Lorca's last hours: all the open questions about the poet's assassination

BarcelonaThe summer of 1936, Federico García Lorca (Granada, June 5, 1898 - between Víznar and Alfacar, Granada, August 18 or 19, 1936) decided to leave Madrid and go to Granada for a short stay. The assassination of the Minister of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Calvo Sotelo, on July 13, had left him very uneasy. "July 18 was his saint's day and his father's, and they were going to celebrate it, and also to say goodbye to the family because he was leaving for Mexico with the actress Margarida Xirgu. His intention was to return to Madrid in the autumn, because he was to premiere La casa de Bernarda Alba and publish Poeta en Nueva York", explains journalist and writer Víctor Fernández.

Shortly after arriving in Granada, the poet wrote a letter, unpublished until recently, to Juan Ramírez de Lucas, one of his last loves: "I think of you a lot, and you know this without me having to tell you, but in silence and between the lines, you must read all the affection I have for you and all the tenderness my heart holds. I only have one obsession and that is that I would like to instill in you the attitude you must maintain, full of strength and cunning to counteract your father's wrong attitude [...]. You can always count on me. I am your best friend and I ask you to be diplomatic and not let the river sweep you away. You must laugh again. I have gone through very rough, not to say terrible, things, and I have overcome them".

Ramírez, who never wanted to reveal his relationship with Lorca while he was alive, did not have time to reply. Nor do we know if the poet was able to say goodbye to another of the great loves of his life: Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. An engineer by profession, Rapún accompanied the playwright as secretary of the company La Barraca.

That July of 1936, all of Lorca's plans collapsed: the theatrical premiere was canceled and the publication of his book was left in limbo. Between August 18 and 19, he was silenced forever. A year later, Rapún died at the front. According to the writer María Teresa León – who knew the couple's intimacy well – it was no coincidence: Rapún let himself be killed.

Isolated in Granada

It was not an improvised assassination. Lorca was on the coup plotters' lists because he had all the credentials: he was a poet, playwright, musician, and artist, homosexual, a defender of public education, freedom, equality, and the Republic. "Furthermore, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time," emphasizes Fernández, who this October is publishing Recuerdos. Breve historia de un amor (Seix Barral) with Hispanist Christopher Maurer, and has recently written No te olvides de escribir (Akal), the correspondence between Lorca and his family. On July 20th, terror was established in Granada. The rebel military and the Falangists seized control of the city center, and only the historic Albaicín neighborhood resisted until July 23rd. Granada became an island amidst Republican territory, and the repression was fierce. On August 9th, the fascists searched the Huerta de San Vicente, where Lorca was with his family; they were looking for some workers on the estate. Upon seeing the poet, one of them shouted: "The queer from the little bow tie!", they threw him to the ground and hit him with the butt of a rifle.

Lorca then panicked. The family ruled out trying to get him to the Republican zone because Granada was isolated. The poet thought he would be safest at the home of a Falangist friend who considered him his mentor: the poet Luis Rosales. The house was in the heart of Granada, and he moved there that very night. The Rosales family consisted of five siblings, each with their own political ideas. Except for the youngest, Gerardo, all were Falangists. Nevertheless, Luis always defended Lorca. All the women in the Rosales family, who admired the poet, also defended him.

A spectacular operation

It must have been distressing days for the author of Yerma, who eagerly read the newspaper Ideal. While Lorca was at home, on the morning of August 16, they informed him that his brother-in-law, the mayor of Granada, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, had been shot. That same day, according to Hispanist Ian Gibson, the poet was arrested. He was picked up by the former CEDA deputy Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a convinced fascist who hated Marxism. Gibson explains that Ruiz was known as the executioner's assistant. "They arrived at five in the afternoon, taking advantage of the fact that there were no men at home. They made a spectacular deployment, with people on the rooftops and cars, as if they were looking for a terrorist, when the Civil Government headquarters was a seven-minute walk away. The mother of the Rosales family confronted them, but they finally took Lorca away. On the way to the Civil Government, he only asked them to find his friend Luis Rosales," explains Fernández. Lorca's sentence, despite the negotiation attempts by José and Luis Rosales to try to get him out of there, had already been decided. He was accused of being a Russian spy, of being in contact with them by radio, of having been secretary to the socialist deputy Fernando de los Ríos, and of being homosexual.

After being arrested, Lorca followed the same tragic path as many other victims of the blacklists of the military coup and the Falange. The arrested were transferred at dawn and, to leave no written record, orders were often executed by telephone using codes instead of names.

