Pepi Sánchez, seized for a moment with indignation, lets out an expletive, which he immediately asks the journalist to omit. He won’t be the only one. And it’s not that I’m inclined to swear, says this retired secretary, a 73-year-old from Madrid, daughter and granddaughter of the reprisals of the Franco regime in the province of Badajoz. What she talks about touches her inside. What subject? The failure of the legislation on historical memory approved by the PP and Vox in Extremadura, a land brutally repressed by Franco’s general Juan Yagüe, who deserved to be nicknamed the “butcher of Badajoz”. “The truth is the truth, no matter how much they want to hide it. But they try, what nonsense. When the left was stronger, it should have done more. So we wouldn’t see ourselves as we do now, with children who say that life was better with Franco,” he laments. And another swear word escapes him – nothing serious – and he asks once again that it not be entered in the report.
Sánchez now lives in Montijo (Badajoz, population 15,232), where his father, Pedro, was imprisoned in the so-called “penal colonies”. Nearly 1,500 convicted republicans, mostly Andalusians, Extremadura and Catalans, were locked up and forced to work there on the construction of an irrigation canal between 1941 and 1945. A concentration camp in short. Enthusiastic, she walks, supported by two crutches, through an area where, transformed by time, some old installations of a complex which, despite the efforts of the Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory of Extremadura, still lack signage that recalls what happened there, are still identified. The place is an example of erased memory.
But Sánchez has memories of his father. “Living here was not the worst thing that happened to him. He was imprisoned in Ocaña, Burgos and Puertollano, half of his life crushed, in prisons with humidity that aggravated his asthma. He died at 57, a few months before Franco,” says Sánchez before returning to an idea that seems to mortify her: the lack of knowledge, according to her, growing, of the dimensions of Franco’s repression and its impact still today on many families: “We have done things badly. And if in addition, when there is a law, the right repeals it…”
Four relatives of reprisal victims who spoke to EL PAÍS for this report, including Sánchez, agree on a similar complaint – the historical injustice of abolishing the Memory Law – and a similar concern – that repeal would hinder an already insufficient social awareness of repression. In accordance with a request from Vox, the PP and Santiago Abascal’s party repealed the 2019 Democratic Memory Law in October this year and replaced it with the Concorde Law. The change doesn’t stop at the name. In the new standard, there is no reference to “dictatorship” or “coup.” References to the repression of women and those suffered because of their sexual orientation also disappear, among many other repressions.
The text, strictly equidistant between the Second Republic and the dictatorship, limits itself to noting some “generic errors in the society of the time” and proposes to “repair the damage” caused “on both sides”. While justifying the repeal of the previous norm in which it contributed to “dividing society”, it expands the temporal range covered not until the coup d’état of 1936, but until the Republican proclamation of 1931, and also includes among the victims those of terrorism, despite the fact that they already have their own autonomous law since 2020. The result is that the violence exercised by the Franco regime is blurred.
16,000 victims
As the victim’s grandson and member of the memorial movement, historian Ángel Olmedo was present last May in the Extremadura Assembly during the debate on the new law. Sitting on the podium with other relatives of the victims and associative actors, he listened to how a Vox deputy described them as “reds in mourning”, an episode which for Olmedo is a symptom of the same problem as the law: the rise of a “Francoist revisionism” which ranges from a minimum of respect for the heirs of the losers of the war to the vision of the Republic, the coup d’état, war and repression. “The idea that the law conveys is that there was a war between brothers in which all were equally guilty, in an equidistance which, in addition to the historical truth, ignores that the deaths in the Republican zone were already recognized,” explains Olmedo, co-author with Chema Álvarez of Extremadura against oblivion (Jarramplas, 2025).
This “concord” law which mentions Franco only once – and which says that “there has never been a consensual story” about him – was approved in a country where Franco’s repression reached brutal levels. “Cruelty and raids were a common resource,” it reads The column of death. The advance of the Francoist army from Seville to Badajoz (Crítica, 2017), by the historian Francisco Espinosa. Olmedo points out: “In Extremadura there was no war, there was an occupying army experienced in North Africa, entering every town with blood and fire as it advanced through Badajoz. As for Cáceres, it remained almost entirely under the control of the rebels since the start of the coup. There there was outright repression.”
