Gregory McNamee: The Death of Federico Garcia Lorca (Time for Spain to Face History)
[Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor for Encyclopædia Britannica, for which he writes regularly on world geography, culture, and other topics. An editor, publishing consultant, and photographer, he is also the author of 30 books, most recently Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food (Praeger, 2006).]
On August 18, 1936, a 38-year-old Spanish poet named Federico García Lorca was taken from a jail cell in the city of Granada, escorted to a courtyard in the hills outside the city, and executed, along with a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters who had fought in the city’s defense against Francisco Franco’s rebellion.
His killers were Fascist militiamen whose leaders had long before targeted the poet for murder, for it was clear where his sympathies lay; he once said, after all, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.”
His killers, however, apparently believed that he was being killed simply because he was homosexual, and one later bragged of having fired two bullets into the poet “for being queer.”...
...García Lorca’s family has objected to the exhumation, as Jon Lee Anderson reports in an admirable story for the New Yorker (June 22, 2009; abstract here). Noting that thousands of his compatriots were executed in the hills above Granada, Laura García Lorca, a niece of the poet, adds to Anderson’s story the comment, “We feel that the best way to remember all victims of the terrible crimes committed by Franco’s troops is to preserve and protect this burial ground, where Lorca is one victim among many.”
The case is slowly moving forward, with all its complications. Whether it will undo Spain’s long-standing “pact of silence,” as it is known, with respect to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship remains to be seen. But many believe that, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of disturbing the bones of the dead, it is a conversation that is long overdue.
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On August 18, 1936, a 38-year-old Spanish poet named Federico García Lorca was taken from a jail cell in the city of Granada, escorted to a courtyard in the hills outside the city, and executed, along with a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters who had fought in the city’s defense against Francisco Franco’s rebellion.
His killers were Fascist militiamen whose leaders had long before targeted the poet for murder, for it was clear where his sympathies lay; he once said, after all, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.”
His killers, however, apparently believed that he was being killed simply because he was homosexual, and one later bragged of having fired two bullets into the poet “for being queer.”...
...García Lorca’s family has objected to the exhumation, as Jon Lee Anderson reports in an admirable story for the New Yorker (June 22, 2009; abstract here). Noting that thousands of his compatriots were executed in the hills above Granada, Laura García Lorca, a niece of the poet, adds to Anderson’s story the comment, “We feel that the best way to remember all victims of the terrible crimes committed by Franco’s troops is to preserve and protect this burial ground, where Lorca is one victim among many.”
The case is slowly moving forward, with all its complications. Whether it will undo Spain’s long-standing “pact of silence,” as it is known, with respect to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship remains to be seen. But many believe that, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of disturbing the bones of the dead, it is a conversation that is long overdue.