Excavation begins at the La Paloma mine in Zarza la Mayor to exhume victims of the Civil War

Archaeological work began this past Monday at the ‘La Paloma’ mine in Zarza la Mayor (Cáceres) to exhume victims of the Civil War. There are at least 20 bodies in this “place of horror”, but “there may be many more”, as revealed this Saturday at the VII Regional Conference on Democratic Memory, organized by the PSOE of Extremadura and held in this caceres town.

The Aranzadi entity is in charge of carrying out these archaeological works to exhume the possible bodies deposited in this mass grave during the Civil War.

The announcement of the beginning of these works has been made by the mayor of Zarza la Mayor, Vanesa Montero, who has described as shameful that the bodies are still there “after more than eighty years”, and has advanced that the families of the victims of the locality “they will be the first to know if the bodies appear”, as reported by Europa Press.

The Secretary of Democratic Memory of the PSOE of Extremadura, Fernando Ayala, has described the ‘La Paloma’ Mine as a “place of terror”, “a creepy place”, which is now going to be analyzed in order to exhume the bodies.

In this sense, the general secretary of the PSOE of Extremadura, Guillermo Fernández Vara, has insisted that “if the wounds do not heal, the wounds hurt, and as long as they continue to cause suffering, a country, a city, a town, a territory has a problem”.

In this regard, he lamented that the policy of dialogue is being forgotten in favor of “bloc politics”, and that there are now “so many warmongering people and so few pacifists” to resolve conflicts such as the one that occurred worldwide after the invasion of Ukraine from Russia. “Whoever does not understand this, has not understood anything that has happened in history,” he pointed out in reference to the Spanish right and extreme right. “You have to bring the past to the present so that it does not happen again in the future”, he has indicated to endorse these conferences that reach their seventh edition.

Journeys

The general secretary of the Socialist Youth of the province of Cáceres, Irene Pozas, also took part in the opening ceremony; the deputy general secretary of the PSOE of the province of Cáceres, Esther Gutiérrez, and the socialist deputy Patxi López.

In addition, the former president of the Junta de Extremadura, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, spoke during the conference, stressing that “memory can be a key factor in influencing war or dictatorship”, because “the past is immovable, It can not be changed; but the past is interpretable and may or may not condition the future of later generations».

In his opinion, “civil wars generate spirals of violence and resentment that can be endless if they are not cut off in time,” he has sentenced.