Exiting Conflict or Reasserting the Struggle ? The exhumation and making of 'Republican Victims' in Spain. (French Review of Political Science)

Exiting Conflict or Reasserting the Struggle?The Exhumation and Making of “Republican Victims” in Spain

Sélim Smaoui, Translated by Sarah-Louise RaillardIn Revue française de science politique Volume 64, Issue 3, 2014, pages 435 to458

ISBN 9782724633702

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Sélim Smaoui, Translated by Sarah-Louise Raillard, «Sortir du conflit ou asseoir la lutte ?», Revue française de science politique

2014/3 (Vol. 64) , p. 435-458

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Sélim Smaoui, Translated by Sarah-Louise Raillard, «Sortir du conflit ou asseoir la lutte ?», Revue française de science politique

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RESOLVING THE CONFLICT

OR CONTINUINGTHE STRUGGLE?

UNEARTHING AND ESTABLISHING“REPUBLICAN VICTIMS” IN SPAIN

Sélim SmaouiTranslated by Sarah-Louise Raillard

Since the middle of the 1980s, locating the mass graves where “the disappeared” wereleft behind by state violence, and then exhuming and identifying the corpses, havebecome routine procedures.1 Elevated to the status of “best practice”2 by expert net-

works specialised in the management of post-conflict violence,3 exhumation is seen as ameans to halt clashes and depoliticise conflicts. This practice is in turn linked to a two-fold“exit strategy” from violence.

Finding a way out of violence means first and foremost removing uncertainty for the familiesof missing persons and creating conditions that will allow them to mourn. The forensicanthropologists,4 psychologists5 and brokers involved designate the “families of missing per-sons”– also seen as “victims” granted “the right to know”6 – as the legatees of the process.Locating the dead and returning their bodies to their families, so that the latter can finallyoffer them a decent burial, permits the hitherto deferred mourning process to take place.

Exhumation is thus seen as a tool to be used in the process of “reconciliation”. Whether itis employed in the service of criminal investigations (in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, etc.)or paralegal inquiries (“Truth Commissions”), exhumation helps to appease political antag-onisms and restore “national unity”.7 The uncovering of physical evidence, the thorough

1. William Haglund, “L'archéologie et l'anthropologie médico-légales dans le contexte international”, in Jean-PaulDémoule, Bernard Stiegler (eds), L'avenir du passé. Modernité de l'archéologie (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 114-31.

2. “Missing persons and their families. Recommendations for drafting national legislation”, fact sheet from theInternational Committee of the Red Cross, 11 October 2003, <http:// www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/missing_and_recommendations_missing.pdf> (accessed on 8 January 2014).

3. Sandrine Lefranc, “La professionnalisation d'un militantisme réformateur du droit: l'invention de la justicetransitionnelle”, Droit et Société, 73(3), 2009, 561-89.

4. “Knowledge of the fate of their loved ones and the opportunity to complete funeral rituals provide a measureof psychological closure for the families” (Karen Ramey Burns, “Forensic anthropology and human rights issues”,in Kathleen J. Reichs (ed.), Forensic Osteology. Advances in the Identification of Human Remains (Springfield:C. C. Thomas, 1998), 63-85 (82).

5. Susana Navarro, Pau Pérez-Sales, Resistencias contra el olvido. Trabajo psicosocial en procesos de exhuma-ciones (Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 2007).

6. “Missing persons and their families...”.7. Erine Jessee, “Promoting reconciliation through exhuming and identifying victims in the 1994 Rwandan gen-ocide”, CIGI Africa Initiative, Policy Brief 2, 17 July 2012; “Guatemala. Memoria del Silencio”, report by theCommission for Historical Clarification, 1999, 67.

❘ REVUE FRANCAISE DE SCIENCE POLITIQUE ❘ ENGLISH ❘ VOL. 64 No 3 ❘ p. 51-77

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investigation of the facts, and the creation of a chain of responsibility, all enabled by theforensic analysis of human remains, are seen as tools to ward off revisionism and permitinstead the construction of a shared narrative.

The implicit moral convictions and presuppositions of these expert beliefs were criticallyscrutinised by scholars analysing the mechanisms for “an exit from violence”.1 In their view,these measures, by being carried out in a perspective of pacification, effectively depoliticisethe institutional management of past violence. By establishing legitimate criteria forexpressing suffering, such policies position “victimhood” and “trauma” as the only possiblevocabulary. In doing so, these policies therefore dismiss the figure of the activist and thevocabulary of heroic struggle. This analytical standpoint is also a critical posture endorsedby certain victim communities that seek to break from the practices implemented in post-conflict contexts. Assimilating healing – as encouraged by this post-conflict therapeuticprocess (including victim hearings, face-to-face meetings between victims and persecutors,exhumation, etc.) – with political closure, some associations have chosen to continue thefight begun by the missing activists and to refuse all reparation policies.2

Victims or heroes? This article sheds new light on this semantic tension, also experienced inother contexts,3 and which concretely reveals the incompatibilities between the agendas ofpost-conflict experts and those of activist groups seeking to continue the struggle. Ratherthan focusing on the discrepancies between the therapeutic practices used to promote anexit from violence and the combative postures of “victims” or their representatives, here weshall analyse how these actors are organised. Spanish activist communities offer one suchperspective from which to document the processes of extroversion4 which involve borrowingcontemporary pacification standards, and adapting them to activist objectives. This organ-isation and implementation will thus be analysed in the context of the exhumation of massgraves in Spain. Since the beginning of the 2000s, Spain has witnessed an upsurge in protestmovements addressing the impact of the state violence perpetrated during the country’s civilwar (1936-1939) and under Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). The “Recovery of HistoricalMemory”, as the movement is called locally, unites different protest groups that combine“Republican” activism with the practices and vocabulary first used by the Southern Cone ofSouth America during the 1980s (protests against the fate of the disappeared, against“impunity”, for “Truth, Justice and Reparation”, etc.). In this respect, the forensic exhuma-tion of the missing persons “disappeared” by Franco’s forces, led by ad hoc groups sinceOctober 2000, has become a common practice, one which illustrates the adaptation of post-conflict standards to protest objectives.

The activity of the Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria (FEFM – State Federation forMemory Forums), an association specialised in the excavation of mass graves since 2002, is

1. Sandrine Lefranc, “Pleurer ensemble restaure-t-il le lien social? Les commissions de vérité, ‘tribunaux deslarmes’ de l'après-conflit”, in Raphaëlle Nollez-Goldbach, Julie Saada (eds), La justice pénale internationale faceaux crimes de masse. Approches critiques (Paris: Pédone, 2014), 199-226; Didier Fassin, La raison humanitaire.Une histoire morale du temps présent (Paris: Éditions de l'EHESS, 2010).

2. Zoë Crossland, “Buried lives. Forensic archeology and the disappeared in Argentina”, Archaeological Dialogues,7(2), 2000, 146-59; Alfredo Martin, Les mères “folles” de la place de mai (Paris: Renaudot et Cie, 1989).

3. Paola Diaz, Carolina Gutiérrez Ruiz, “Les détenus disparus, victimes ou résistants? Les catégories dans lamobilisation de l'Association chilienne des familles de détenus disparus”, in Sandrine Lefranc, Lilian Mathieu(eds), Mobilisations de victimes (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 129-44.

4. Jean-François Bayart, L'illusion identitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1996).

❘ REVUE FRANCAISE DE SCIENCE POLITIQUE ❘ ENGLISH ❘ VOL. 64 No 3

52 ❘ Sélim Smaoui

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here used as a case study.1 Historically correlated with the shift towards forensics in studieson human rights violations,2 the activities of the FEFM are part of a sphere of unifiedpractices. Composed of scientific and professional experts (forensic anthropologists andarchaeologists, psychologists, historians, etc.), working with activist personnel and the fam-ilies of missing persons, the association broadly operates within the three protocol phasesrecommended in this field of international activity: 1) an ante mortem historical investigation,via the collection of documents and testimonies from family members; 2) the scientificexhumation of a body; and 3) laboratory analysis, body identification, and the determinationof cause of death. Nevertheless, even though the FEFM reproduces these international norms,the association’s activist operations are at odds with the objectives and ethical constraintsendorsed by many international actors.3

Often described as the “Popular Front for Memory” by its leaders, who embrace the spectrumof political families belonging to the Republican left-wing, the FEFM adopts a “revolu-tionary” perspective on exhumations and refuses to create “sanitised memory”.4 The asso-ciation in no way wishes to work towards “reconciliation” – a principle that it in factcondemns as belonging to the pact made between the outgoing pro-Franco elite and thedemocratic opposition during Spain’s transition, symbolised by the 1977 Amnesty Law. And,in fact, exhumations are not limited to reparation for families of missing persons, as such anarrow scope of activity would depoliticise the cause. Conducted by actors who have madethe transition to pro-victim activism and are working to re-mobilise those disappointed bySpain’s parliamentary left, the exhumation of Republican victims has become a practiceoperated in protest against the principle of reconciliation. By replacing “the rifle and thebayonet with the shovel and the pickaxe”,5 by exhuming the corpses of fallen “comrades”imbued with the values of a struggle ready to be reclaimed, the FEFM seeks to continue theconflict between “Franco’s heirs” rather than resolve it.

