Aug 18, 2022
Many years after the fall of Franco’s regime, Spanish human rights activists have turned to new methods to keep the memory of state terror alive. By excavating mass graves, exhuming remains, and employing forensic analysis and DNA testing, they seek to provide direct evidence of repression and break through the silence about the dictatorship’s atrocities that persisted well into Spain’s transition to democracy.
Nicole Iturriaga offers an ethnographic examination of how Spanish human rights activists use forensic methods to challenge dominant histories, reshape collective memory, and create new forms of transitional justice. She argues that by grounding their claims in science, activists can present themselves as credible and impartial, helping them intervene in fraught public disputes about the remembrance of the past. The perceived legitimacy and authenticity of scientific techniques allows their users to contest the state’s historical claims and offer new narratives of violence in pursuit of long-delayed justice.
Iturriaga draws on interviews with technicians and forensics experts and provides a detailed case study of Spain’s best-known forensic human rights organization, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. She also considers how the tools and tactics used in Spain can be adopted by human rights and civil society groups pursuing transitional justice in other parts of the world. An ethnographically rich account, Exhuming Violent Histories sheds new light on how science and technology intersect with human rights and collective memory.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicole Iturriaga is an assistant professor in the Department of
Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California,
Irvine, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck
Institute Center on Religious and Cultural Diversity.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Back at the grave, Rosa had a red earring resting on her cranium.
All four victims still had their wedding rings. I was removing the
top soil from Rosa's feet due to the dryness of southern Spain. The
soles of the victim's shoes were well conserved. Some locals from
the village came by. They whispered that Rosa had been eight months
pregnant at the time of her death.
Speaker 1:
I kept working, all the while, thinking about what they had said
later while uncovering her soles. It dawned on me that Rosa and I
were the same exact shoe size. I even held my shoe near hers to
check. I then quickly scaled myself alongside her, and discovered
that we had the same build and stature. I was looking at myself in
a mass grave.
Speaker 1:
I was just paraphrasing from the book, Exhuming Violent Histories.
The subtitle is Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain's Past,
Columbia University Press 2022. The author is Nicole Iturriaga. And
Gail Kligman of this volume says Exhuming Violent Histories is an
engaging ethnography of how forensic and genetic sciences are being
deployed to recover and reframe literally buried histories in
post-Franco Spain.
Speaker 1:
Through their painstaking work, human rights-oriented forensic
specialists and human rights activists are together challenging the
necropower of the state and revising the official history of the
Franco era. Welcome to ethnography podcast, the first installment.
I'm very fortunate to be able to speak to the author of this great
book, professor Nicole Iturriaga. She's on the faculty at the
university of California, Irvine. Welcome, Nicole.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:
So, could you tell us about the path that led to you being there,
removing the top soil, and doing this study?
Nicole Iturriaga:
Sure. I was volunteering with the Association for the Recovery of
Historical Memory as part of my dissertation field work. They are a
scrappy activist group that due to lack of funds, and I think also
part of their general philosophy, incorporate volunteers in their
exhumation technical work.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And so, if you're volunteering at the right time of the year,
they'll train you in the basics of forensic anthropology, forensic
archeology, and throw you into the field work. So, in that case,
with Rosa and her family, we were in the southern part of Spain,
where the team had been actually many times looking for graves in
this area.
Nicole Iturriaga:
They've spent many years searching for the... the south part of
Spain has a lot of mass graves, and this was the first time they
had actually found anybody. So, it was a really big deal. The town
was ecstatic, and that's how I ended up there, even though I am by
training, a sociologist, not an archeologist.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, I ended up having about a year of actual in-the-field field
work experience. So, it doesn't count, I guess, without it being
attached to an official degree, but yeah, been part of over 10
exhumations.
Speaker 1:
And so, I learned a lot about this from the book. I had a very
vague understanding of these things, but essentially as I learned,
there are a lot of mass unmarked graves in Spain. Second, only
to-
Nicole Iturriaga:
Cambodia is what the Spanish activists like to say.
Speaker 1:
Okay. And these are people that in Rosa's case, this was someone
who had been executed in 1936.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. Yes, that's right, right after the coup. That would've been
about two months. The coup started in July. They were executed in
September.
