by ALASDAIR FOTHERINGHAM
Half a century has passed since Francisco Franco’s dictatorship ended with his death, but some today valorise his rule.
This summer, Marina Roldan, a lawyer from Granada in southern Spain, finally got the phone call her family had waited decades for.
The body of Fermin Roldan Garcia, her grandfather, who was one of tens of thousands of people killed by General Francisco Franco’s death squads in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, had finally been located and identified.
His remains were found in a ravine in the village of Viznar, a few kilometres outside Granada.
“My brother Juan called me. He’d been the family contact with the archaeological team carrying out the excavation,” Roldan told Al Jazeera. “When Juan told me my grandfather had been found, my first thoughts were for my [late] father.”
Her father, Jose Antonio Roldan Diaz, was just 10 months old when his father was killed at the age of 41.
Roldan Garcia was a tax inspector, a trade unionist and a member of the Socialist Party who stood unsuccessfully for parliament in the February 1936 elections in Granada.
As Marina remembers them, her voice falters with the emotion of it all. The noise of passing trams echoes through an open window of her office.
“I thought of [my father] and I thought of my late uncles, who would have liked to have heard the news, and my grandmother too. … I think they all deserved their husband, their father, to be found.”
On Thursday, Spain marks 50 years since the end of Franco’s dictatorship – four decades that ended with his death on November 20, 1975.
Al Jazeera for more