The start of the tasks exhumation of the remains of the anti-Francoist Cipriano Martosdied in 1973 after ingest sulfuric acid in the course of an interrogation under torture at the Civil Guard barracks in Reus (Tarragona), already has a date: it will be Monday, December 12.
This was explained to Efe by sources from the Department of Justice, Rights and Memory of the Generalitatafter having completed all the required procedures to proceed with this intervention in the mass grave of the Reus cemetery.
After passing away on September 17, 1973 in the Hospital de Sant Joan de Reus, the Franco authorities secretly buried the body of Martoswithout allowing the family to attend the burial – in grave number 11, on the sixth floor of row 67, north side, of the cemetery – nor to take the body to its land of origin.
Cipriano Martos was born in 1942 in a rural nucleus within the municipality of Loja (Granada), into a family of poor peasants, and emigrated in 1969 to Sabadell (Barcelona), where he became politicized and joined the ranks of the Communist Party of Spain (Marxist-Leninist), a split from the PCE that advocated intensifying actions against the dictatorship and did not renounce the armed struggle.
The match founded the Anti-Fascist and Patriot Revolutionary Front (FRAP), a conglomerate of organizations supervised by the PCE, and Martos was assigned to a clandestine cell in Reus, where in August 1973 he was detained by the Civil Guard, who interrogated him for more than two days, until he ingested the drug. sulfuric acid forced him to be rushed to the hospital, where he agonized for 21 days, without his family knowing where he was.
The case of Cipriano Martos was included in 2014, at the request of Antonio Martos, a brother of the victim, in the macro-complaint filed before the Argentine court for crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime.
Last February, the then Minister of Justice, Lourdes Ciuropublicly announced that the exhumation would take place in the second half of the year.
Despite the fact that the departure of JxCat from the Government forced Ciuró to leave office, the Ministry of Justice -now directed by Gemma Ubasart- has maintained the plans, which were already well advanced before the government coalition broke up, for which reason the Archaeological excavation work may begin on December 12.
The general direction of Democratic Memory warns that finding the remains of Martos may not be an “imminent” task, since it is a common grave in which archaeologists must first prepare the ground, before proceeding with the excavation with machinery to extract the first layers of earth.
