Bringing up the bodies again: third burial of Franco's victims marks Spain's endless agony

Juan Chueca Sagarra was buried for the third time late on Wednesday afternoon, his tiny coffin, topped with a single white rose, stowed in a crypt in his home town of Magallón, which sits among vineyards and wind turbines under the huge, low skies of Aragón.

- Sam Jones in Magallón

His homecoming was as overdue as his murder was savage, and his afterlife has been peripatetic. The farm worker, trade unionist and father of five was 42 when he and five other men were shot dead by Francoists in the cemetery in the neighbouring town of Borja in August 1936.

The general's coup against the Republican government had triggered the Spanish civil war a month earlier, unleashing a wave of terror against its ideological opponents, among them union activists and teachers. The six bodies were tossed into a mass grave, where they would lie for almost a quarter of a century.

In April 1959, the remains of Chueca and 16 other murdered men from Magallón and the surrounding area were removed from the pit in Borja - without the knowledge or permission of their families - and packed into two large crates. Boxes 2,034 and 2,035 were then taken to the mountains outside Madrid and buried in the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, the monument to Francoism and its creed of National Catholicism where the dictator himself was buried from 1975 to 2019.

Spain's largest mass grave holds the remains of some 33,800 people from both the Nationalist and Republican sides, their bones crammed together under the basilica's gargantuan cross in a hollow attempt at postwar reconciliation. Only the Nationalist dead were labelled with names and surnames; the remainder, like Chueca and his companions, arrived in the valley in crates inscribed with nothing but the number of bodies they held and name of the town from whose mass grave they had been taken.