Speaker 1:
Right. And so, I didn't realize any of this. Do you have a great
first chapter, which reviews the history here. But essentially, for
readers like me who might not know the history, there was an
election in February 1936 of progressive government elected. And
then, within the year, there was a military coup, one of the
generals was Francisco Franco.
Speaker 1:
And there was a, I guess, a war period, which lasted until '39. And
then, the Franco regime lasted all the way until 1975. And then,
you've had silence after that, or so that we're talking about
someone who had died 80 years prior or had been executed 80 years
prior.
Nicole Iturriaga:
That's right.
Speaker 1:
Now, when you started to do your dissertation, did you know that
you wanted to do ethnography as your method?
Nicole Iturriaga:
I did. Yeah, I did. My master's was also in ethnography, but it was
the Tea Party movement, the Far-right movement here in Southern
California. And I was pretty comfortable with that methodology. And
so, I wanted to continue doing ethnography while also, I mean, in
both, I use interviews as well, but yeah, ethnographic
observations, I thought would be an interesting modality for this
topic.
Speaker 1:
Fascinating. I agree with you. Now, how did you get interested in
ethnography? Were there certain books that really intrigued
you?
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. I'm trying to remember exactly which books really got me
interested in ethnography. I got really into sociology in my
undergrad years at Cal UC Berkeley and I was a transfer student.
So, I was a little late. My path was a little laundering. And so, I
was a little older, and I think that actually allowed me to really
enjoy, and take my time with learning.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And so, I was really interested in family sociology. And so, I was
reading a lot of those ethnographies, like Promises I Can Keep, I
think by Edin and Kefalas, which is about working class and poor
women having children, as opposed to other advancements, and what
we only think of as adult progression, like getting a degree,
buying a house.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And so, I remember thinking that data was so rich because of the
ethnographic graphic observations that interviews can lend you one
part of the story, but really observing people in their everyday
lives, really observing an organization, brings so much more
nuance, and this is my larger critique.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I'm not trying to start a war with the quant people, but that
can only give you so many metrics of a social problem or social
phenomenon. To me, what's way more interesting is seeing what
people are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they're
doing.
Speaker 1:
Right. So, when we're talking about ethnography, we're talking
about still using interviews, but they're more open ended, as
opposed to closed. And they're more on site, as opposed to
someone's filling out a form, and then you're analyzing them.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, for me, in this study, I had to get very creative in terms of
how I was using interviews. So, I used informal interviews. So, I
did both. I was doing more of a semi-structured interview format
with a tape recorder in a private location, with different actors
in these fields. And then, I found that to talk to locals who came
to the exhumation site, trying to do anything formal would scare
people off because of the social context that this is happening
in.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I do a lot to try and ground how terrified a lot of the people
are in Spain, especially rural Spain. Pulling out a tape recorder,
and then being like, tell me about your thoughts, about state
terror is a great way to watch people disappear.
Speaker 1:
You're right. Yeah.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, realizing that really quickly. I think what's also the beauty
of ethnography is it can be very fluid, and you have to be really
good with your instincts, on how to connect, build rapport,
maintain privacy, while also allowing the social context to be a
guide in some ways. So, the informal interviews, I have my
interview guide memorized. I knew what questions I wanted to hit
and which ones to start with.
Nicole Iturriaga:
It was beneficial to me in my positionality, in the field to be a
foreign woman, because that made me seem very naïve, and
sympathetic, and people wanted to help me, I think, understand.
Yeah, they were teaching me exactly. So, I have a very Spanish last
name, but I'm not Spanish. My father is from Chile.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, I think I also had this like, "Oh, she speaks Spanish. She's
American. She's got this really Spanish last name." But I don't
have any kind of dog in the fight, which I think someone explained
that to me, actually, when I was there at one of these informal
things. It's like, "Oh, it's so cute that you have this last name,
but you don't know anything. You don't have anybody in the
war."
