SIGHTSEEING
Franco ’ s repression in Navarre through its spaces of remembrance
José Miguel Gastón Aguas and César Layana Ilundain Navarre Institute of Memory Government of Navarre
Political cleansing in Navarre , dismemory and family resistance
On 18 July 1936 , a military coup against the Second Republic was successful in Spain . The uprising had been forged in a small city in the north of the peninsula : Pamplona , where General Emilio Mola had been transferred months earlier . From then on , the violence unleashed by the rebels in Navarre became very intense , acquiring a multifaceted nature .
Thousands of people were detained in municipal and district prisons , in the Provincial Prison , in detention centres set up by the nationalist political forces ( in particular the schools of Escolapios , occupied by the Carlist Central War Junta , and Salesianos , taken over by the Falange ) and in prisons such as the San Cristóbal Fort . But the most terrible expression of this political cleansing was undoubtedly the planned and controlled murder by the principal military authorities , of nearly 3,000 people who ended up being buried in clandestine mass graves . Just when it seemed that the mass murders had come to an end , 795 prisoners escaped from the prison at San Cristóbal Fort , on Mount Ezkaba , on 22 May 1938 . 206 of them , once captured , were murdered and buried in new clandestine mass graves . These burial sites were designed as places of dismemory , shielded by a regime where it was forbidden to remember , and which sought to erase the republican memory from history .
In the face of this calculated policy of disappearances , a determined , albeit silent , resistance emerged from the families of the murdered people who kept the memory of these places alive . One particular action occurred in the early 1960s at the pit cave Raso de Urbasa , where the bodies of three Amescoans murdered in 1936 had been dumped , and the plaque
86
Observing Memories Issue 6