Accidental deaths or covert murders? 'Noches sin ficción' delves once again into the dark side of military service

Barcelona"They'll make a man out of you in the army" was one of the most common phrases heard when mandatory military service was still in effect. For some people, spending time in a barracks for military training was a way to bring out a supposed virility. All of that is in the past, but the traumatic stories are still remembered: denigrating "rabbits"—new recruits—was a pastime of those of higher rank and veterans, some of whom were driven to these practices if they didn't want to become victims themselves. Following the success of the documentary They'll make you a manMireia Prats and Joan Torrents now showcase the work of eight months of research for a sequel to that piece. They'll Make You a Man: Silenced Deaths It delves into several cases of deaths under strange circumstances that occurred in military barracks, deaths that remain shrouded in doubt because they were never properly investigated. The production premieres this Tuesday on TV3 and on the 3Cat platform.

The protagonists are the families of Narcís, Joan, Martí, and Jordi, four conscripts who died tragically during or after their military service. These stories are told from the perspective of the victims' siblings, some of whom describe how they encountered a "wall of silence" where nothing was said and all they could do was "accept what had happened" and receive the sealed coffin delivered by the military establishment, without further explanation. One relative of a young man who committed suicide claims to be convinced that his brother "was murdered" because just days before, he had been writing letters expressing his excitement about having been granted leave to return home. These accounts are combined with those of other people who served in the military during that time and who record harrowing scenes, such as having to clean the walls with lime because they were covered in blood, hearing gunshots, or even self-harming with a bayonet to escape the system.

The filmmakers behind this documentary attempted to consult documents from over twenty archives and official sources, but received no response and reached a dead end. Most families never learned what happened, and, as explained in the documentary, the opacity of these military archives perpetuates the impunity of those responsible for many of these potential crimes, which were dismissed as suicides or accidental deaths. In the 1990s, suicides appear in the Ministry of Defense records as the leading cause of death, and although it is impossible to know the exact number, the production estimates that approximately 1,900 people died during their military service.

This second part comes about because, with the first documentary, more people decided to report similar incidents they experienced while in the military. According to 3Cat, over a hundred affected individuals contacted them to share their stories. After seeing that there were so many cases, and some of them even more serious, they decided to give a voice to the families who buried their sons who died in the military under traumatic circumstances, as a way for them to obtain some redress.

The beginning of the story

In that documentary, released in 2024, a group of witnesses met to explain some of the events they experienced during their mandatory military service at the Vielha barracks in the Vall d'Aran and other locations in Spain. Mireia Prats learned of these abuses while in Vatican City, covering Pope Francis's summit against pedophilia for TV3 news. In one of her conversations with Albert Arean, her colleague and cameraman, she confessed that he had been tortured during his military service and that he had survived death three times while volunteering with the Vielha Ski and Mountaineering Company. Arean wrote a book to document all these events and called it The White LegionAccording to Prats, it was difficult to get them to agree to speak in the documentary, but they finally agreed to give their testimony. Now, one of the town's public parking lots is located on the site of the former barracks.

The witnesses explain how they were forced to perform dangerous and humiliating activities such as doing push-ups with a knife pointed at their chest on the ground, picking up a peseta with their mouths through a sink full of ice-cold water, receiving punches that knocked them out, and being subjected to confrontations. Àlex Gorina, a film critic who was presenting Rear Window on Catalunya Ràdio, he narrated live on The morning of Catalunya Ràdio Laura Rosel in 2022 said that when she was in the military at the Melilla barracks she suffered a rape: "I was woken up in the barracks where I was sleeping, they told me to go to the weapons room and two sergeants abused me."