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, it was like, I was a somewhat neutral person as the
ethnographer who was just asking questions naively. And they were
trying to explain them to me. And so, there was still the fear, but
pulling out a tape recorder, as I said, was also just not
happening. So, I'd write everything down if I could in a moment or
reconstruct it immediately after.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I found that to be... or I would record after they were gone
into my phone or recorder and recount. And that was just a lot
later of me writing notes, and then coding them, and then coming
back to all of that. But yeah, I had to get very creative in this
field.
Speaker 1:
I once read a book about interviewing, The Craft of Interviewing, I
think it was called. And I think that the author said, as I recall,
that when you're interviewing someone, they often have a story they
want to tell. They already have an idea of what they want to say.
And one of the things, as I recall, you want to do is let them tell
whatever that story is. Did you have that sense?
Nicole Iturriaga:
Absolutely, yeah. And I think what's interesting about Spain and
this particular topic is that the story that a lot of people
initially start telling is the state line story of civil wars are
bad, brother versus brother, leave the past in the past. But if you
push just a little bit back, well, according to the association,
this is just about returning families. So, family, where does that
fit in?
Nicole Iturriaga:
And then, you start to see more of a negotiation with the actual
person's perspective. And so, I think allowing the safety or the,
okay, I've heard you say the safe answer. What's one you're
actually thinking of? And in the book, I tell about a waitress who
started with that. And then, in the further conversation revealed
that her grandfather was in a mass grave.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And that he had been killed during the war, and had been on the
Republican side, and how it would be nice to get him out of the
ditch. But she started with leave the past in the past. And if I
had just left it at that, I wouldn't have gotten this much more
interesting history of someone who is, I think, a perfect
embodiment of what the transition period really instilled in the
population, which is like, we're leaving it alone. And if you don't
leave it alone, it'll be bad for you.
Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah. So, just for listeners who wouldn't know, so the
Republicans would be the more progressive side, the people who
were, I guess, leftist, Marxist, anarchists, communists, a wide
variety of-
Nicole Iturriaga:
And pro-democracy even.
Speaker 1:
Pro-democracy. Nonfascist.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Nonfascist, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Right. And then, the nationalist was the military fascist side,
right?
Nicole Iturriaga:
That's right.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. I was thinking, it's clear in that it must be difficult for
those people to have, on the one hand, even privately, they have
their private thoughts, and then they have what they can say. And
you would imagine that since there's only something that they can
say, that seeps into what they actually think.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. It was really interesting to watch people do that dance.
Speaker 1:
So, you say that you're doing an ethnographic exploration of how
social actors, like the AR image are using a variety of tools and
tactics to... one of the things they're doing is fighting for
control over collective memory. The book is so interesting because
there's so many different levels to this. For example, in some
cases, it seemed like the memory was already known.
Speaker 1:
It was known that there was this mass grave out there, and that
they had been executed. And what was really happening was more like
a bringing to the surface or literally, bringing to the surface,
but also a processing. You might think of someone in psychotherapy
who had trauma and was now bringing it out. It was like this facing
and speaking.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. Witnessing even, storytelling, witnessing, I think is
absolutely, yeah. I think larger to the global movement of
forensics-based human rights, you have examples like Argentina,
where you really didn't know what happened, the disappeared, the
desaparecidos. They just vanished. And the science there really
helped fill in gaps. People really didn't know what went on.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And there's other examples of that too. But in Spain, yeah, people
knew, it wasn't like they were like, "Are they still alive?" No.
Everyone knew that these people who went missing were dead. And
most of the time, a general idea as to where they were, I think in
some ways, the seizing or the attempt to see its collective memory
is how those deaths are remembered and what the state's role is for
that remembrance.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And they just passed, and I'm not well versed in exactly what's in
this bill, but the new memory law that just passed in Spain a
couple weeks ago, I don't think anyone thought was possible, even
when I was in the field, or when they exhumed Franco.
Nicole Iturriaga:
There's been these big shifts in Spanish culture that I don't think
would have been possible without the work of the association and
forensics-based human rights in Spain, constantly forcing this
conversation, this witnessing of sadness, and death, and the
responsibility of state for the terror that it imposed during the
war and during the regime, because a lot of people were killed by
an outside-of-the-war context.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And the stories of the repression of this regime have been so
successfully buried for a really long time. So, I think most of
their job was just making it okay to even mention it. And then,
they've been making these moves to be like, "Okay, well, now that
we can talk about this even existing, what are we going to do about
it?"
Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. I guess there was one
example where there was one person came, approached who was very
angry about it. And another person was with her who was more
sheepish. Do you recall that?
Nicole Iturriaga:
I feel like that happened a lot.
Speaker 1:
A lot. Okay.
Nicole Iturriaga:
I don't remember that specific example, but yeah. A lot of initial
reaction is anger, but I think the anger as being a secondary
emotion coming from fear.
Speaker 1:
Right. And was there a sense that if you look at people now, maybe
there's a left and a right in this area, and maybe the people on
the right were thinking they were going to be identified with the
fascists, and that that was part of what was going on?
Nicole Iturriaga:
It's funny. I think that would be in a place like Germany, who were
being associated with the fascist or the Nazis is just a bad thing.
Where it's like for the good portion of the 20th century, it was
great to be affiliated with a fascist.
Speaker 1:
I see. Interesting.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And so, I think there's still a deep clinging to, I'm not going to
apologize, and we were right, and we saved Spain from communism.
Part of that also has to do, I think partially, with the amount of
businesses and money that were seized from the Republican side.
Nicole Iturriaga:
If you start opening that door, you might start opening the door to
reparation, and some of that money being returned. And I think
there's a very vested interest to make sure that doesn't happen
because they make a lot of money at this point.
Speaker 1:
Actually, as you raise that, there's another interesting thing
about this is that as just... I don't know whether I'm typical for
American, but I know more about Germany than about Spain. I hardly
know anything about Franco, except that he existed, until this
book.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Most people I've talked to didn't know Franco existed at all.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And it comes through very differently. And sometimes I'm
assuming that the case is similar to Germany and it's not... that
that's one example. But it did seem that it was something about, at
least for the family members, for people who identified themselves
as family members of someone who had been executed, it was about
not just here are the facts, and not just about processing, but it
was also about holding your head higher, having a public
recognition.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. I think that's totally accurate. If we put that in context,
the victim, the losing side were horrifically repressed and shamed.
To the point, especially, in those immediate post-war era, they
couldn't hold certain jobs. They weren't allowed to travel. They
were rendered very much so second citizens, and so were their
children. And they were heavily, heavily stigmatized, punished and
othered.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And that went on for decades, and even into the '80s, '90s. So,
you've got generations of you should feel bad and shamed for having
any connection to the reds. And so, I think this movement really
offered those families the ability to go, "I didn't do anything
wrong. What was wrong was what happened to us." And so, I think
that's an extremely powerful offering of this movement is to
reclaim the humanity of the victims, in this case.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And you see that so often, again, to take it to the
individual level. Someone who clearly was victimized by a crime
somehow is the one that ends up feeling shame about it.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah, yeah. And that, if we take just Rosa from the beginning, the
introduction chapter, she was pregnant, and was with her family,
and they were leaving a party. And from that class at the foot of
the grave that the lead archeologist gave... so just to back up,
the association, when they do exhumations, will invite people to
come, and see a class at the foot of the grave, it's what they call
it.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And they walk them through the process. And most of it starts with
science, and then it leads into these critiques of the state. And
the one that he said at her class was what did this woman do to
deserve summary execution on the side of the road? And then, on top
of that, to be rendered silent and in a ditch for 80 years., or
that we, as the citizens of Spain should never learn about her.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Not only did you execute her, leave her in a grave for a really
long time, but insist that no one learn about this violence. It's
just compounded insult on top of insult. And it's so upsetting.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So many different levels to it. Boy, I've never seen a grave
opened up, much less a mass grave.
Nicole Iturriaga:
It's intense. I describe it in the book as exactly like, they are
exactly how they were left. So, it's a very effective tool, if you
will, a pedagogical tool, but just there's nothing left to your
imagination, really. You know exactly what happened. They're lying
there like that, you can just imagine, oh, the movie plays in your
head easily when you're looking at a mass grave.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Especially, if they're really well conserved, like the ones in
Rosa's case, or there was one over there with a bunch of men
layered on top of each other. The skeletons do all the talking. You
don't have to explain anything. Literally, a child can... and there
were children who came to these exhumations who could just totally
get it.