A localised sociology of the circulation and activist appropriation of post-conflict principlesand practices allows us to arrive at two conclusions. First, this sociological lens reveals thesuggestive power of the care policies advocated by international experts. Locally observablepractices are, in effect, shaped by the action frameworks and legitimate frames of referenceproposed. But, on the other hand, the possible hybrid forms and redefinitions to whichpacification practices are subject deny them any sort of innate consistency. In other words,an analysis of the forms of subjugation engendered by the technical “governance” of humanrights (the psychologising of identities, the deconflictualisation of conditions, etc.) must besupplemented by an investigation of the concrete ways in which these techniques of gover-nance are absorbed by actors, and how, simultaneously, the latter make use of them toself-govern. In the case of Spain, whose “democratic transition” has long been touted as a

1. For a brief presentation of the role of the FEFM compared to other activist groups and organisations, see theappendix at the end of this article.

2. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils. Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (New York: Verso,2011).

3. Margaret Cox, Ambika Flavel, Ian Hanson, Joanna Laver, Roland Wessling, The Scientific Investigation of MassGraves. Towards Protocols and Standard Operating Procedures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);Derek Congram, Dawnie L. Wolfe Steadman, “Distinguished guests or agents of ingérence: foreign participationin Spanish Civil War grave excavations”, Complutum, 19(2), 2008, 161-73.

4. Manual de Memoria Histórica. Protocolo de actuación para excavaciones de fosas comunes, FEFM protocol,July 2006.

5. “Ideario de la Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria”, FEFM prospectus brochure.


RESOLVING THE CONFLICT OR CONTINUING THE STRUGGLE? ❘ 53

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“model of democratisation”,1 and where the public powers are accused of timidly dealingwith the spectre of Franco’s violence,2 adapting the tools of pacification to the political needsof certain Spanish left-wing groups has given rise to a number of infra-state mobilisationsbreathing new life into Republican activism.

This article is thus not concerned with setting the argument for reconciliation as virtuouslystructured by the “transition” against the reality of the persistence of traumatic memories.3

The metaphor of “the return of the repressed”, which naturalises the opposition between“remembering” and “forgetting”, overlooks both the social conditions behind memory pro-duction4 and the historicity of what we are required to remember.5 This metaphor in factsurreptitiously lead us back to the normative, teleological premise according to which vio-lence necessarily produces a “reserve” of traumatic memories, which are inevitably expressed,sooner or later, in the public sphere.6 The “politicising of memory” is here linked to theemergence of new means of expression and resources for action – products of the activistappropriation of contemporary pacification practices – that update and reinvent the formsof protest against the order inherited from the “democratic transition”.

This activist appropriation will be analysed from the perspective of the renewed problem-atisation of forensic exhumation, documented via participant observation7 which was con-ducted during the 2012 excavation of a mass grave located near the Andalusian village ofIstán.8 After analysing the motivations of the various actors involved, three concentric move-ments, with the mass grave at their centre, will be used to describe the dynamics behind thiscombination of expert and activist spheres of activity.

The mass grave project will first be broadly contextualised, including by examining its villageenvirons. In order to understand the FEFM’s political position, I will start by describing howthe association critically negotiated its role with local actors (elected officials, village resi-dents). These local conflicts indirectly reveal the conflicting ways in which the victims offorced disappearance are portrayed in the political sphere, and how they consequently informthe FEFM’s position. The focus will then move to the observable interactions, practices, andconflicts surrounding the mass grave. Analysing the association’s material occupation of the

1. Kenneth Maxwell, “Spain's transition to democracy. A model for Eastern Europe?”, in Nils H. Wessel (ed.), TheNew Europe. Revolution in East-West Relations (Baton Rouge: Capital City Press, 1991), 35-49; Bénédicte Baz-zana, “Le ‘modèle’ espagnol de transition vers la démocratie à l'épreuve de la chute du mur de Berlin”, Revued'études comparatives Est-Ouest, 30(1), 1999, 105-38.

2. For an overview of memory politics in Spain, cf. Paloma Aguilar, Políticas de la memoria y memorias de lapolítica. El caso español en perspectiva comparada (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2008).

3. It should be pointed out that this precautionary note is of an analytical nature; I am not seeking here to denythe scope of the suffering generated by the violence in question.

4. Sarah Gensburger, Marie-Claire Lavabre, “Entre ‘devoir de mémoire’ et ‘abus de mémoire’: la sociologie de lamémoire comme tierce position”, in Bertrand Müller (ed.), Histoire, mémoire et épistémologie. À propos de PaulRicœur (Lausanne: Payot, 2005), 76-95.

5. Sébastien Ledoux, “Écrire une histoire du ‘devoir de mémoire’”, Le Débat, 170(3), 2012, 175-85.6. Sandrine Lefranc, “Pleurer ensemble restaure-t-il le lien social?”.7. This article is also based on 24 biographical interviews conducted with members of the FEFM (2012-2013), aswell as multi-site observation of the members' activities during the same time period (protests, celebrations,memorial services, meetings, conferences, lab work).

8. For a perspective on exhumation from the point of view of the sociology of memory, cf. Juan Enrique SerranoMoreno, “Mémoire de vainqueurs, mémoires de vaincus. La construction démocratique à l'épreuve des conflitsautour des mémoires de la guerre civile et du franquisme”, doctoral dissertation in political science, Paris,Université Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne, 2013. For an anthropological approach to contemporary exhumations,cf. Francisco Ferrandiz, El pasado bajo tierra. Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (Barcelona:Anthropos, 2014).



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space demonstrates that activist resources (discipline, organisation) and expert resources(scientific practices and discourse) marginalised local narratives in favour of a process ofpolitical objectification and redefinition of the mass grave. Finally, the last concentric circlewill focus on the “content” of the mass grave. I will argue that the management of the bodies– a combination of activist martyrdom and expert post-conflict practices – ultimately soughtthe scientific identification of “left-wing Republican victims”. By way of introduction, let usfirst consider to what extent the practice of forensic exhumation changes how activist legaciesare transmitted.

Dramatis personae: the activist trajectories of the “excavators”

Afuneral rite for families, an action repertoire for protest entrepreneurs, a routineexercise for archaeologists and physical anthropologists used to the practice of exca-vation, an open archive allowing historians to identify victims and redefine the geog-

raphy of massacres... A snapshot would show that exhumations implicate a number ofdifferent interests and forms of engagement. Despite the division of labour and the differentways of framing the process, which the specific skills and expectations of different actorsworking together entails, the FEFM refuses to establish a division between scientific expertise,activism, and individual remembrance. Unlike other groups analysed,1 within the FEFM bothactivists and scientists purport to be “left-wing/Republican/victims”.

Although I will be analysing how these different interests align with the victims’ cause, thisdoes not mean that I take on trust the actors’ alleged motivations. Studies commonly claima form of activist awareness that has in fact been reconstructed retrospectively. Moreover,they often merely reproduce the types of justification that are the result of activist consensus.However, over and above the strategies deployed to present the group as cohesive in public,a serious attempt should be made to analyse how motives for involvement align with organ-isational discourse. Repeated participation in exhumations – whether or not this is super-imposed on previously internalised activist representations – over the long term graduallyredefines the activist and ethical positions to be adopted with regard to the “disappeared”.Repeated actions thus help to redefine the cause as well as how individuals commit to it.This redefinition is first and foremost in terms of status and concerns both “activist” and“scientific” profiles.

For FEFM activists who were formerly, or still are, affiliated with associations and partisanorganisations (primarily the Spanish Communist Party and the Young Communist League),mobilisations concerning “the disappeared”, in which many inadvertently became involvedduring the 2000s, represented the potential for protest that redefined the lived experience ofactivist engagement.

Their claim to “memory activism”, within which they now situate their action, is first andforemost a function of a whole range of potential rewards (accelerated upward mobility inthe activist world, greater responsibilities, symbolic returns) to which previously establishedactivist structures hindered access. This activist identity is equally forged by the gradualacquisition of new technical skills. Exhumation is a form of recruitment: it is during the

1. I am drawing on more than twenty interviews conducted with members of organisations which specialised inexhumations (Association de récupération de la mémoire historique, Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi, Associationde récupération de la mémoire historique de Catalogne, in particular).



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emotionally charged moments when bodies are discovered that the organisation succeeds inenlisting scientists, volunteers, and the family members of missing persons wishing to “con-tinue the fight”. Exhumation is likewise a tool for geographic establishment: faced withcompetition from other organisations, exhumation mobilises the activist networks in a givenregion, brings together local groups, and marks a territorial zone as being under the FEFM’sauspices, thus influencing the strategies of rival groups. Moreover, learning how to collecttestimony, how to do archival research, mastering the legal vocabulary of human rights, anddifferentiating a bone from a pebble caught in the riddle are all practical skills and techniquesthat are specific to memory-based activism.

With regard to the professional personnel involved (archaeologists and physical anthropol-ogists), the gradual transformation of their perceptions (of their role in the process, of themeaning that the cause of the disappeared holds, etc.) was dependent on the action frame-works within which they had successively operated since their first experience with an organ-isation. The stance of scientific neutrality they assumed during the first excavation, seen asa one-off form of technical assistance, came gradually to be reinterpreted in light of thesocialisation frameworks they experienced during exhumations. Before joining the ranks ofthe FEFM (2002–2005/7), the principle archaeologists and anthropologists had first collabo-rated with organisations that had little access to activist resources (small associations offamilies, university research units) and lacked any structured organisational discourse. Thesefirst experiences (described variously as “human”, “in the service of others” and “morallyimportant”) nevertheless helped to shape individual perspectives. As those interviewed stated,the emotions involved with recovering the dead – which were often heightened by the pres-ence of the families involved – meant that the strictly “scientific” scope of their work hadto be somewhat nuanced.

