Forensic experts in Catalonia have recovered and identified the remains of a young anti-Franco activist, communist and trade unionist who died in 1973 after being forced to drink sulphuric acid during a police interrogation.
Cipriano Martos, who was born to a family of farmworkers in Granada in 1942, was a member of both the Spanish communist party and the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (Frap), a far-left group committed to overthrowing the Franco regime that went on to murder six Spanish policemen in the mid-1970s.
Martos, a labourer, miner, textile worker and mason, moved to Catalonia in the late 1960s. On 25 August 1973, he was arrested after being accused of membership of the Frap and of handing out the group’s propaganda in the Catalan town of Igualada.
Taken to the Guardia Civil barracks in the city of Reus, Martos was then interrogated and tortured. Two days later – after being forced to drink “truth liquid”, a mixture of sulphuric acid and petrol – he was transferred to a hospital in the city.
Martos lingered for three weeks, unable to see his family but able to give a statement to a judge, before dying on 17 September. His body was buried in secret in a mass grave in a cemetery in Reus three days later.
On Wednesday, the Catalan regional government’s department of justice, rights and memory announced that it had found and identified the activist’s remains as part of efforts to recover the bodies of those murdered during the civil war and subsequent dictatorship.
“On 10 January, the archaeological team confirmed that, of the 41 individuals exhumed, one was compatible both with the physical characteristics of Cipriano Martos [sex, age, dimensions, wounds] and with the spatial characteristics of the grave [column of the pit and depth],” it said in a statement.
The remains were transferred to a laboratory where they were examined and checked against DNA from relatives.
“The results of the genetic and anthropological tests have confirmed that the remains correspond to those of Cipriano Martos,” the statement added.
The Catalan president, Pere Aragonès, tweeted: “Today is an emotional day for the family of the anti-Franco militant Cipriano Martos, and an important one for the country’s memory: after 50 years, his remains have been identified.”
Aragonès said his administration would continue seeking “justice and dignity for those who fought for freedom”. Tens of thousands of people who were killed during the civil war and the dictatorship lie in unmarked graves across Spain. In Catalonia alone, 887 civil war graves are though to hold the remains of about 14,000 people.
Almost seven years ago, Martos’s brother, Antonio, testified about Cipriano’s death before a judge in Barcelona as part of a massive lawsuit in Argentina that is being used to investigate Franco-era human rights crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction. The 13-year-old investigation, based on the principle that human rights crimes committed in one country can be investigated and tried in another, is being led by the Argentinian judge María Servini de Cubría.
Speaking to El País in 2016, Antonio Martos said he could neither forgive nor forget what had happened to his brother, and called on Spanish politicians to act.
“The people who govern this country need to have some morals and they should feel something when they see that someone from abroad has had to come in and crack open the doors that were locked and bolted,” he told the newspaper.
In October last year, Spain’s Socialist-led coalition government introduced a democratic memory law intended to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the civil war and subsequent dictatorship.
Among its measures are the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of those who still lie in unmarked graves, a ban on groups that glorify the Franco regime, and a “redefinition” of the Valley of the Fallen, the giant basilica and memorial where the body of Franco lay for 44 years until its exhumation in 2019.