Speaker 1:
Right. Yeah. In the book, you have a picture of one of the skulls
with a gunshot wound, with a whole through it. So, right, there's
the story.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. You don't have a guess as to why, they didn't die of a heart
attack.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. That was really fascinating. And just a whole
intergenerational, we might think, "Well, what would I care about
my grandfather?" Well, I'd care quite a bit about my grandfather,
actually.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. That's funny. A lot of people have brought that up. Well, I
wouldn't care. And I always think on that of, but you don't know
because that's not you. But also, even if it's not related, you
don't know this person, they're most people, I would say, a good
majority of people who would never met a grandparent if they knew
they were in a mass grave, who would want to get them back. There's
something about the obligation of care too at that
Speaker 1:
Yeah. It just seems wrong. Even though we know it's a corpse, it's
not a person, it just still seems a betrayal or something.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. And for me, in the field, especially trying to observe and be
participating in these exhumations. My first one was that when I
was describing with the men who were on top of each other, I
believe the picture with the bullet wound is from that exhumation.
I was working, it was my first one ever, and I was so terrified of
breaking something.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I had no idea what I was doing that I didn't realize that I was
uncovering the cranium of what turned out to be a 15- to
17-year-old kid. Someone went, "Oh, is that the head?" And the
archeologist went, "Yeah." And then, I was so overwhelmed by that,
and I just screamed. This is not in the book, but I remember just
touching the cranium, and being like, "We found you, and you're
okay.
Nicole Iturriaga:
It took a really long time, but even if we don't your people, or
they're not around, at least we found you." It was this very
profound moment for me that I just felt so protective of this kid.
Died alongside his dad. He was just wrong place, wrong time. And it
was very moving to me as just a person in the field. But also, as
the ethnographer, this is extremely powerful. And I feel connected
to you. I don't know your name, but here we are together.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. I'm just thinking off the top of my head, but you don't...
maybe we're so distant from death, and dead bodies, and burials
that, but then, now you're right there.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yes. Literally, staring death, I guess, and a version of death in
the face. It's just this skeleton, and there's very obvious signs
of violence, and you know that it's a kid, the kid is a minor. It
was just, yeah, I feel like the United States has a really
sanitized relationship to death. We don't really do, we embalm.
There's so much distance. And then, I'm in a literal grave with
bodies, and I'm digging them up.
Speaker 1:
Right. That's really fascinating, right. Now, that has really came
across in the book. So, I was interested in the way that this came
to Spain from, do you use the term global south?
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Could you tell me about that term? I just hadn't-
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. The global south, it's a way around saying developing a
third, second, first world. That's the global south versus the
global north.
Speaker 1:
How did this, I guess, forensic-based human rights movement get to
Spain?
Nicole Iturriaga:
Actually, to me, I think such a really fun example of how a
movement can start on the other side of the planet. And then,
another one could piggyback off of the gains of that. So, I will
try to be brief, but in Argentina, there was a military
dictatorship that ruled that country for seven years. And in the
process, disappeared around 30,000 people.
Nicole Iturriaga:
They also stole the children of the people they were disappearing,
and they illegally adopted them out by stealing their identities.
So, when that regime fell, after the very disastrous Falkland
Island war with the UK, they were trying to do the distract
everyone. And they just like major fuck up there on their part. But
all of a sudden, there was a lot of questions.
Nicole Iturriaga:
What happened to all these people who went missing? Where did these
children go? Some of these disappeared, people were pregnant women.
What happened as a fetus? Things like that. The interim president
invited people from the global north to help with these questions.
And one of them was Clyde Snow, who is a forensic anthropologist
out of Oklahoma.
Nicole Iturriaga:
He'd been really famous for identifying people from plane crashes.
He also identified Dr. Mengele's skull. And so, that was how we
knew what happened to Dr. Mengele. He goes there. He does a
presentation on this very topic. A man comes up to him afterwards
and goes, "Is it possible for an infant to dissolve?" And he goes,
"What?"
Nicole Iturriaga:
And that man's story was his daughter apparently had died in a
shootout with the police. Everybody died, including all the kids.
