The Department of Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality has started the tender for the contract that will allow the exhumations of graves of 61 victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in four cemeteries of the Community; among them, those of Alicante and Orihuela.
But from the Civic Commission for the Recovery of the Historical Memory of Alicante, they believe that although in Orihuela, as is being done in Monóvar, that location and delimitation is viable, in Alicante “it will be very difficult to intervene”.
The exhumation works, which will have a maximum budget of about 88,000 euros, seek to recover and identify the bodies of the people who suffered Franco’s repression and dignify the memory and democratic values of those who fought for democracy.
The studies they refer to 11 victims in the Alicante cemetery and 17 in Orihuela.
But from the Commission they explain that in the Alicante cemetery “the bodies of the reprisals in the war are more than 400 and they mingled in a mass grave “with the victims of the bombings and with others whose families did not have money for burial and ended up in the mass grave until recently.
In total, there will be a thousand bodies, very difficult to delimit, so they believe that “the best would be a memorial” that remembers them, which is what they have been asking for years with the families of the victims, some of whom have placed small tombstones where they believe their loved one would be, says historian Paco Moreno, a member of the Commission.
The hiring by the conselleria will allow carrying out these investigations, delimitation, exhumation and anthropological study of the victims in a series of graves in the two Alicante municipalities, in addition to Castelló and Segorbe.
The term is open for the presentation by the companies that want to opt for the contract, and these exhumations They will be added to those already started or planned in Monóvar or Benissa.
By the way, the Civic Commission recalls that since last year they have been waiting to meet with the mayor of Alicante, Luis Barcala, to address issues such as the activities that can be carried out in the institutional celebrations of the anniversaries of the bombing of the Central Market of Alicante and the march of the last Republicans in Stanbrook.
With the Diputación, on the contrary, they have begun to approach with the Department of Culture, a series of routes of interest through places of the memory of the Civil War and the Republic in the province.
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