Artículo sobre García Lorca en "The New Yorker"

Una de mis publicaciones preferidas en inglés, The New Yorker, ha publicado el artículo "Lorca's Bones" [Los huesos de Lorca] de Jon Lee Anderson en el número actual (el 22 de junio) de la revista. El subtítulo del artículo es una pregunta que puede resultar un poco cansada para los lectores españoles: "Can Spain finally confront its civil-war past?" [¿Puede España afrontar por fin su pasado de la guerra civil?]. Esta no es la primera vez que la revista ha publicado un artículo sobre el caso de Lorca (ver "Looking for Lorca" de Elizabeth Kolbert, de 2003). Aquí, Jon Lee Anderson narra su viaje a Granada, incluyendo encuentros personales con Juan Antonio Díaz, profesor en la Universidad de Granada; el juez Baltasar Garzón; Francisco Galadí, nieto de uno de los fusilados con Lorca; Fernando Serrano Súñer y Polo, nieto de Ramón Serrano Súñer; y Laura García Lorca, la sobrina del poeta. El artículo termina con las palabras de esta última.

El contenido del artículo será un poco "caducado" para los que ya conocen este caso y los que siguen las noticias en torno a las memorias históricas en España, pero aún así, me alegra ver que el tema reciba la atención debida en este país. La figura de Lorca es muy conocida en círculos literarios y culturales y se espera que dar a conocer este caso en particular sirva para iluminar otros como él. La sinopsis del artículo sigue en inglés:

ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM ANDALUSIA about public debate over whether the remains of Federico García Lorca and others murdered by General Franco’s forces should be exhumed. Writer describes Lorca’s murder in Granada during the Spanish Civil War. Lorca had become Spain’s most renowned poet and dramatist. At the age of thirty-eight, and more or less openly gay, Lorca was a highly visible figure with known Republican sympathies. And that, in the summer of 1936, was enough to get a person killed. Briefly describes the rise of Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until 1975. Writer visits the cemetery in Granada with Juan Antonio Díaz, a professor of English and German Philology. Díaz notes that a plaque commemorating the victims of Francoism had been removed from the wall. The probable site of Lorca’s grave was identified by his biographer, Ian Gibson, in 1966, but his body remains where his killers dumped it. Last year, a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzón ordered that Lorca be dug up. The exhumation order was seen as a historic challenge to the silence in Spain about the Franco years, but it set off a raging public debate. With Garzón’s order came the news that Lorca’s own relatives opposed the exhumation. Describes the incarceration and execution of thousands of people during Franco’s regime. In the jittery transition to democracy after the dictator’s death, however, politicians adopted a don’t-look-back policy. In 1977, an amnesty law sealed the past in what became known as the pacto de olvido. That is how things stood until a decade ago when “historical memory” groups began to dig up some of the bodies. The memory groups’ activities inspired a national lobby for a reckoning with Spain’s past. In 2007, Spain’s parliament approved a Law of Historical Memory, which said that the state was required to support the exhumation of thousands of mass graves. Despite the new law, Granada’s graves remain largely unexhumed. Last October, Garzón, in response to a petition filed by thirteen Historical Memory associations decreed that Franco and thirty-four others were guilty of crimes against humanity. Declaring the amnesty null and void with regard to human rights violations, Garzón ordered the exhumation of nineteen mass graves including the one believed to contain the remains of Lorca. Javier Zaragoza, Spain’s prosecutor-general, filed an appeal against the order and put a halt to the exhumations. Writer interviews Francisco Galadí, the grandson of a bullfighter who was killed with Lorca, Fernando Serrano Súñer y Polo, the son of Ramón Serrano Súñer, who was charged by Garzón with “crimes against humanity,” and Laura García Lorca, the poet’s niece. All three give their views on the exhumations.