And the coroner said when they went to bury the infant, that she
was so delicate, she dissolved like water. And that is not how that
goes. Clyde Snow asked to do an exhumation. He studied the remains.
Found that they did not die in a shootout.
Nicole Iturriaga:
They died within a 30-centimeter execution style death. And that
the remains that were... the pieces of bones that were in the
infant's coffin, came from an adult foot that decomposed somewhere
else, which suggested that that baby never was in that coffin, and
was probably somewhere else possibly alive.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, this opened up a whole world of, okay, so every state narrative
we have about either potential deaths of people or all of these
bodies that showed up has no names in municipal cemeteries might be
these disappeared people, or also bodies that were washing up from
the river plot, which is right there in Buenos Aires.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And that comes from these death flights, where they would load
people they were done torturing, drugged, and then dropped them
alive into the water. Some of them would wash up. So, they started
doing all these exhumations. And that was this burst of this
forensics-based human rights movement, where they were able to say,
we know these people died this way.
Nicole Iturriaga:
That is completely opposite of what the state is saying had
happened. And then, you have a second line there, where these women
who had been protesting throughout the regime, the mothers and the
grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who are demanding answers about
like, where did that baby go? Or some of these women that were
found after they had been killed.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, if you give live birth, it scars your pelvic bone. And so, that
they can tell this person had a baby. But if there's no baby or
fetus, now the question is, where is it? So, this kept happening.
And so, you have a second line where the grandmothers had been
asking international scientists to figure out blood testing.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And at that point, we didn't have DNA yet. DNA doesn't come out
until 1989. This is 1986. You have a legal testing that can do
paternity level testing, even to grandparents. And so, they start
using that, and then DNA blows up, if you will. And so, then
they're able to definitively prove that a child they suspected was
stolen, was stolen. And that changed everything in Argentina.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Because then, they were no longer able to say that never happened.
I don't know if you guys are crazy, you're making this up. And that
was a massive watershed moment. And it was the first time that DNA
and forensics was used to officially go you're lying and stop it.
And so, that really changed everything. And then, they started this
team, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Clyde is now a new student. And then, they went around and started
setting up labs in other places. So, for those of you who don't
know, the Southern Cone, so South America was distilled with
dictators in the '70s and '80s, and there was a lot of human rights
abuses. So, they went around to these different states to help set
up independent forensic labs.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And the benefit there would be, you don't have to rely on a state
that's probably hostile to you/involved in the violence. So, you
have this separate unit that's set up by an outside force that
trains people how to do this. They did one in Guatemala, Peru. They
did, I think, some work in Chile. And then, we're getting into the
early '90s, the Soviet Union falls, you have the wars in the
Balkans.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Moved to Kosovo, they helped set up the lab there. And also, Bosnia
Herzegovina. Bosnia have a massive genocide. They're setting up
that lab. They move over to Cypress. There was a war there in the
'70s, [inaudible 00:30:42] militarized zone where there's a
UN-backed lab, also set up by the Argentinians at the same time,
same timeline.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Spain, Franco dies in '75. So, the Argentinian regime starts in
'76. He dies in '75, Spain transitions into '78, '80. So, we're
getting into the end of the Argentinian regime. '80 to the late
'90s, Argentina is going off and setting up all these other labs.
1998 comes, and Baltasar Garzon, who's a judge finds out that
Pinochet, back to South America, who is a former dictator is
vacationing in the UK.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And he goes, "I'm going to get you with universal jurisdiction."
And universal jurisdiction is this idea that any state can hold
another state's human rights abusers accountable outside of the
territory. So, he goes, "Got you." Sends out an arrest warrant to
Interpol. The UK freaks out and goes, "What do we do?" And this is
a big, I don't know if you remember this in '98, people are
freaking out.
Nicole Iturriaga:
People from Chile are coming over to UK, they're protesting. And it
took two years for them to figure out what to do. Pinochet
eventually had to pretend that he had dementia so he could get a
humanitarian relief, and they sent him home, and then he lived
another 10 years or something, and died in his bed. But what that
did in Spain was a bunch of people went, "Wait a minute. Why are
you going after Pinochet when we have 40 years' worth of fascist of
our own?"
