Zaragoza (EFE).- José Cansado Lamata and his brother Antonio were killed at the end of September 1936, “maybe by the Falangists”, on the side of a road in Morata de Jalón (Zaragoza). In 1959 they were removed without permission and transferred to Cuelgamuros. This Monday the grandson of the first, Paco, attends from a distance the exhumation of the bodies with the conviction that the wounds of that coup d’etat and the repression that it generated have been covered, but “they have never been closed.”
Forensic work began this Monday to exhume 128 victims from the Cuelgamuros Valley whose remains have been claimed by their relatives. Tired, he admits in a conversation with Efe “with some joy” but asks for “a lot of caution” until he sees how his grandfather’s bones are identified thanks to DNA.
Then they will be taken to Ateca, to the town where José Cansado came from and where he was a councilor in July 1936, to bury him there. Two of his children, Paco’s father, 92, and his great-uncle, 100, will be able to bury him in the place they want.
That a new government does not paralyze them
He fears, however, that after the elections, if there is a new government with the participation of Vox, the exhumations could be paralyzed and “stay halfway.”
And no, it is not about reopening wounds unnecessarily, he says bluntly, because “the wounds have never closed, what’s more, they have been open, what happens is that they have been covered.”
Stories like that of Paco’s grandfather are tinged with pain. He says that they put him in a truck, with the excuse that he was going to testify in the Zaragoza court, but he never arrived. Together with his brother, who was made to get into the vehicle precisely for this reason, because she was his brother, and ten other people, he was murdered on a road and thrown into a pit that Paco Cansado speculates that they could have dug themselves. .
And he explains that that body was there until 1959 when his wife told their children that they had taken their father from that place and that they had taken him to Cuelgamuros.
A bag with the bones of the hands
“My father, two or three Sundays later, passed by there, he wanted to go see the grave; he found her asking the shepherds. The earth was removed. He also collected some small bones, which seem to be from hands or feet, and in a bag he gave them to his mother. Until the woman died, he had them, ”he recounts.
You want the complete remains exhumed now. He considers that “ideally” would be for all the bodies to be removed from there, except those of those whose families do not request it.
And the building? Paco Cansado is not in favor of “destroying everything” but what to do in “some kind of exhibition center” that explained the Transition, the Civil War, the coup, the Republic.