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Spaniards wish to identify remains from civil war

MALAGA, Spain - Juliana Sanchez passes a trembling hand in the air above the cracked and crumbling skeletons in the dry earth at her feet, her eyes moist and her voice quavering.

One of these estimated 4,200 sets of bones - perhaps this one with tattered leather shoes still attached to its feet, or that skull with bullet damage - is the father she lost 70 years ago, shot by a firing squad loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain's cataclysmic 1936-39 civil war.

Another grave complex, in Valencia, is thought to hold more than 26,000 bodies.

"This one could be him," says Sanchez, 77, gesturing toward a partially unearthed skeleton, its legs pulled up in a near-fetal crouch. "Or this one, or this. The truth is, they are all my father. That is how I feel."

For Sanchez and tens of thousands like her, a law likely to be passed by Spain's lower house this week could make finding the remains of victims of Franco easier and eventually lead to their names being legally cleared.

But the Law of Historical Memory has sparked a firestorm of debate, with the conservative opposition saying that the country agreed to leave the ghosts of its past buried - in every sense - when it undertook a shaky transition to democracy following Franco's death in 1975, and that the bill could tear Spanish society apart.

For Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero - whose grandfather was executed by Franco's forces during the war - the law is a centerpiece of his first term, and with the help of several smaller parties in Parliament, its passage looks all but certain. It must then pass the Senate - considered a formality - and be published in the government gazette to become law.

It will mandate that local governments fund efforts to unearth mass graves, some of which hold thousands of bodies, and push the governments to make their wartime archives more transparent in order to make searching easier. It will also for the first time formally condemn Franco's coup and the nearly 40-year dictatorship that followed, and order the removal of all fascist symbols from the country.

[Last modified October 28, 2007, 01:48:10]