Nicole Iturriaga:
And this guy named Emilio Silva, who started the Association for
the Recovery of Historical Memory, writes an article and says,
"Hey, my grandfather was also a desaparecido. Why aren't we talking
about that?" A forensic anthropologist who had been working in this
world outside of Spain goes, I can help you find your grandfather.
And that's exactly what they did. In 2000, they did the first
exhumation in Spain. And that's how we get... I was trying to make
that short. It's never short.
Speaker 1:
Did they actually find his actual grandfather?
Nicole Iturriaga:
They did.
Speaker 1:
Wow.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. They did DNA testing and he was found.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And I remember the Pinochet stuff in the news, but it's one
of those things where it's in the news and it's in the news. It's
nothing that I'm attached to or that I... it's just something that
is surface level.
Nicole Iturriaga:
In the background, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah. So, it goes to Spain and the big difference is the huge
time, the time gap now.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
So, that it's not being driven by the mothers who lost their kids.
I understand that there are some grandchildren around and that were
involved in this, but it seems like it's more... my sense from your
book, well, there are lots of different levels. There were some
grandchildren and there were some individual people, but it also
seemed like it was more of a community drive.
Nicole Iturriaga:
I would say, Emilio Silva, he's the grandson. There're still a few
children of the victims that are, at this point, pushing and
they're in their 90s. Yeah, they would to be, right? Unless they
were killed during... their parents were killed in the repression
of the late-
Speaker 1:
In the repression era.
Nicole Iturriaga:
... the '40s, '50s era. But even still, they're older. So, it's
mostly, I would say run by grandchildren, great grandchildren, but
it's gotten bigger than that at this point. A lot of people,
especially in the newer teams, I don't know if they have any
relationship the disappeared, if you will. But are just motivated
by... I heard this once in the field of how can we claim that we
have a democracy when our countryside is littered with mass
graves?
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I think that's a great point. So, I think there's a movement
amongst younger Spaniards, some younger Spaniards that feel an
obligation to democratic ideals, and to the beliefs in science that
this should be more of a priority than it was to previous
generations. But yeah, it's still, I would say family victims,
family members of the victims are very much involved.
Speaker 1:
So, you've mentioned both of these things as we've been talking.
But I think if you think about someone coming into a community, and
I'm going to touch on this issue of mass graves, and I'm going to
actually dig them up. You're thinking, "Well, that's pretty hot and
we need to cool this down."
Speaker 1:
And it seemed to be able to do it, you're going to have to lower
the temperature here. And the two ways they did it were the framing
in terms of this is just science, in terms of science and also in
terms of human rights. Well, you can speak to that.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, especially, in those beginning years. And so, they started this
movement in 2000, I popped in there around 15 years later. So,
those early years were extremely hard. People were very aggressive.
I heard a lot of stories of people would come, and steal their
tools, or would come and yell. And then, they would have to really
work to cooling that situation down.
Nicole Iturriaga:
I don't think anyone was ever physically attacked in the
association, but maybe the attention was there. And I think that's
where this push towards really depoliticizing. There's also a lot
of groups that started doing this in the early 2000s. And some were
extremely political, bring out communist flags. They were
associated with the communist party, would sing songs.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Not exactly a depoliticized approach by any means. And there's a
lot of criticisms against the depoliticized approach. And I think
some of those are valid, but I also think it's like, what do you
want out of this situation? Do you want to be successful or you
want to be right? And it doesn't mean just because you're
successful that you're not also making a lot of headway.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I think the depoliticized approach has won in many ways, a lot
more success than being overtly political, as frustrating as that
might feel. But I think coming in and being like, we are here, this
is also a very Catholic country, even just culturally speaking. So,
the idea of not doing death rituals is offensive in some way. And
that was absolutely the point.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Franco did this with that in mind because he was such a Catholic.
The point was that they wouldn't be buried in consecrated ground.