According to Olmedo and Álvarez’s estimate, the number of victims of Franco’s repression was 14,000, compared to 1,600 in the Republican rearguard. One of the most atrocious massacres was that of Badajoz. Without specifying the number of murders, what General Yagüe told an American journalist gives an idea: “Of course we shot them. What did I expect? That I was going to take 4,000 reds with me while my column advanced against time?” In Extremadura there are 174 mass graves, of which 78 are registered as being excavated, while 96 have not yet been opened, according to data from the State Secretariat for Democratic Memory.
With these figures, and with the Concord law recently introduced at the BOE, is historical memory a relevant issue in the electoral campaign? While Vox is content with a law adapted to its needs and the PP shows little or no interest in talking about this issue, the PSOE and Unidas Por Extremadura are the ones setting the tone on the issue, presenting the new law as a foretaste of the regression that, they say, awaits the region if there is, as all the polls predict, a new right-wing majority. “It is an uncomfortable question for the PP, especially for the families, among whom the rule has generated indignation, but also unrest,” explains researcher Chema Álvarez from a field near the former penal colonies of Montijo, in the area where the barracks of the prisoners’ families were precariously installed.
EL PAÍS requested, without success, to speak with officials from the PP and Vox for this article.
From the cemetery to the convent
In Mérida, near the cemetery wall, an inexcusable point on the path to repression in the city, Olmedo affectionately greets a tall 78-year-old man, Pepe Sánchez, who fights the morning cold with a tightly pulled cap. They discuss the open graves in the area, the possible whereabouts of Sánchez’s grandfather, José Sánchez Sánchez – “they took him to Astorga, they told my grandmother that he died of hunger and cold, we don’t know more”; on the assassination of his uncle, José Sánchez Gallardo; about the ordeals her father endured, often coming home scared to death due to surveillance and persecution. After walking to the small monument to the memory of the victims of the Franco regime erected in the cemetery, the conversation drifts towards oblivion. Olmedo says, “It’s amazing that people know so much about the Nazi concentration camps and…”. Sánchez interrupts him and finishes his sentence: “And I don’t know that there was one in Montijo.” A retired watchmaker and jeweler, Sánchez “has his blood boiling” over the repeal of the law: “If we are not aware of what happened, it is for two reasons. First, because for a long time we were very afraid to speak.
A half-hour walk from the cemetery is the Santo Domingo convent, which served as a prison for the Republicans from 1939 to 1947. Waiting in front of its facade is Paqui Chaves, 75, a retired socialist sociocultural artist, who, as a member of the memorial movement, is fighting for the building where his great-uncle Juan Chaves was imprisoned, then shot, to be recognized and identified as a place of repression. “At least let people know what happened, right?” he thinks. “This law blames us, it means that what we are asking reopens the wounds, that it prevents reconciliation. But we are already reconciled!”, he laments over a non-alcoholic beer in a bar on the square which popularly gives its name to the convent.
“Find out who I am”
“The first remains were found at meter 36 of one of the shafts, around 1936, and what’s more, it was the afternoon before the repeal of the law of memory,” says Inma Montero, a 43-year-old journalist, by telephone, who believes that there was something of a “sign” in the appearance that day and at that depth of the first skulls with bullet holes in the abandoned La Paloma mine, in Zarza la Mayor (Cáceres). There, excavation work is looking for the remains of more than 20 people. Among them, his great-grandfather Luciano Montero, a day laborer who was 27 years old when the Phalangists took him from his home in July 1936.
Montero knows it is difficult for his great-grandfather to appear and be identified, but he does not lose hope. And, even if she is worried about the future of the exhumations, which for the moment have not been interrupted, she is satisfied with what has already been achieved: “We have shown that what we said was true, that we had not invented anything. That it was not true that in the wells there was only garbage and dead animals,” explains Montero, from Cáceres with family roots in Zarza la Mayor, who considers the recovery of memory not only as an act of justice, but also as an understanding of one’s own identity. The search for his great-grandfather is part of an effort to “find out who I am,” he explains. A commitment which, according to him, contrasts with the change of law in Extremadura, which he considers to be a denial of the history of his country. “But this law does not establish what the truth is, a law cannot erase the truth,” he said.
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