Not Just Bodies: Forensic Activism in Post-Franco Spain

Not Just Bodies is an ethnography of one of Spain’s most successful activist movements: the ongoing effort to locate and exhume the more than 130,000 persons disappeared during the 1936–1975 Franco dictatorship. Just two decades ago, public mention of these victims of the Spanish dictatorship was unofficially but effectively censored, widely perceived as a threat to the foundational accords of Spanish democracy. Today, they are a central feature of electoral campaigns, nightly news, and cultural productions. Not Just Bodies examines the often-surprising ways activists and relatives of the disappeared deployed forensic science to achieve such a dramatic change in the ways Spaniards understand what it means to live in a post-fascist democracy.

Although Spanish exhumations follow the same technical protocols as those of their international peers, the context in which these forensic tools are applied is remarkably different. Whereas the Latin American exhumations that inspired Spaniards occurred as part of state-led post-conflict programs of truth and reconciliation, in Spain a policy of amnesty and amnesia have foreclosed the possibility of achieving justice. Removed from this original context as part of state-led transitional justice processes, forensic exhumation becomes more than just a means of extracting data about past human rights crimes from victims’ corpses—it exists as a powerful method through which activists reassess post-fascist democracy and build pressure toward social change. By inserting the deceased into transnationally circulating scientific, medical, and legal discourses, Spanish activists alter the status of the dead, transforming them into disappeared persons whom the state has a moral and legal obligation to recover.