“Bones are no longer just bones, I couldn't deal with them like the Roman [skeletons] that I gen-erally exhume for work!”1

“Once I was there, it was everything but a routine excavation, it was a completely different world,and in this process, the scientific aspect was the least important element.”2

In the wake of these first experiences, the need to identify corpses as well as determine thecause of death meant that it became necessary for many researchers to acquire forensic skills.Archaeologists and anthropologists, thanks to the training provided by North Americanforensic anthropologists (ballistics, the inner workings of the legal system) during academicexchanges, but also as a result of personal initiatives (through reading, attendance at semi-nars, documentation on the Latin American experience), internalised new questions whichresituated the support they gave as forming part of the practical universe of human rights.As a result, these scientists learned how to identify the use of firearms, to draft reports thatfollowed the constraints imposed by legal forms, to approach personal accounts scientifically,and so forth. Not long ago seen as the subject of basic research, excavated remains are nowif not the subject of legal expertise, at least of investigation. To this end, the practices ofarchaeology and biological anthropology have gradually been incorporated alongside inves-tigatory mechanisms designed to repair the injustices that are the legacy of Franco’srepression.

1. Interview, physical anthropologist, cited above.2. Interview, archaeologist, Barcelona, April 2012.



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If, after the ordeal of their first exhumations, growing awareness regarding the cause of themissing persons progressively redefined the meaning of their participation – as was the casewith the integration of new expert practices – then these scientists would, while workingwith the FEFM, ultimately adopt a combative “activist-expert” stance and become committedto the cause’s long-term success.1 Archaeologists and anthropologists were approached bythe collective regarding collaboration from 2005, and discovered in this new experience anunprecedented working environment.

While we were exhuming the bodies, people didn't talk about bones or victims, they spoke ofcomrades... people no longer said “it's the relative of this or that family”, the person was calledby his name... We spent our time talking about “why”, “why” were they killed? I really liked it, itwasn't a sterile working environment like in other organisations [...]. I liked all the flags, and musicand protest songs, it was a whole different atmosphere.2

“We are all activists”, “all comrades”: the group’s internal management as established by theFEFM’s leaders effectively seeks to erase all differences in status. As a form of “social, culturaland political activism” according to the organisation, exhumations must be conducted by acohesive group. The desire to build community spirit and a horizontal frame of action – theextension of the work done by local community organisations in working-class neighbour-hoods, many of which FEFM members had formerly long been involved with – whollyinforms the group’s personnel management philosophy. The group expects every individualto be versatile, participating in all tasks and displaying a pro-active approach at all times.Outside the work of excavations, all other activities are also conducted as a team (gettingup, eating meals, showering, etc.) and governed by a strict schedule. This ritualisation ofdaily activities, constantly reinforced by those activists trained to manage personnel (usingboth encouragement and admonishment), has generally been interpreted by scientists bor-rowing from both the activist and professional registers, as a form of “solidarity” or “inter-disciplinarity”. Conducting excavations with the FEFM means experiencing a “magical” workenvironment,3 where scientific analysis is an immediately useful tool, recognised by othermembers of the team, but ultimately a complementary one, subsumed within a politicalprogramme by the activist context (“devotion”, “political resistance”).

As a space where individuals join forces and camaraderie thrives, excavations are alsomoments of communion with symbolic and ecological spaces that stand apart from theeveryday. At the individual level, getting involved means experiencing a group expeditionthat resembles an adventure. Conducted in the open air – a rare enough occurrence for themany members of the FEFM who are not archaeologists or anthropologists – exhumationis a physical activity that is experienced bodily (sweat, dirt, exertion, lack of sleep) and whoseless pleasant aspects are often glossed over when recounted later (vaunting instead the authen-ticity of the experience, the frugal dining conditions, and unselfish physical exertion).According to certain activists, the encampment in the heights of Andalucía, dotted withRepublican flags, recalled the poetic ambience of the French Resistance. Just as then,

1. Nicolas Dodier, “Experts et victimes face à face”, in S. Lefranc, L. Mathieu (eds), Mobilisations de victimes,29-36.

2. Interview, physical anthropologist, cited above.3. Laurent Willemez, “De l'expertise à l'enchantement du dévouement”, in Annie Collovald (ed.), L'humanitaireou le management des dévouements. Enquête sur un militantisme de “solidarité international” en faveur dutiers-monde (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), 49-78.



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night-time watches were organised, foodstuffs were stockpiled, a village was “liberated” (evenif only with “shovels and pickaxes”), and political strategies were discussed and honed. Evenif this glossing over of activist and professional labour – sometimes half-admitted – stemsfrom the ecological and spatial environment in which the action unfolded, it is diachronicallymaintained by a close-knit community that has been established as a result of shared expe-riences. In fact, the FEFM brings together many individuals who have collectively experiencedadversity (in 2010, the activists were thrown out of a village and seriously intimidated bysmall, far-right groups) and success (gathering a large number of villagers for a commem-orative ceremony, for example). These are the kinds of “feats” that shape group memoryand lead to the reassessment, over time, of what these activities mean, ultimately positioningexhumations within the arena of struggle.

But this profound redefinition of activism is also suggested by the immediate biographicalconsequences of individual involvement in the cause. Rather than being merely reduced toa space where internalised values are played out, or where victims are commemorated andtheir fates are finally determined, exhumation sites gradually establish a new relationshipwith oneself. The desires and skills developed over the long term when fighting for the causeof “the disappeared” are often redeployed within domestic, familial, and professional spheres.Within these spheres, activists may: rewrite their family history (research their family, dis-cover that their great-great uncle had been shot, start looking for his body, and themselvesbecome a family member of “the disappeared”); reconfigure their relationship to their home(write a book about the repression suffered by individuals in their village, their neighbour-hood, on their block, etc.); reimagine the deeper meaning of their professional occupation(erect ethical boundaries in their professional practices, modelled on the current conflictsin the activist world; reclaim the “political” implications of their role as a scientist; volunteer;or organise “critical” academic conferences), etc. Commitment to the cause of “the disap-peared” is expressed in the work that activists do on themselves, while remaining coherentwith the context in which they first became engaged in the cause. Those who take part inexhumations adopt new interpretative frameworks, and modify their representations of theirdaily lives (activist, professional, familial), with the result that they end up claiming to bethe ideological, emotional, and at times even biological, descendants of their “comrades,Franco’s victims”, with whom they identify.

Regardless of their different paths in life, excavators all report that they discovered their“own history”. This kind of “discovery” is attested to by a rhetoric of political or communityidentification (“I became a Republican/a victim”, etc.), but can above all be observed in thecritical attitude adopted towards the ordinary everyday power relations within which indi-viduals had been enclosed up until that point. For the excavators, when asked how thiscritical attitude plays out in their practical lives, challenging the ‘official history’ of the civilwar and Franco’s dictatorship meant challenging the micro-truths which regulated the rolesimposed on them on a daily basis. For one physical anthropologist, embracing the cause of“the disappeared” meant refusing the scientific “sterilisation” that governed his academicposition and forbade activist engagement. For an activist, disappointed by the CommunistYouth League, it meant condemning the “revisionism” of traditional political organisations,which led him away from the “true” struggle and alienated him by causing him to “forget”his “Republican roots”. Finally, for a number of those surveyed, joining the cause meantrejecting the domestic “fear” in which they were raised, which trapped them in the insou-ciance of the easy-going citizen. As their level of commitment to the cause increases, these



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actors historicise the conditions and certainties that govern their subjugation: trivial conflictsin their own families, commonplace epistemological debates with other academics, the powerstruggles within their political parties: all are seen as the subtle effects of the “forgetting”produced by the “Transition”.

Problematising a cause is indissociable from problematising one’s concept of self. Conse-quently, when analysing how a cause is constructed, one cannot overlook the field of expe-rience in which the work of problematisation takes place.1 Creating the cause of “thedisappeared” is not limited to the effects of categorisation by mobilisation entrepreneurs.The forms of sociability experienced when working with mass graves transcend the excava-tors’ social positions, as a result of overlapping influences or “impregnations”.2 Over thelong term, excavators experience and are subject to the very problematics that they mobilise,which reshape the process of self-definition. In this respect, over the long run, the processof exhumation engenders constantly evolving subjectivities.3 In this article I shall thereforeanalyse exhumation as a socialising experience: the political dedication, which exhumationdemands of both scientific and activist personnel, fuels and configures the unique frameworkbehind the FEFM’s mobilisation.

Act 1. Arrival in the village: establishing a critical space

Two days before the exhumation took place, the vanguard of the team arrived in thevillage of Istán – a modest hamlet of 1,500 inhabitants isolated in the Andalusianhighlands – for the first time. Their arrival was punctuated by chance encounters and

interactions, and gradually revealed the interpretation that the team collectively held of its“right of entry” into this unknown village. In this case, the FEFM immediately establishedcritical power relations with two groups of actors: villagers and local elected officials.

