The government has just taken the first step to draw up an inventory of the works built under the Franco regime using forced labor, who were the victims and which companies or entities benefited from it. These are the objectives with which the Public University of Navarra (UPNA) will work after the grant of 600,000 euros approved this Tuesday by the last Council of Ministers of the year. The objective is to respect one of the provisions of the Democratic Memory Law still pending and which provides for the creation of this list.
The intention of the study is to have a “rigorous” database which, where appropriate, ends up contributing to “the recognition and moral reparation of victims” and “serves as a support for future public policies”, affirms the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory. The law provides for the promotion of “actions” to recognize and compensate victims, also by companies that “prove” to have used this type of work for their benefit, but does not give further details.
The inventory that the Navarrese university will make within a maximum period of three years will have to “contextualize and historically document” how this mechanism used by the dictatorship as a form of repression of the “red enemy” worked. In practice, the Franco regime implemented two major systems: one was the system of redemption of sentences through work, to which prisoners were subjected. The other was carried out by prisoners of concentration camps, most of them republican prisoners of war captured directly on the fronts during the conquests of territories by the rebels.
The types of work were very varied and closely linked to the needs of the moment. Some were carried out in the fields themselves or in supervised factories or workshops, others in large open construction sites. They worked in factories, paved towns and villages, built railways, dams, bridges, swamps or roads, they also carried out agricultural, mining or forestry work. The Cuelgamuros Valley itself, built in honor of the dictator and his victory in the civil war, was built using forced labor.
Public administrations benefited from all this, but so did companies that demanded workers working in extreme and exploitative conditions, as several historians have documented. But, at the moment and until the inventory is published, there is no official census indicating which companies were involved and how many victims there were. UPNA researcher Juan Carlos García Funes documented that in January 1940, 92,000 prisoners of war were part of the workers’ battalions and that 18,700 prisoners sentenced to Franco’s prisons were serving their sentences in penitentiary detachments.
The Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory justifies the direct attribution to the university “for reasons of specialization, technical adequacy, efficiency and guarantee of results” and explains that in addition to the census of works, victims and companies, the organization will have to prepare a “scientific monograph” which details the organization and operation of these sanction systems. The study must also include an analysis of the characteristics of the people subjected, the conditions, the duration of work and the causes of their conviction.
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