Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá and the Pact of Forgetting: trauma analysis of execution victims from a Spanish Civil War mass burial site at Guadalajara, Castilla la Mancha

Fascist dictator Francisco Franco was responsible for the torture, murder and covert burial of 150–200,000 civilians both during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This comprises one of the largest concentrations of mass graves and victims in the world, yet efforts to exhume them have been strenuously blocked by subsequent governments. This research documents the 2017 exhumation of Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá and 27 other individuals executed between July and November 1939, and interred at the cemetery in Guadalajara, Castilla La Mancha. The analysis includes DNA identifications and an assessment of cultural (possessions) and bioarchaeological variables (age/sex, stature, palaeopathology) in order to contextualise studies of ante/peri-mortem trauma, and thus understand the decedents’ lives and the manner in which they were treated before and up to the time of their executions. Of the 24 burials in the main grave, 23 (95.8%) showed gunshot trauma (GSW), 7 (29.2%) showed blunt force trauma (BFT) and 1 (4.2%) showed sharp force trauma (SFT). Five of the main group (20.8%) showed healing lesions indicative of often extensive assault in the weeks leading up to their execution; one individual had sustained 27 fractures. GSW patterns are consistent with an organised firing squad, followed by multiple GSW at close range in the back/side of the head. This research elucidates unrecorded aspects of fascist dominion in 1936-9, adds to extant research on pattern and method in global atrocities, and demonstrates the human cost of the Spanish Civil War to those who aim to trivialise it.