Choosing the village of Istán

Exhuming “Istán’s mass grave” was a project dictated as much by circumstance as by

choice. At the start of 2012, the FEFM envisaged exhuming a mass grave in Sant Quirze

del Vallès in Cataluña. But as archaeological surveys were unable to locate the mass

grave, at the beginning of the summer the organisation “turned to” Istán, where it had

also planned to excavate a site. Following the discovery of a foot that rain erosion had

uncovered – as part of the grave was situated on a hillside – the relative of a missing

person had called on the village’s deputy mayor at the beginning of 2012, who in turn

contacted the Málaga chapter of the FEFM. The FEFM thus benefited from all the docu-

mentation available at its local chapter and decided to organise the excavation of the

Istán grave. This abrupt change in venue had the (sociological) merit of making the local

support that the organisation enjoyed more visible (logistics were taken care of in just a

few weeks). Moreover, this change also demonstrated the commitment of the scientists

involved – since the majority of the archaeologists and anthropologists lived in Barcelona

and its environs, exhuming the Istán site entailed a much longer and more expensive trip

1. Daniel Cefaï, Cédric Terzi (eds), L'expérience des problèmes publics. Perspectives pragmatistes (Paris: Éditionsde l'EHESS, 2012).

2. These analytical categories are borrowed from Maurice Agulhon, La République au village (Paris: Seuil, 1979[1st edn: 1970]).

3. Jean-François Bayart, “Conclusion. ‘Total subjectivation’”, in Jean-François Bayart, Jean-Pierre Warnier (eds),Matière à politique. Le pouvoir, les corps et les choses (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 215-53.



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(especially in the middle of the summer holidays) than was the case for Sant Quirze del

Vallès. Finally, the change also helped to gauge the unity of the mobilisation’s goals, as

the objectives announced during the preparatory meetings for the Catalan excavation

were transferred onto the Istán project.

With their highly visible mini-vans and backpacks, over-stuffed with equipment, and anescort provided by the deputy mayor, young city people, bearing the FEFM’s Republicanlogo on their T-shirts, burst into the village. This was in-your-face activism: in front ofeveryone, they filmed the slightest movement behind an intimidating camera, all in an atmos-phere of camaraderie (laughter, complicity, inside jokes). These first moments clashed withthe small village’s tranquillity and did not go unnoticed. Especially in the eyes of one youngman, who feigned curiosity and immediately went up to the newcomers to find out theirintentions. Then he went on: “That’s a Republican flag, right? You’re here to dig up ourdead, aren’t you? [...] If it were me, I’d give the corpse a big “bang” in the head [miming akick]”. Two octogenarians, their stares icy, were distinctly heard to exchange the following:“Where did these guys come from?”, “From all the places they should be right now instead!”The group’s initial exploration of the village was accompanied by whispers, sudden silences,and hostile glances, fuelling the sense of intrusion.

Despite not exactly receiving the warmest of welcomes, the excavators were unaffected. Theyhad anticipated this sort of response during the whole trip down to Istán, and instead proudlyaccepted the situation. Without ever acting improperly, the activists were amused by thevillagers’ reactions, which they filmed and commented on as they went along; their lamentsconcerning this state of affairs only serving to further convince them of their project’s validityand, ultimately, over-determining its impact. Confronted with the villagers’ reactions, theexcavators remained polite and, when necessary, tried to neutralise sceptics with well-meaning, if pedantic, statements (“By taking care of the dead, we’re taking care of you guys,the living!”) The organisation’s members were quite used to this. These reactions echoedthe obstacles they’d encountered in previous villages. They only served to confirm the “fear”in which Istán was plunged. “La vamos a liar” (“We’re going to make a mess”) – thisexpression, often whispered amidst laughter, was somewhat self-fulfilling. The organisation’spresence in the village immediately established a difference of opinion on which the activistscongratulated themselves. This was a disagreement that was also interpreted in politicalterms. Both the villagers’ hospitality and their mistrust were ceaselessly filed under politicallabels: the “fascists” and the “families of Republicans”.

This desire to “make a mess” also emerged during the first discussions with local electedofficials. As the primary local liaison for the organisation in the village, the deputy mayor(from the Izquierda Unida, the Unified Left party)1 welcomed the team upon its arrival inIstán. While striving to establish a personal rapport and ideological complicity with thegroup’s members, the deputy mayor nevertheless made sure to present herself as their solelegitimate interlocutor. Behind the scenes, however, this strategy of seduction and controlover the initiative was mocked by the activists. The very first morning, during a press con-ference organised in Málaga to present the excavation project, two events provoked thegroup’s anger. The president of the FEFM felt that he had been disrespected by the regional

1. Created in 1986, Izquierda Unida (United Left) is a coalition that brings together a number of different parties,including the Spanish Communist Party (PCE).



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representatives of the Unified Left Party, which he accused of having ignored him in frontof the media and of having appropriated the initiative for themselves. Even worse, duringher presentation, the deputy mayor declared that the same project would have been under-taken even if individuals from the “other camp” – pro-Franco supporters – had been buriedin the mass grave, which, for the FEFM, was unspeakable because it made all “victims”equivalent. These public positions, seen as political machinations, were condemned by thecollective. The dispute emerged later, however, during an otherwise trivial discussion in thevillage. During the exchange, the president of the FEFM explained the “philosophy” behindexhumations to the deputy mayor and attempted to wrest back political control of thesituation by outdoing her rhetorically:

Deputy mayor: Bar X will make sandwiches for you, how many of you will there be?President of the FEFM: Twenty-five people.DM: Twenty-five! Oh! Twenty-five... I didn't know that you needed that many people to exhume agrave!P: It's not just the grave that interests us, we're also doing political, social and cultural work [...]The important thing is getting people to visit the mass grave, to host activities and to raise aware-ness about what happened here.DM [whispering]: Yes, yes I understand, it's important [...] but I know my village, you have to bevery careful moving forward, don't push people too much [...] I support you 100% but I know howpeople are around here...1

After this first meeting, over their apéritifs, the activists all murmured their satisfaction,saying that “she wasn’t expecting that, she’s scared”; “they [the elected officials] must becomplaining about the mess they got themselves into”; “everyone in the village must beflipping out!”; “they can go to hell, we’re here to get things moving, like we always do”. Therole of “troublemaker” that the FEFM meant to adopt in the village, as revealed by suchbackstage scenes, was in fact merely the local expression of the critical place occupied by theFEFM in the Spanish political landscape.

The activists’ mistrust vis-à-vis the local officials should be seen in the context of the conflictswith partisan actors experienced by FEFM leaders from the very beginning. Created withinthe Spanish Communist Party (PCE) in 2002, the association was originally named Foro porla Memoria (Memory Forum) and was mainly founded by card-carrying members. Progres-sively marginalised by internal conflicts, the organisation’s members decided to cut ties withthe PCE in 2005 and to create the FEFM.2

The organisation’s gradual autonomy from the party was intimately linked to the contro-versial career of L.M.,3 a card-carrying activist in the town of Leganés (south-west of Madrid).After occupying a number of local activist positions during the 1980s and 1990s (in neigh-bourhood associations, as the political secretary for the PCE in Leganés, organiser for localprotests, etc.), L.M.’s trajectory took a new turn in 1999. At that time, he joined a neigh-bourhood association called Asociación Cultura Paz y Solidaridad Haydée de Santamaría [TheHaydée Santamaría Association for Culture, Peace and Solidarity]. This organisation

1. Personal observations, Istán, 31 July 2012.2. Data specifically concerning the organisation's progress towards autonomy were collected between April 2012and April 2013 with the help of about fifteen FEFM members.

3. Initials have been changed. Interview conducted in Madrid on 24 March 2013.



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introduced him to issues that, in retrospect, he describes as “memorial” concerns.1 In thecontext of the mediatisation of the first protests organised by the families of the disappearedat the beginning of the 2000s, L.M. decided to advocate for “historical memory” within thePCE. He thus managed to attract the attention of the party’s leaders, who asked him to writea column on memory in Mundo Obrero, the Party’s newspaper. Thanks to the contacts madeduring his investigative reports, and relying on activist friendships that helped him to estab-lish himself in both the political and activist spheres, L.M. decided to create the Foro por laMemoria in 2002. This was to be an association integrated within the party apparatus anddevoted exclusively to honouring the memory of PCE activists.

Although the small organisation originally benefited from a certain freedom of action, as itexpanded it would increasingly become subject to the Party’s growing attempts to neutraliseit. The first tensions were a result of the critical stance that the organisation gradually adopted.The “historical denial” from which Franco’s victims suffered, and of which L.M. becameincreasingly aware in the context of this new form of activism, provided critical content thatreawakened his former desires to influence the party’s orientation from the inside.2 Hisoutspoken criticism of the 1977 Amnesty Law,3 which the PCE had supported, caused a lotof controversy within the Party – especially since “Reconciliation” was being used as aresource for historical legitimacy by established PCE leaders.4 Collaboration with non-par-tisan activists, made possible by his local community involvement, as well as the discoveryof a cause that transcended party lines, likewise convinced L.M. of the need to move beyondthe merely “Communist” dimension of the issue.

