AFP: The painstaking search for Spain's Franco-era missing: "With painstaking care and armed with brushes and chisels, volunteers at a site in central Spain are unearthing bones buried for more than 70 years in the hope of identifying some of the victims from the Civil War.
But it is agonisingly slow work -- and hopelessly underfunded according to the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, which helps Spaniards locate the graves of loved ones who went missing during the 1936-39 war and subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
Among them was the father of Paula Gonzalez Polo, who is now 78 and was just four when her father was shot with six neighbors.
'I am pleased, although I hardly remember him,' she said as she approached the grave where his remains were found at Calzada de Oropesa, dressed in black and aided by her two granddaughters.
'Finally we can bury them.'
Over the past 10 years, the association has opened some 150 mass graves and exhumed around 1,500 corpses in its quest for truth, which is emerging just as slowly, 35 years after the death of Franco on November 20, 1975.
But that is out of 105,000 to 130,000 people the association estimates were killed and buried in mass graves during the war, which pitted Franco's right-wing forces against an elected left-wing government.
While Franco's regime honoured its own dead, it left its opponents buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country."
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