The subdelegate of the Government in A Coruña, María Rivas, traveled to the cemetery of Santa María del Val, in the city of Narón, to check the progress of the work of prospecting and locating up to 51 victims of the Franco regime. There highlighted the effort of this Government to "restore the deserved memory of the rebel people and to allow the families to bury their loved ones as they deserve".
The works began last Monday with a multidisciplinary team composed of members of the University of Santiago and the Institute of Legal Medicine of Galicia (Imelga) with the collaboration of the Democratic Historical Memory Association. Initially they had focused on the area of the niches enabled in the cemetery in 1964, where bone remains were found that do not correspond to the victims, more the latest investigations are redirecting the search to the nearest area of the tapia of the cemetery, where remains with signs of violence and ammunition of a Mauser rifle of the Civil War were found.
The researchers believe that the remains of the crew members of three boats of the Republican side killed between 1936 and 1939 could be buried there. This is the battleship ‘Spain’, from which the remains of up to 32 men are expected to be found; the warship ‘Contramaestre Casado’ and the steamboat ‘Dómine’, from which the remains of 10 other crew members are expected to be found.
The subdelegate stressed that this type of work constitutes “an act of reparation for the justice and dignity of all the victims of Franco’s regime, as well as their families” and is “a symbol of the freedom and democratic values that our government defends” through actions such as the approval of the ‘Democratic Memory Law’ more than a year ago.
In this line, he recalled that from 2020 to today, the State Secretariat of Democratic Memory financed activities for more than 435,000 euros in Galicia, almost 50% through the Xunta in the Sectorial Conferences, “which means an average of 103,000 euros a year for research, publications and exhumations”, funds that, as announced by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, in a recent visit to Galicia, will be increased to 120,000 euros per year in the next budgets.
María Rivas also pointed out that on that visit the minister had already expressed his willingness to conclude an agreement with the University of Santiago de Compostela, with an endowment of 200,000 euros, to have a team responsible for carrying out a census of victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship. In this sense, he insisted on the importance of fighting historical oblivion. “Only by learning from our past can we avoid repeating it,” he said.