On the Republican side, the emotional bonds of family launched a major social organization led by nietos, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Late in 2000 Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías began a personal search for the unmarked graves of their Republican ancestors.

[...] Descendants of executed Republicans told a journalist that “without the body, the pain never ceases.” “Never,” she reported, “have they spoken of vengeance, of revenge, or of anything that resembles that. In an exhumation, they never raise their eyes from the ground. They are not thinking of reopening wounds, but of closing, for once, their own.” This journalist, Natalia Junquera, also quoted a distinguished professor of psychiatry who said, “The hatred dies, it is extinguished, but the necessity of putting a name to the dead, of honoring them, no. There always comes a moment in which one has to put an end to this interminable trauma.” [63]

Paul D. Escott