Moreover, both the legitimacy and persistence of his insubordination with regard to Partyleaders were cultivated in two ways, notwithstanding Party admonitions. On the one hand,as a community mobilisation entrepreneur, he enjoyed the support of many activists mar-ginalised by various Andalusian PCE chapters. In the Huelva chapter (in the southwest ofSpain) where the activists organising the exhumation of the Istán mass grave were from, forexample, political conflicts had pushed members to strategically commit to the issue ofmemory politics. A local chapter of the Foro por la Memoria was thus created in order toinfluence local conflicts. Elsewhere, contacts with local politicians during the first exhuma-tions (2002-2005) fed into the growing suspicion with regard to elected officials. Being subjectto electoral constraints, local officials were accused, if not of hindering the exhumationprocess, at least of trying to contain its disruptive repercussions.

These early dynamics (2002-2004) demonstrate how the boundaries of the cause were increas-ingly being reassessed (a shift from the “memory of Communism” to the “memory of theRepublican left”), as were the acquisition of resources enabled by interdisciplinarity (enlistingregional PCE members that were at odds with the party hierarchy), and also reveal thegrowing disconnect between the Party’s perspective and the reconfigured expectations ofactivists on the ground.

1. By reading works emphasising the importance of reclaiming one's “activist heritage”, meeting with interna-tional activists (Zapatistas, Palestinians, Iraqis, Cubans, etc.) giving anti-imperialist presentations, and by invitingformer Spanish guerrillas to talk about their experiences as Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

2. According to L.M., broadly speaking he acted as an agitator within the PCE (as a result of which the partytried to expel him several times), in the name of his ethos as an “on the ground” activist.

3. Which L.M. expressed clearly and directly during local PCE chapter meetings, everyday conversations with hisfellow party members, and in the context of articles published in activist newspapers.

4. Juan Antonio Andrade Blanco, El PCE y el PSOE en la Transición. La evolución ideológica de la izquierdadurante el proceso de cambio político (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 2012.



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These seeds of discord led to open conflict that crystallised in the wake of the 2004 legislativeelections. According to L.M., controlling “historical memory” became a major objective fora number of leaders hoping to secure institutional positions for themselves if the left won.The fact that certain activities were obstructed, and meetings were held without his knowl-edge, as well as the fact that he received a number of personal threats, led L.M. and hisfollowers to leave the PCE behind in 2005 and to create the FEFM by bringing togetheractivists from other local chapters.1

And from there, when the organisation became autonomous, what happened is that historicalmemory, which was in fact a tool to transform the Communist Party from the inside, became anend in and of itself. Memory was no longer a tool, but our goal.2

Commitment to the victims’ cause can first be linked to the gradual emancipation of activistaction from the party framework. Only a “citizen” collective that brought together all thedifferent elements of the Spanish political left – Socialists, Communists, Anarchists – alignedin relation to the shared goal of (re)founding a Republican Spain, would be capable ofundertaking the task of ideologically recapturing hearts and minds without being obliteratedby the agendas of traditional organisations.

On the fringes of such political skirmishes, the leaders of the FEFM slowly but surely cameto establish tense relationships with the families of victims and, over the course of theiractivities, to reconsider the latter’s role. These tensions were a result of the dissent whichemerged with the main association representing the families of the disappeared, the Asocia-ción para la recuperación de la memoria histórica (ARMH – Association for the Recuperationof Historical Memory), the organisation with which the president of the FEFM experiencedhis first exhumation project in 2003. Accused of not politicising the cause enough, and ofreducing exhumations to a mere family affair (recovering bodies in the name of “dignity”and nothing more) – in short of establishing a “private memory”3 – the ARMH was seen ashonouring family trauma to the detriment of the activist struggle of those exhumed“comrades”.

The activists’ negative perception of the ARMH’s role was likewise forged by their gradualfamiliarisation with the realities of village life during the first excavations organised by theFEFM. Activists confessed that they found themselves in areas where hitherto unsuspected“fear” and “political apathy” reigned.

“They killed him even though he was someone who had never done anything bad”; “No, he wasn'ta Communist, he was a good guy”; “We told him not to get involved in politics, he put us in a stickysituation”, etc.4

As they conducted their first surveys in the villages, the activists came up against a familialdiscourse that depoliticised the victims’ deaths, obscured the circumstances behind these

1. The Foro por la Memoria still exists today, and is still controlled by PCE staff.2. Interview with an FEFM activist from the Huelva chapter, Istán, 4 August 2012.3. “Apoyar a la ARMH es enterrar la memoria” [“Supporting the ARMH means burying our memories”] statementmade by the president of the FEFM, 2004. For more examples of clashes between the FEFM and the ARMH, cf.also Francisco Ferrandiz, “Exhuming the defeated: Civil War mass graves in 21st century Spain”, American Eth-nologist, 40(1), 2013, 38-54.

4. These statements come from interviews conducted with FEFM members (April 2012-April 2013) and the reac-tions of villagers heard around the excavation site.



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deaths, and sometimes – when they recognised the victim’s political activism – even accusedthe dead of being responsible for the stigma with which families had had to live in the village,generation after generation. The figure of “the villager” was retrospectively depicted by theactivists as an actor in need of emancipation. He or she was also seen as repeating local“popular beliefs” that distorted reality, as well as the fatalistic narrative produced during theyears of post-transition amnesty.

The “victims do not belong to the families” (nor to rival groups, then), any more than theybelong to traditional left-wing political organisations. The critical stance adopted by theactivist group upon its arrival in the village thus connected up a number of differentdynamics. It locally translated the negative perception, forged during the experience of acti-vist reorientation, of the role played by traditional political organisations in the fight againstimpunity for the Franco regime; it was also the result of the struggle for position within thememorial activism arena.

Act 2. The political objectification of the mass grave: helping the dead tospeak and redefining the situation

Appropriating a cause also means appropriating a physical space. As Javier Auyeroobserves, “it is in the space that all the representations shared by individuals find ahome, thus determining the organisation, both physical and mental, of these indi-

viduals”.1 The way in which space is physically occupied makes concrete the political workundertaken by the group to define the cause.

In Istán, while the first archaeological surveys were being conducted early on the secondday, the rest of the team began to physically appropriate the areas surrounding the massgrave. At first glance, the layout of the area appeared to be both functional and symbolic.Tents were set up in order to create a separate area for the excavation site, a space fortestimony, into which families and villagers were welcomed, as well as a space for documen-tation and communication (computers on site allowed historians to consult the archives).At the same time, flags from the Second Spanish Republic were displayed, as well as animpressive banner positioned at the camp’s entrance proclaiming “Truth, justice and rep-aration for the victims of Franco”.

But more importantly, this appropriation of space erected a border between the “grave” andthe “village”. Fences, security cordons, activists wearing high-vis vests in charge of regulatingentry, security passes... after a few hours of work, access to the grave was effectively definedand limited. This demarcation of the territory structured the activists’ actions and represen-tations in different ways. From the perspective of the meaning that individual actors gave totheir actions, and that they co-produced as a group during interactions, erecting a borderwas an accepted tactical initiative that allowed the organisation to control the cause andstrip the villagers of any influence. “When they [the villagers] come to the mass grave, they’reon our land. When we’re in the village, we’re on theirs” was the strategic justification pro-vided a number of times by an experienced activist to several first-timers. This appropriationof space also corresponds to the management of activist activities. Organising the spaceeffectively satisfied the need to streamline activities (exhuming, collecting testimony, etc.),

1. Javier Auyero, “L'espace des luttes. Topographie des mobilisations collectives”, Actes de la recherche ensciences sociales, 160(5), 2005, 122-32.



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helped to maintain group cohesion, and redefine duties (guarding the grave at night, cleaningthe corpses, taking care of security, filling water bottles, were tasks that activists, psychologistsand historians all performed). This also conveyed an image of professionalism to the media,to potential new activist recruits, and to rival organisations.

By expanding its focus to the surrounding village, the organisation’s appropriation of spaceredefined the situation, reconfigured the relationship towards the “victims”, and reshapedthe identities of those actors present. What precisely then was the “terrain” thus delineatedby the activists, and of which they became temporary custodians?

First of all, the border marked the regimes of historicity that suddenly had to co-exist in thevillage. By physically taking control of a portion of land, the group transposed onto itknowledge, ideas, and practices – in short, a worldview – that sought, if not to rival thehitherto unchallenged local narrative, at least to translate it into a new language. Before theteam’s arrival, the mass grave – and the bodies it contained – had always been specificallyassociated with the village world. As in other Spanish villages, the charnel ground had beengiven a nickname based on local folklore (“la lomilla de los muertos”, or “the hill of thedead”), a name that was passed down from generation to generation. The site was also thesubject of stories, told in whispers or merely alluded to. Other uses were also made of themass grave – scaring children, for instance: “Don’t go play over there, the dead will climbout of their graves”. Only two narrow markers signalled the mass grave’s existence: itremained within the boundaries of local geographical unity and within those of reportednarratives, which were often clouded over by family shame.

As the organisation established itself in the village, it effected a shift of both scale andmeaning: the “hill of the dead” became a grave filled with “Franco’s victims”; as in othercases, “the dead” were now referred to by forensic examiners as “the disappeared”. The“firing squad”, long the subject of rumours and varying stories, became the result of“planned” repression at the national level. The mass grave was stripped of its singularity,likened to many others, repositioned in the realm of state violence, and treated accordingly.The political objectification of the grave, which reconfigured the local narrative throughrepeated interactions between activists and villagers, was dependent on the specific resourcesmobilised by the FEFM to drum up support. The academic authority of the actors present(historians, physical anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, etc.), as well as the acti-vists’ rhetorical mastery, acquired during previous excavations, helped to counterbalance thevillagers’ scepticism.

