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08/22/2004:

"Via a grave site, Spain relives harsh divisionsMany seek to dig into war's remains"

by Charles M. Sennott Boston Globe
GRANADA, Spain -- On a hillside overlooking the Sierra Nevada mountains, a gnarled olive tree and a simple granite marker stand where historians believe Spain's most celebrated 20th-century poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was summarily executed and dumped in a communal grave.

It was August 1936 when Garcia Lorca, who romanticized the ruggedness of the landscape and the people of southern Spain in poetry and plays, and who stated, "I will always be on the side of those who have nothing," was killed by Francisco Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War.

...The effort to document the past has provided a political theme in modern Spain, a sense that if it is to progress as a modern country it must recognize injustices.
The issue is not prosecution or a formal truth and reconciliation committee, as in South Africa, Chile, and elsewhere. Spain's journey toward truth is about a "persistence of memory," to borrow a phrase from Salvador Dali's depiction of a melting clock, that has lasted through three generations. full article

Mas, como el recuerdo de la tierra, como el petreo
esplendor del metal y el silencio,
pueblo, patrio y avena, es tu victoria.

Avanta tu bandera agujerada
como tu pecho sobre las cicatrices
del tiempo y tierra.

And furthermore, like the memory of the earth, like the petrified splendor of metal and the silence,
people, motherland and fields of oats, is your victory.

Your tattered banner advances
like your breast above the scars
of time and earth.
Pablo Neruda