Intent on forgetting

Found during exhumations of the remains of people executed by the fascists: a pair of scissors

Viznar near Granada. Not everyone is dead yet. A few children of the murdered Republicans and the anti-fascist resistance against the regime of Francisco Franco, who died on 17/18. The July 1936 coup that triggered the Spanish Civil War still exists.

One of them is Rosario Sánchez Quero, born in Granada in 1932. Her father António, then 25 years old, never came home from his job in the gunpowder factory in the suburb of El Fargue during the days of the coup, which was immediately joined by the military stationed in Granada. Sánchez says her mother never started looking for the body for fear of reprisals.

»Therein lies the danger: repeating history. It is already Generation Z that predominantly votes for the ultra-right.« The trade unionist Inma Manzano Romero

On August 31, 2026, Francisco de Asís Carrión Jiménez took two DNA samples from the almost 94-year-old woman. Carrión is part of the Universidad y Memoria (University and Memory) project: with the help of the samples, the project aims to identify the remains of Rosario Sánchez Quero's father after all these years.

Their son Roberto Lara Sánchez describes to Jungle World what has been passed down in the family from those days of mass murder. It is believed that António Sánchez Rodrigo was murdered on August 19th, he says. “The forest near Víznar,” a small community not far from Granada, “was littered with corpses, including possibly my grandfather, Rosario's father. Many faces were terribly disfigured.”

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