But it was first and foremost the physical organisation of the space as arranged by the groupthat was designed to create new meaning. The physical barriers erected served as mentalbarriers intended to define visitors’ behaviour. Control over space was here a resource thatdetermined the meaning that was to be conferred to the reappearance of the bodies.

When victims’ relatives came to the site, these dynamics became clear.1 For example, onedaughter of a victim wished to “see her father again”. Once on site, she was greeted at theentrance by a psychologist and then invited into the area reserved for providing accountsand testimony. She was then accompanied to the grave. A first barrier was crossed. Behindher, villagers and curious passers-by would only be allowed to see the bodies during visitinghours specifically designed for this purpose. When this woman reached the second security

1. Observations from 1 and 2 August 2012.



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cordon, situated beyond the excavation site, the activist in charge of regulating entry askedher to wait for a few moments, in order to inform the archaeologists and anthropologistsof her arrival. Meanwhile, the psychologist placed a hand on the visitor’s shoulder in theguise of a comforting gesture. Once the second threshold was crossed, the woman finallyfound herself in front of the bodies. After a long moment of silence, often caught on film,the victim’s relative was invited to go back to the testimony area. A long interview ensued,conducted by the aforementioned psychologist, as well as a historian and a physicalanthropologist.

In this clearly defined territory, freedom of movement was largely restricted. Visitors wereguided, forced to pause momentarily and asked to cross barriers that gave rise to intervalsof waiting, as well as to short discussions where the situation was explained and endlesslyredefined by the various experts framing the visitors’ experience and interactions. As theycrossed the space, always escorted by a member of the team, visitors found themselves in anumber of micro-spaces where they were encouraged to adopt appropriate behaviours. Forinstance, the experience was structured so that visitors could have moments where they couldbecome emotional in front of the grave, where they could contemplate in silence, where theycould express their anger to the activists, where they could speak at length during an interviewprocess and delve into their memories to recall physical details to the forensic anthropologist.Different individuals were trained to control entries and exits, to provide moral support, toexplain, to encourage therapeutic anger – this distribution of roles within a clearly definedspace sought to shape the legitimate attitudes to be adopted when faced with the reappear-ance of the disappeared. Despite its obstacles, the site did not hinder but instead aimed tocreate reparative behaviours hitherto not allowed by the “village”, according to the mobili-sation entrepreneurs.

The physical appropriation of the space also sought to wrest the monopoly of the meaningof the grave back from the village. This rewriting of the local narrative could be concretelyobserved. In the controlled area, the “dead”, as described in the village narrative, becamethe “disappeared victims” claimed by the organisation. In fact, the village narrative’s holdvanished when the material bodies were discovered – at the moment when “the hill of thedead” became, under the gaze of the villagers, a display of corpses bearing all the traits oftheir late humanity (shoes, personal effects, etc.) and of the violence they suffered.

It is not for this article to measure the emotional impact on the visitors of these long silentinteractions between the villagers and the bodies. At most, we can simply observe that the“reappearance” of the dead, as well as the inner turmoil that it produced, was immediatelycontextualised and mediatised by individuals whose actions continually translated and rede-fined the situation.1

The transition from narrative to physical reality was simultaneously expressed both in wordsand actions by the different actors present. Faced with the exhumation, villagers not onlyinteracted with the corpses, but also with forensic scientists. Situated within the gravesite’senclosed surroundings, the latter manipulated the bodies in accordance with sophisticatedmethodologies, explained their work to the villagers and engaged with them, clipboards inhand, jotting down the smallest of statements. They subjected each stray detail recalled inpassing to a rigorous taxonomy, and posed questions that the villagers had never even

1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959) [French translation:La mise en scène de la vie quotidienne. Tome I. La présentation de soi (Paris: Minuit, 1973)].



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considered before. Both the experts’ practices and their energy bore witness to a “post mortemcorporality”, a second life granted to these bodies, whose fate had hitherto been confined toindigenous narratives. These corpses suddenly had something to say, something that thevillagers were not aware of, and from acting as witnesses the villagers became assistants inthe forensic endeavour. Similarly, when a visitor surveyed the charnel ground it was in thecompany of the psychologist. The latter interviewed the villagers at length and established asafe space for them to speak out. She validated and affirmed all of the sentiments they shared,acknowledging their version of the facts (and not the accepted version), in order to positionthem, as she put it, “before their own reality”.1 The psychologist served to approve individualnarratives, which sought to challenge village rumours, censorship, and revisionism. Finally,the discovery of the bodies was mediatised using the activists’, historians’ and FEFM sup-porters’ reference points and vocabulary. They generalised the facts (referring to “crimesagainst humanity’) and recontextualised them in a national geographical framework byexpounding upon excavations taking place on the other side of the country. They detailedthe number of victims in the region, made numerous historical references in order to situatethis tragedy within a long line of massacres, and standardised the vocabulary (“comrades”,Franco’s “coup d’état”, Republican “legitimacy”, etc.).

When they went to the “hill of the dead”, visitors found themselves both confronted withthe extraordinary reality of these tortured bodies, and also propelled into a clearly definedspace, saturated with references conveyed by actors with skills and credentials that wereintimidating to a rural public (medical, scientific, legal and activist jargon especially), andwhich encouraged the rewriting of the village’s history. This was an appropriated space,where the practice of prosopopoeia acted as a palimpsest. The dead were “made to speak”for a variety of reasons: forensic experts had the corpses bear witness to the truth of aviolence that had been challenged or altered in village memory; activists and historians hadthem reveal the political dimension of repression, euphemised by village censorship; lawyersused them to authenticate the existence of an injustice that had been endured, and whichhad to be condemned and redressed in accordance with international law; and for psychol-ogists they were a means to allow the grieving process – hitherto in limbo – to finally unfold.These were the different discourses that attempted to reconfigure the site’s meaning in theeyes of its visitors. But although these discourses appeared to each have a different perspec-tive, they were in fact all aligned in relation to a shared activist grammar.

Act 3. Establishing “left-wing victims” and politicisingthe post-conflict environment

Over dinner at the local bar on the first night, in the middle of a conversation aboutthe number of Spanish Republicans who had been deported to the Mauthausenconcentration camp in Austria, two activists suddenly wondered aloud if some of

these victims had not been from Istán, since “most of them were from Andalusia”. Checkingthe data on a tablet, the activists were immediately able to determine that two villagers hadindeed been deported. While one of the activists went to talk to the owner of the bar aboutit, the leader of the FEFM concluded that “if they deported people from this small village,that means that it was really Republican in these parts”. Returning to the table, the activist

1. Interview, psychologist for the FEFM, Istán, 2 August 2012.



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informed the group that a guerrilla was supposedly also buried in a cave not far from thevillage. The decision was made to go and exhume his body (which ultimately did not happendue to the lack of a specific location).

During the preparatory meetings that I observed,1 the debate was already polarised regardingthe necessity of proving the “Republican” identity of the victims. This debate would continueon the ground in the village. As a result of chance encounters and confidences gathered hereand there, the activists established a makeshift political genealogy of the victims that theyjotted down as they went along. The activist investigation did not merely note the raw facts,however. On the contrary, the evidence gathered was continually adjusted to fit the activistgrammar.

“We have to verify the results of the February 1936 elections in the village, then we'll be able tosee if there were people here who supported the Popular Front!”; “We have to get more informationabout where the members of the resistance were in this area!”...2

Counting the number of victims was done alongside establishing a map of the Republicanresistance and documenting its planned repression. The goal was proving that the organi-sation was defending structural, targeted victims, in a politicised village, and not merely thevictims of “jealousy”, “vendettas” or “score-settling”, as villagers generally described thesituation.

Incidental discoveries – such as the presence of resistance fighters in the area – were greetedenthusiastically and continually aligned with the organisation’s goals by the president of theFEFM during debates, in order to unite the group in its mission. These discoveries gavegreater meaning to the group’s activities: the excavators were not mere gravediggers, cometo meddle in private affairs, as some villagers claimed, but “memorial activists”. They couldalso been seen as confirmation of the “fear” that still existed in the hamlet: “They’ve beenthere for 70 years and no one has dared to dig them up!”, members of the group exclaimed,thus justifying their cause. Such discoveries likewise brought individual motivations and themeaning of lived experiences in line with official FEFM discourse. During discussions, anthro-pologists, archaeologists and psychologists effectively encountered the same ways of drama-tising the cause again and again – that of a hidden truth (the victims’ political identity) –that silence and ignorance would have concealed indefinitely, and which had now suddenlybeen brought to light by the organisation’s efforts. Finally, the political definition of thevictims confirmed the legitimacy of the organisation’s stance with regard to its rivals: unlikeexhumations that only celebrated the “dignity” that the victims’ relatives could now enjoyand which “privatised” suffering, the FEFM made public the deadly stigma of a politicalidentity.

On the ground, the combination of activist conceptions of martyrdom and post-conflicttheory were obvious. The lengthy testimony sessions overseen by the FEFM psychologistwere one example. After asking relatives questions to determine the psychological traumaprovoked by the victim’s “disappearance”, the psychologist would suddenly switch to politicalissues.

