Spain Braced for Opening of Civil War's Mass Graves

Investigators digging into the brutal repression unleashed by General Francisco Franco will this week complete a list of 130,000 names of those killed during and after Spain's civil war as the country prepares to face the full horror of what has often been treated as a shameful national secret.

The list will be handed over to the controversial magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, whose preliminary investigations have already provoked a fierce row over whether a mass grave thought to contain the remains of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca should be exhumed.

Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago has become the latest intellectual heavyweight to join the clamor for graves across the country, including that of Lorca, to be opened up so that the victims can be properly identified and their remains handed to relatives. 'The recovery of Lorca's remains, buried alongside thousands of others, should become a national imperative,' said Saramago, who now lives in Spain.

Other writers argued that Lorca should be left to lie in peace, while many on the political right accuse Garzón of stirring up old hatreds. 'We shouldn't be bartering with bodies,' said the novelist Francisco Ayala.

The report, due to be handed over this week, will reveal the size of the task ahead for those determined to dig up the graves and break Spain's pact of silence about the violence unleashed against Franco's opponents.

Hundreds of mass graves containing an unknown number of bodies are spread across the country. Historians estimate that death squads and kangaroo courts liquidated between 90,000 and 180,000 political opponents during and after Spain's civil war in the late 1930s.

Lorca's grave is one of the few to have been identified with any degree of certainty, though there are still doubts about whether the place marked beside an olive tree on a hillside overlooking the southern city of Granada is the right one. The Lorca family's decision to stop fighting a possible exhumation was greeted last week as a sign that the movement to dig up the mass graves had now become unstoppable.

Garzón has also ordered state bureaucrats and the Roman Catholic church to hand over to investigators all relevant documentation - much of which has been unavailable to historians over most of the past six decades. Doubts still remain, however, about whether Garzón can carry the investigation any further. Many of the crimes committed happened so long ago that they are covered by a 1977 amnesty law.

The judge has previously used international human rights law to investigate the abuses of Latin American dictatorships and even ordered the arrest of Chile's General Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998.

This is the first time, however, that a major Spanish court has acted to investigate crimes committed during the country's civil war.