Franco's secrets haunt Spain

Families in search of truth witness the exhumation of three women victims of Falangist tyranny

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Monday October 21, 2002
The Guardian

More terrible secrets from Spain's civil war were uncovered yesterday as the bones of three women dragged from their beds and shot by General Franco's supporters 66 years ago were dug up by campaigners seeking to shed light on the fate of 30,000 people.
Relatives of the three women, whose bodies were tossed into a ditch outside the central town of Candaleda on the night of December 29 1936, looked on in tense silence as the first bones were brought to the surface by a mechanical digger.

"My mother was killed because she was a reader of the Socialista newspaper," Obdulia Camacho, 80, recalled.

The dead women were named as Obdulia's mother, Pilar, then 43, Virtudes de la Puente, 53, whose only apparent crime was to be a Protestant republican, and a 26-year-old pregnant woman called Valeriana Granada