1. Observations of meetings in Sabadell (Cataluña), April 2012.2. Instructions routinely given during this period by the president of the FEFM to members of the group as newdata was collected (during dinners, daily general meetings, when physical evidence was discovered). Personalobservations.



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Was he an activist? With the Democratic Transition, as the family of a victim did you feel thatthings got better? Have you ever been recognised as a victim's family member? Do you think theexhumations are good for the village? For the country? Do you think this helps to bring aboutjustice?

Developing this questionnaire was in and of itself a heuristic endeavour, as it allowed reflec-tion on the nature of the link between the legitimate framework of psychosocial interventionin the post-conflict universe and the gradual adaptation of individual behaviour in relationto the specificity of the activist collective. When asked how she developed this questionnaire,the psychologist admitted that, not knowing how to prepare, just a few days before her firstexcavation with the FEFM she downloaded a protocol concerning the “model for psycho-social intervention” designed for use during the excavation of a mass grave.1 This document,prepared by a Spanish NGO, follows current international norms. The first time, the FEFMpsychologist followed the questionnaire to the letter. Then, over the course of her involve-ment with the organisation, she began to eliminate questions that she did not find relevant,replacing them with other “psycho-political” questions more appropriate for the group’sfocus. The “politicisation” of the questionnaire – concrete proof of which could be seen inthe notes added and crossings-out on the photocopied documents – also extended to theperception that the psychologist had of the interview space that she controlled. Althoughshe admitted that this was a space that allowed for grieving to finally begin, she also con-sidered it as “a place where left-wing values and Republican ideals were reclaimed [...] thusallowing all this hidden pride to be expressed”. The argument for activist therapy is not justrhetoric: it is a function of those chance events previously experienced (the interview spaceat times providing an arena for the expression of activist anger, or even becoming a placefor recruiting victims’ relatives into the ranks of the FEFM) that have served as justificationfor the activist cause. It is on this basis that individual “trauma” was gradually recognisedas a form of political “trauma”. According to the psychologist, so long as mourning wasrendered impossible, it would likewise be impossible to reclaim the Republic.

As much as anything else, the work of identifying bodies sought to establish “Republicanvictims”. This agenda was often revealed during chance occurrences. At the edge of the massgrave, an elderly woman had come to provide a photograph of her father, “buried” there.The picture was passed around. Enthralled, one activist examined the image at length. Then,teary-eyed, he admitted that this picture allowed him to humanise the bodies they had foundand to truly understand the cruelty involved in the killings. The photograph was then passedto the physical anthropologist. With a jeweller’s magnifying glass over one eye, the anthro-pologist wrote down every physical detail, in order to aid future laboratory work. Later, twohistorians examined the image. This time, the magnifying glass was used to identify anyelements that might point to Republican political activism (insignia, uniforms, clothingdetails).

Although the details observed by the physical anthropologist were kept confidential, thosereported by the historians immediately became part of group discussions. When asked abouttheir role, the historians explained that they hoped to fulfil a double function when identi-fying bodies.

1. Interview, FEFM psychologist, cited above.



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We historians, we're here to complement the work done by the forensic anthropologists and archae-ologists. First, we help to identify the bodies. They examine the bones and remains to reconstructthe victims' stories and determine the truth of the matter. We complement this work by examiningdocuments, archives and personal accounts, and help with identification. Then, our second job isdocumenting everything that happened here in Istán, the political events [...]. We consider theindividuals in the grave like friends, like comrades, we're here for them because we have an intel-lectual, moral and historical obligation to them [...].1

Documenting the political context is a common method in forensic investigations on missingpersons. This process allows researchers to identify acts of repression and helps with bio-logical identification.2 In Istán, however, the historians’ work did not assist with forensicidentification, but rather came to supplement it. By consulting the village archives, the recordsof resistance organisations, and the few monographs penned by local historians, theseresearchers were attempting to prove that the individuals identified by bio-anthropologicalmeans were in fact political dissidents and that Istán was an oppressed Republican village.

Control over the images of the bodies likewise merits attention. Within the ranks of theFEFM, only the activist in charge of audio-visual media was authorised to film and takephotographs of the ongoing work. When journalists visited the site, always escorted by thisactivist, they were asked not to take pictures of the dead and to focus instead on panoramicviews (where Republican flags and activist banners were prominently placed). Control overthe images was primarily designed to prevent sensationalism in the media, which wouldhighlight the abused bodies (perforated skulls, handcuffed skeletons) to the detriment of theideals being defended.

For ten years, we've been inundated with images of old people mourning, and with bones, we don'tcare about victimisation, that's not the problem, we want the media to talk about the ideas thatthese people defended, and that we defend today, we want them to talk about the Republic!3

As an arena in which to reveal the “truth” of the gratuitous violence endured, and as a placefor the collection of memories,4 displaying these bodies meant presenting the media with aspace in which political identity and a political programme could be actualised. In front ofthe microphone, that brief moment in which the effective impact of a speech is linked to itscapacity to make generalisations, international human rights standards and conventions wereinvoked by the group’s leaders in order to emphasise the barbarity of “Franco’s coup d’état”.However, it was the ceremony organised in honour of the “comrade-victims” that reallypublicly displayed the grammar of activism. Held at the end of the excavation project infront of an audience of family members and villagers, this ritual involved the entire FEFMstaff and served to crystallise the link between the commemorative repertoire of the Repub-lican left and post-conflict theory. The way in which villagers were invited to participate, therhetoric used by the group, and the participants selected all combined aspects of a com-memorative funeral rite with those of a Republican political meeting.

1. Interview with an FEFM historian, Istán, 2 August 2012.2. Interview with Luis Fondebrider, president of the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF – ArgentineForensic Anthropology Team), Barcelona, 14 December 2012.

3. Exclamation from the president of the FEFM.4. Hélène Dumas, Rémi Korman, “Espaces de la mémoire du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda”, Afrique contem-poraine, 23(2), 2011, 11-27.



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The individuals invited to come up to the microphone were confined to those who knewhow to leverage their local roots in the service of political activism (e.g., the great-nephewof a missing person who called himself a Republican and spoke of his relative’s assassinationin general terms, rather than telling a personal story; and “Andalusian-Republican” com-munity leaders and local representatives, who constantly referred to the heavy price paid bythe region’s inhabitants). The tribute paid to the victims was also a tribute paid to theexcavators’ selfless dedication. While their willingness to work for free, their outsider status,and their high level of scientific skill all attested to their integrity, these characteristics alsohelped to highlight the dedication of the group, which called itself “the final anti-Francomilitia” come to “liberate” the village. Finally, the commemoration attempted to historicisethe village’s story. Exhuming the bodies was seen as putting an end to the limbo of defeatin which Istán seemed to be permanently stuck. After the group sang A las Barricadas andThe Internationale in honour of the victims before them, the president of the FEFM spokefervently to this “Republican village” and called on each and every resident to follow theexample set by “the comrades before them” in order continue the struggle for a Third SpanishRepublic.

Opening up the debate. Republican subjectification: a traumatic legacy,or a political one?

The FEFM’s stance can in part be likened to the antagonistic position adopted bycertain organisations that have refused to accept victimhood status in other contexts.In such cases, “victimhood” is seen as a social identity that is dependent only on the

contingent experience of an “event” (being wounded or tortured, disappearing, losing sightof a loved one forever, etc.), encompassed within a subjugating category (“trauma”) thattends to conceal individuals’ real activist identities and runs the risk of setting up an equiv-alence been their status and that of executioners.1 In a consensual register, victimhood statusthus aligns itself with the pacification efforts of post-conflict policies. In such cases, insteadof institutionally condemning victims to perpetual grief,2 organisations sometimes prefer toconfront things head on. Such was the strategy chosen by the Mothers of the Plazo del Mayoin Argentina or by certain anti-apartheid activists.3

The FEFM’s criticism of “private” and “depoliticised” victims is connected to this position,with the difference that this association also criticises the contemporary mechanisms formanaging the victims of state violence. Although the aforementioned groups have claimedactivist heritage and rejected the traumatic legacy that post-conflict therapy supposedly pro-duces, the FEFM has in addition chosen to adopt a stance of activist extroversion with regardto these care policies. In this case, establishing victimhood status does not take place on thefringes of the mechanisms adopted – such as forensic exhumation – but at the heart of theseprocesses, by means of détournement (diversion)4 and re-enunciation.5 If we limit ourselvesto the practice of identification – one of the main functions of forensic exhumation – the

1. D. Fassin, La raison humanitaire.2. S. Lefranc, “Pleurer ensemble restaure-t-il le lien social?”.3. Sandrine Lefranc, Politiques du pardon (Paris: PUF, 2002).4. Michel de Certeau, L'invention du quotidien. Tome I. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Translated intoEnglish by Steven F. Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984).

5. Jean-François Bayart, “L'énonciation du politique”, Revue française de science politique, 35(3), 1985, 343-73.



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current ethnographic study reveals that the identification of the disappeared is inseparablefrom identification with their struggle. To achieve this, the collective’s specifically designedactivities seek to eliminate any sort of strictly “private” and emotional relation to the victims.Instead, they try to orchestrate a “political communion” with the dead, in activist terms,which seeks to lay bare the conditions for investing in the Republican cause.

