Within the intense and bitter debate on the Spanish civil war and the long dictatorship that followed, led by General Francisco Franco, the Department of Justice of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia has recently confirmed that according to its calculations more than 20,000 victims are still buried, unidentified, in mass graves.


Until a few years ago the Catalan authorities supported and financed the excavation and identification of these mass graves only upon the request of relatives of the disappeared victims, but after the Law of Historical Memory the Catalan Autonomous Government has begun to act independently once it has knowledge of mass illegal graves.


Since this actuation, the authorities have drawn up a map of at least 505 localized mass graves, of which only 38 have so far been opened.
At the same time, a DNA Bank was voluntarily organized among the relatives of the thousands of disappeared persons.

A Memory Bank that up to now accumulates DNA identification of some 6,000 families.
Between 1979 and 2018 the remains of barely 339 murdered people have been recovered, of which a small part was identified and given to their relatives.

The Catalan Government through the so-called Plan of Graves has proposed to identify in 2019 at least 80% of the remains found so far, which would be about 281 people.


Despite the efforts, the figures are still far from the 20,000 people buried in mass graves that were killed during the occupation of Catalonia and in the intense subsequent repression.


Meanwhile the debate on the Franco dictatorship, among its detractors and defenders (active and passive), is still open in Spain, and offers interpretations which are extremely contemporary.