pedro Dorado, a railway worker, in the nearby village of Bobadilla.
Inter Press Service for more