In the context of Spanish protests supporting victims, this type of activist problematisationand management of the cause of “the disappeared” fuels the accusation by the FEFM’schallengers that family grief was instrumentalised for ideological ends. Although these fam-ilies deserved to be freed from their pain (shame, guilt, anger, etc.) and regain emotionalstability,1 they were often cast by the FEFM as supporting actors, stripped of the ability toproperly mourn their dead, so long refused them, and at times denied the right to evenconsider themselves true victims. The “right” way to reclaim a family narrative – hithertoshot through with gaps, silences, and discontinuity – as well as the possibility of “expressingoneself” and speaking freely2 were to be altered by the FEFM’s “ideological manœuvres”.

However, reducing the FEFM’s practices to the strict realisation of Communist commem-orative repertoires, designed to honour a shared community identity to the detriment of theindividual,3 does not stand up to empirical scrutiny. As evidenced by the integration ofcurrent practices in the international world of post-conflict management, the collective’sactivist strategy also achieves individuation of the fates of “the disappeared” and their rela-tives. In other words, although exhumation appears to assign a collective identity that placeslittle emphasis on personal perspectives and emotions, in reality, the process as organisedby the FEFM nevertheless remains oriented towards the victims’ families. For the latter, asan example, the process of re-interring the bodies is an occasion for renewed access to thepast subjectivity of the victims. In addition to recovering the bodies, who are now finallygranted a place in the village cemetery and the “community of the dead” from which theyhad been excluded,4 the FEFM presented the families with a series of investigatory reports(forensic, psychological, historical) that recreated the victims’ individual identities (their firstand last names, their occupations, their genealogy), how they had lived (their personal storiesand economic situations) and their daily lives (their relationships and a number of bio-graphical anecdotes). The attention to the individual thus contrasts with the commemorativerepertoire that allegedly glorifies the heroic actions of activists, whose names could be inter-changeably engraved on a headstone. On the contrary, forensic identification, historicalresearch and the collection of personal accounts by psychologists recreate robust biographicalsubjectivities.

Moreover, the FEFM does not limit itself to providing individualised care, unlike otherorganisations whose primary goal is helping families move past their traumatic memories.The FEFM seeks to offer families a new way of expressing themselves without having recourse

1. Ernolando Parra Parra, “Intervención psicosocial en exhumaciones en España”, paper presented during thestudy session titled “Jornadas Derechos humanos y memoria histórica”, 23 and 24 February 2012, accessibleat the following website: <http://www.derechosociales.unizar.es/Documenta/Parra.pdf?> (last accessed 8 Jan-uary 2014).

2. Gabriel Gatti, Identidades desaparecidas. Peleas por el sentido en los mundos de la desaparición forzada(Buenos Aires: Prometeo libros, 2008).

3. Isabelle Delpla, “Incertitudes privées et publiques sur les disparus en Bosnie-Herzégovine”, in Marc Le Pape,Johanna Siméant, Claudine Vidal (eds), Crises extrêmes. Face aux massacres, aux guerres civiles et aux géno-cides (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 287-301.

4. F. Ferrandiz, “Exhuming the defeated...”.



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to trauma narratives, an operator of meaning that, when used in its everyday sense byactivists,1 would confine the tragedy to its “humanitarian” dimension and exclude the pos-sibility of claiming “left-wing” roots. According to the activists, this kind of approach wouldmean the ultimate ideological victory of Francoism, which would have destroyed the prideof belonging to the left. Instead of a traumatic legacy, the FEFM strives to provide a politicallegacy: redressing the wrongs endured by the families of the disappeared entails scientificallyproving (by using the knowledge and skills available during the investigation, aligned withan activist grammar) the existence of a political line of descent and inviting relatives toreclaim ownership of this legacy.

We have to put an end to “grandfatherism” [abuelismo], they weren't killed because they weregrandparents or parents, brothers or sisters, but because they fought against fascism, becausethey were revolutionaries. People need to reclaim their values.2

Advocating for the values of the disappeared victims, perpetuating their legacy, reconnectingfamily narratives with the Ur-narrative of past struggles and nostalgically lamenting the lossof an exalted political past: raising the awareness of the families of “the disappeared” certainlyrelies on the traditional emotional tools employed by memorial movements. That said, theactivists’ attempts at raising awareness were not limited to the simple rhetorical expositionof grievances and references that seek to enlist the public’s emotional support. They werecombined with a form of appeal that invited individuals to reflect on their own heritage and,ultimately, to fulfil a duty of testimony. Via a strategy of physical presentation of the “Repub-lican bodies” at Istán, this “mechanism for awareness”3 sought to reveal the political natureof individual heritages. Consequently, it is not so much that the FEFM invokes nostalgia fora mythical struggle, in the hopes of enlisting loyalty and creating “heirs”, but rather that itoperates directly on filial ties by insinuating itself into the cracks of family narratives andtraumatic experiences, ultimately redefining and transforming them into a catalyst forrenewed political struggle.

“Finding the disappeared means finding the ‘Republican’ inside of you”: such could be themotto characterising the work of subjectification undertaken by the FEFM. Exhuming bodiesseeks to produce new ways of understanding oneself: the process encourages everyoneinvolved to delve into their own genealogy, reclaim their own “activist background”, andjoin the fight against “Franco’s heirs”.

Sélim Smaoui

Sélim Smaoui is currently a doctoral candidate in political science at Sciences Po Paris and a visitinglecturer and research assistant at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence. He works primarily on protest move-ments concerned with the victims of Franco’s regime in Spain. He is also the author of works on protestmovements in Morocco, and his publications include: (with Mohamed Wazif) “Étendard de lutte oupavillon de complaisance? S’engager sous la bannière du ‘mouvement du 20 février’ à Casablanca”, in

1. Didier Fassin, Richard Rechtman, L'Empire du traumatisme. Enquête sur la condition de victime (Paris: Flam-marion, 2007).

2. President of the FEFM, 2 August 2012.3. Christophe Traïni (ed.), Émotions... Mobilisations! (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009).



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Amin Allal, Thomas Pierret (eds), Au cœur des révoltes arabes. Devenir révolutionnaires (Paris: ArmandColin, 2013), 55-79 (Sciences Po Paris, CERI, 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris, <[email protected]>).

Appendix. The FEFM and its rivals

The number of organisations specialising in the forensic exhumation of “the disappeared”has greatly increased since 2000, when the first contemporary excavations took place. Withinthis sphere, the FEFM is positioned in relation to two other major organisations: the Aso-ciación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH – Association for the Recu-peration of Historical Memory) and the Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi (Aranzadi ScientificSociety). Created in 2000, the ARMH inaugurated the contemporary practice of exhumingvictims. It brings together relatives of “the disappeared” and enjoys a great deal of attentionfrom the media. The association likewise has access to activist resources provided by someof its most active members (individuals with close ties to the United Left or the SpanishSocialist Workers’ Party, former UN officials, etc.). The ARMH is organised as a networkand works alongside independent agencies at the national level (Psychologists without Bor-ders, Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi) and the international level (the Argentine ForensicAnthropology Team). At the local level, the association collaborates with dozens of smallcommunity organisations. These groups are not, however, organically linked to the ARMH.The organisation acquired a research unit in 2009, on the campus of Ponferrada Universityin León, in order to identify the exhumed bodies of Spanish civil war victims. It also boastsits own network of biological anthropologists and archaeologists. The Sociedad de CienciasAranzadi, which also specialises in exhumation, operates primarily out of the Basque Country.It is exclusively composed of archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic doctors from theUniversity of the Basque Country. Since 2000, this group’s members have acted upon therequest of the associations of victims’ families, including the ARMH, and have limited theircollaboration to providing strictly “scientific” assistance. Some of its members, who are wellknown in academic circles, have helped to draft protocols seeking to systematise the practiceof forensic exhumation and align it with international norms.

The Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria (FEFM-2005) originally created within theSpanish Communist Party (PCE) under the name of Foro por la Memoria in 2002, can bedifferentiated from the two groups mentioned above because of its organisational structureand the composition of its members. Since 2005, the Foro has acted as an umbrella organ-isarion uniting twenty or so local chapters of varying size, which function according to apyramid structure. The organisation is primarily composed of activists from the PCE, whotransitioned into memorial activism, as well as multi-positioned activists from within anumber of left-wing groups (the National Confederation of Labour, student groups, localneighbourhood organisations, self-managed social centres, etc.). With regard to scientificpersonnel, until 2005, the group initially collaborated with archaeologists who belonged to(or were affiliated with) the Communist Party. After 2005, the FEFM began to recruit archae-ologists and biological anthropologists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.During certain excavations, the FEFM also collaborated with some of families of “thedisappeared”.

The FEFM stands out because of the strict control it has over its members (internal discipline,the abnegation it demands of them). It also strategically recruits its collaborators. In thepast, however, the group has also collaborated with the international NGO Equipo Nizkor



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(which specialises in the fight against impunity) and a number of foreign forensic anthro-pologists. This was the case when the FEFM organised the 1st Conference on the Victims ofFranco (20-22 April 2012, in Rivas-Vaciamadrid), during which the group attempted to unitedozens of organisations dealing with the victims of Francoism. While the ARMH and theSociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi state that they work strictly in favour of victims’ families, forthe FEFM, exhumations are a way to rebuild the Republican left in Spain.



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Exiting Conflict or Reasserting the Struggle ? The exhumation and making of 'Republican Victims' in Spain. (French Review of Political Science)

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