The point would be that they were buried faced down. There's a
point that they wouldn't have grave. So, things that were important
to Catholic death rituals, they were meant to be insulting. And so,
I think-
Speaker 1:
And shaming.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And shaming. And so, with that in mind of, do you think that this
little abuela over here doesn't have the right to recover her dad
and give him a mass if she wants to, is very powerful in that
context. It's a certain level of a monster to be like, "No, screw
her and screw her dad." That's bad politics, especially now. Now
that media, they're way savvier in some ways.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Talk about Asuncion at the end of the book. And she was 92, and she
was exactly that. She was this little old Spanish grandma, all she
want... and she was so cute and so smart, in terms of her activism.
I was like, she played right into that. Like, "I just want my dad
back. You're going to tell me I can't have my dad back?" Yeah,
exactly. What do you say to that? No?
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, there's that level of it's just about giving people their
family members back, which is depoliticized. And then, you also
have the, we're just doing this from science perspective. And we're
trying to help this lady get her dad back, how we're doing that is
through science. That it's the medium of our trade, and science
doesn't have an agenda. Science doesn't have politics. So, whatever
comes out from this, it's not our fault. We didn't do this. It's
just what the science says.
Speaker 1:
No, absolutely.
Nicole Iturriaga:
So, if this person was tortured, I don't have to tell you. That's
just what the body says.
Speaker 1:
Right. I was thinking and I was reading it that the depoliticized
approach worked for this issue, this place, this time, this
culture, but who knows in another-
Nicole Iturriaga:
I would say in the Balkans, in Bosnia, from what I understand, so
Sarah Wagner is an expert in that field. We were in a conference
together and she was like, "No." And I did interviews there too,
which didn't make it into this book necessarily. I think it does
maybe a little bit in the beginning, but it was like I was doing so
much research or field work at that time.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I had this whole other chapter that I had to drop just to be
able to graduate on time. But when I was there, I was like, "Oh,
this does not apply here." It does and it doesn't. It worked for
the HEG in holding people accountable legally for genocide, which
was proven through the forensics. But in the local levels, that is
not happening.
Speaker 1:
No. Right.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And so, if you want to read more on that, I would say read To Know
Where He Lies. It's also an ethnography by Sarah Wagner. It's
excellent. And really gets into why this is a lot more complicated
depending on the context you're in. But also even that, it's
different. They worked legally.
Speaker 1:
Right. And I was just thinking in terms of today in the US, science
doesn't... if you want to get attention, you need to be political
and outrageous, not-
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah. And forensics is certainly, I get this question a lot too, is
why forensics is this outlier in terms of science that the public
believe?
Speaker 1:
That's true. That's true.
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I do think it's different than climate change or even vaccines
in a certain way, because it is so accessible. As we were
describing earlier, if you see a gunshot wound in a skull, you
don't have to go, well, humans create bullet club whether or
whatever. But also, it's the science of the state. And that's how
trials are done. Do you believe in DNA? And it's also huge part of
media.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, no doubt. It's fascinating. And people are sending in their
saliva to find out what-
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah, the ancestry testing, which I would urge caution on. But
yeah, I'm about to go to Tulsa in a couple weeks because they've
been doing exhumations there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I was going to say that was-
Nicole Iturriaga:
And I don't know, I think how that's going. Because they're also
doing a very depoliticized rights of the family's approach. It's
almost identical to Spain. It's a long time ago. So, it's over a
hundred years ago. But the context is the United States, the case
has to do with racial... white terrorism, basically, on a black
neighborhood.
Speaker 1:
The Tulsa race massacre.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Like the Tulsa race massacre. So, they've been doing exhumations.
They started last year, and I'm going with a research team to see
what the impacts have been, very similar. Almost all use the same,
exact, slightly modified interview guide there, but I'm
anticipating it to be very different in some key ways.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. It sounds be interesting, right? Yeah.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Right. Well, I knew that the problem with this interview was I had
way too much to talk to you about. So, I should end it now, but
it's just a great book. I highly recommend it. Exhuming Violent
Histories, Forensics, Memory, and Rewriting Spain's Past, Nicole
Iturriaga, Columbia University Press 2022. Thank you so much. Did I
get all that right?
Nicole Iturriaga:
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
Okay, okay. Thank you so much for speaking to me. It was really
interesting. I really love the book and-
Nicole Iturriaga:
Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.
Speaker 1:
Okay, great.
Nicole Iturriaga:
Cool.