The destination for most was La Colonia, a former converted mill. "During the Second Republic, it had been a secular school colony where the children of workers escaped the summer heat; however, after the coup d'état, the rebels transformed it into a detention center for prisoners from the provincial prison or the Civil Government," explains Francisco Carrión, professor of archaeology at the University of Granada and coordinator of the exhumations in the region.

The gravediggers and the executioners

At the mill, Lorca spent his last hours of life along with other condemned men, including the republican teacher Dióscoro Galindo and the anarchist banderilleros Francisco Galadí and Joaquín Arcollas. In those same premises, prisoners from the Masonic lodge were forced to dig the graves early in the morning. Gibson collects the testimony of one of these Masons, Antonio Mendoza de la Fuente, who in 1966 provided a description of how the system worked. The prison was on the ground floor; upstairs housed soldiers and assault guards. Some of the volunteers who carried out the orders were part of the Black Squads.

During the early hours of August 18 or 19, the execution squad led the condemned to the area of the Barranco de Víznar or the road to Alfacar. Lorca was shot without any prior trial, a victim of planned terror. In "Federico García Lorca" (Crítica), Gibson explains that the civil governor of Granada, José Valdés Guzmán, contacted General Queipo de Llano, head of the Andalusian rebels. At that time, Llano was already famous for his harangues on Radio Sevilla, where he incited the killing of republicans: "There are indications that suggest Queipo recommended to Valdés: 'Give him coffee, lots of coffee.' It was his way of ordering the execution," writes the Hispanist. Regardless of this, Gibson asserts that Valdés is the main culprit for the murder: "It is evident that Valdés could have saved Lorca if he had wanted to, despite the denunciations. But Valdés was not a man who saved anyone, much less a red poet, a friend of Fernando de los Ríos, a spy for the Russians and known for being gay".

Despite the multiple investigations carried out over the decades to locate the remains of the author of "Romancero gitano", the exact location of his body remains an enigma. Gibson argues that Lorca was not shot in the ravine but a little further away, near the spring known as Fuente Grande. This is the same theory that Fernández defends. "In 1980, the Diputación de Granada conducted a very valuable official investigation. A witness, María Luisa Illescas, asked to testify behind closed doors and handed over a photograph of the olive tree taken in 1936, showing the exact location. Based on this, the land was purchased to create a park. During the park's construction, in 1986, human remains were found, but the construction managers, instead of notifying the court or the Civil Guard, decided to move some of them and hide them in another part of the park or in the urbanization opposite, and silence fell," says the journalist.

Theories about where they buried him

Carrión is one of the researchers who searched there, but he states that he found nothing. "Initial historiography was based on testimonies that, over time, proved to be unreliable," he says. According to Carrión, the theory is based on the investigation carried out at the time by one of Lorca's first researchers, the American writer of Catalan origin Agustín Penón: "He came to Granada in the fifties, during the dictatorship. He interviewed Manuel Castilla – the man who supposedly buried Lorca – and Castilla gave him information, in exchange for money, and pointed him to a small olive tree in Fuente Grande. We intervened there to locate the grave and nothing appeared; it was a false witness. Manuel Castilla himself left a written testimony saying that what he had said was false." Regarding the real possibilities of finding Lorca's body today, Carrión is skeptical: "If Lorca is found, it is still very important, but the place has not been located nor do I think it can be located, or it is impossible. There are many theories, but we scientists do not play with hypotheses. What the investigation has served us for is to find many other victims and to name 194 victims executed between August and November 1936.

What the Francoists could not make disappear is all of Lorca's work, his poetry, his theater, his articles... In 1976, when Franco had been dead for only nine months, a massive tribute to the poet was organized in Fuente Vaqueros, which marked a before and after. Despite the context of change, institutional control was still very present. "The government of the time only allowed half an hour. It was half an hour of freedom. Until that moment, his murder was a taboo subject, his sexuality was not even spoken about, nor was all his work published. Lorca was the symbol of how far barbarism could go: killing an innocent person," says Fernández, who regrets that investigations into his murder were carried out in 1939-1940, 1965, and 1971, but that the documentation has not been declassified.

As the decades passed, perceptions surrounding his figure changed. For Fernández, one must differentiate between the symbolic value the poet held in the last century and the image projected of him today: "Until Franco's death, Lorca was the symbol; now he is the myth, which is something very different," says Fernández. This process of mythologization has led to a certain emptying of content: "Today he continues to be a symbol, but we have entered a dangerous path. In the shops in Granada there are t-shirts, bags... We are left only with the image. We have forgotten his political commitment; he said that in Spain one could not be neutral. He signed manifestos in defense of Catalan during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he became a member of the Friends of the Soviet Union and he criticized the history taught in schools and the vision of Catholic Spain. We must remember all of this".