The discovery between 1972 and 2010 of the human remains of five people in a wasteland on the coast of Los Silos, near the cove of Piedra de las Viejas and Caleta de Funche, opened up numerous questions that need to be resolved 51 years after the appearance of a first corpse, with remains of clothing, in a ravine in this area of Isla Baja. Los Silos City Council has presented a project to recover historical memory, which will be financed with 8,800 euros by the Cabildo de Tenerife and with another 1,200 euros contributed by the Consistory, with the main objective being to determine if those bodies discovered in 1972, 1979 and 2010 are the first of the reprisals of the Franco dictatorship found on the island of Tenerife, after the unsuccessful searches in the National Park Teide or in the lagoon cemetery of San Juan.
This still inhospitable place, surrounded by greenhouses and cultivation areas, can write key pages in the history of the repression of the Francoist side after the coup d’état of July 18, 1936 on the island of Tenerife. Los Silos City Council is one of the 12 that has obtained financing, thanks to the most detailed and complete proposal to shed light on a dark period. Another study financed by the Department of Public Administrations, Justice and Security of the Government of the Canary Islands, developed by the Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory of Tenerife, made it possible to draw up a verified list of 182 fatalities directly related to the repression generated during the Franco regime in Tenerife. In that list there are missing people, who died from extrajudicial executions, court martial or as a consequence of repressive actions. In most cases they were young men, close to 30 years of age, members of labor organizations or left-wing parties.
This previous investigation, carried out between November 2020 and April 2021 by archaeologists from the University of La Laguna (ULL) Nuria Álvarez Rodríguez and Laura Bencomo Fernández, allows us to have a specific list of disappeared; died from torture, murders perpetrated by members of the Falange or the Civil Guard or died as a result of diseases contracted in prison, and officially shot on this island, the best known to date due to the existence of documentary sources, since the military cases that sentenced them to the death penalty are preserved. In addition, in this study there are preliminary data on another 40 disappeared, although other sources raise the number of victims in Canary Islands above 3,000. After the harsh repression of the first days after the coup of July 18, 1936 and more than 40 years of dictatorship and silence, it is very difficult to shed light on so many disappearances that are believed to have had a great deal in the sea that surrounds the islands. and inscrutable mass grave.
Oral tradition speaks of the sea, the caves, the chasms, the wells, the mountains, the ditches and the corners of the cemeteries as the final destination of many reprisals. Despite the efforts and investigations carried out, until now no human remains of victims of repression at that time have been found. Something that has happened in La Palma, with the exhumation of bodies in Fuencaliente, or in Gran Canaria, with the opening of the Arucas and Tenoya wells.
The first remains of Tenerife
If this Silense project manages to confirm that the remains of these five people belong to the stage immediately after the Francoist coup d’état, as indicated by the previously collected evidence, they would be the first remains of reprisals to be found in Tenerife after intense searches in places like Mount Teide or the San Juan cemetery, in La Laguna.
The urgent archaeological intervention and the documentary research planned for the coast of Los Silos aim to demonstrate the relationship of these skeletal remains with Franco’s repression during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) or the subsequent dictatorship. The first corpse was found in 1972 in a small ravine near Piedra de las Viejas, thanks to erosion, which left the bones and remains of a person’s clothing visible. In their day, the scientific police of the regime analyzed them and transferred them to a court in Icod de los Vinos. Without the content of those reports having been disclosed to date.
the bones of 1979
Seven years later, in 1979, the intervention of excavating machines brought to the surface the remains of three people in the area around Caleta de Funche. There they now want to carry out an archaeological intervention that allows clarifying whether the body that remains in the place and the two delivered to another court in Icod de los Vinos are, as the court clerk pointed out for reasons that are still unknown, “from the Civil War Spanish”. Witnesses of that exhumation maintain that in at least one of the skulls a hole possibly caused by a bullet impact could be observed.
The last finding, that of a fifth person, occurred in 2010 in the same area. Those remains were transferred to the Institute of Legal Medicine of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The promoters of this investigation hope to be able to divulge the content of that report. It will be one of the tasks planned in the documentary investigation phase, when it is time to analyze all the documentation related to the removal of the five corpses, in addition to the information with the Francoist repression in Los Silos.
Néstor García Lázaro, PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), and Juan Evaristo Armas Herrera, an archaeological technician, will be in charge of carrying out, in a period of approximately two months, this project for the recovery of historical memory, which includes an urgent archaeological survey in an area “exposed to the action erosive from the sea and affected by landslides»; the request and analysis of the forensic reports issued by the officials of the Icod de los Vinos courts involved in these findings, and the rescue and dignity of the remains of people who died decades ago and to whom no one has paid much attention until now . Just trying to determine who they are and why their bodies appeared there justifies the challenge that now opens on the coast of Los Silos.
Missing in town
In Los Silos there is information of several forced disappearances, without documentary trace, such as that of a pregnant woman, murdered and supposedly disappeared by two Falangist brothers; Luis Contreras Lorenzo, arrested in July 1936, tried for a crime of arousing rebellion, sentenced to five years, imprisoned in Fyffes and disappeared after being transferred to Gran Canaria; Abelardo Pérez Méndez, who also passed through Fyffes; Juan Díaz García, known as Juan El Huido, who escaped for a time to avoid being sent to the front and disappeared after turning himself in to the authorities, without it being possible to determine if he was assassinated or fled, or Felipe Lorenzo Baso, imprisoned in Garachico and Fyffes, among many others. | RS