The pit keepers

The foser is the one who opens graves, the gravedigger. Spain is considered the country in the world with the second most mass graves after Cambodia, which holds this macabre record as a result of the massacres perpetrated in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge under the orders of the bloodthirsty Pol Pot. That, by the way, was also a genocide, because "genocide" (to the surprise of the mayor of Madrid and those who think like him) is not a term that anyone has exclusive rights to, but rather the practice of exterminating the population of a place. In Cambodia, the totalitarian frenzy to create a "new society" led to the murder of all those deemed unworthy of being part of it. Between 1975 and 1978, between 1.5 and 2.2 million people were murdered, and official data speak of some twenty thousand mass graves scattered throughout the country.

In Spain, there is no official count of the victims of the Civil War, so estimates range between 190,000 and 500,000. The number of mass graves in Spanish territory is said to be between 2,000 and 3,000. For those who still today discuss or deny the need for democratic memory policies (in the Balearic Islands, the PP and Vox are preparing to definitively repeal the regional law on this matter, as they have already done in other communities), or who clash fiercely, the data flatly refutes them.

In a country like this, for the secretary general of the party aspiring to govern to affirm that the current government must be buried in a mass grave is beyond offensive and beyond worrying. Even more so when the party in question, the PP, is the direct ideological descendant of those who dug the graves ninety years ago. And even more so if we consider that the PP's only chance of returning to power comes with the same arithmetic price as most of the regional and municipal governments it currently holds: depending on the far-right Vox party, which not only descends from Franco's regime but also openly claims and praises it.

In a solid democracy, this Tellado would pay for such an outrage with his political career. However, the current situation is not only not one of democratic solidity, but can be described as a downward spiral without brakes, and not only in Spain. The news coming from France, Germany, the entire European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States shows an erosion of liberal democracies (of their institutions and governance mechanisms, but also of the very idea of democracy) such as we have never seen before. In Spain, the phenomenon takes on its own characteristics, because in more than forty years, democracy has not even fully developed. Every day there are outbreaks of gestural and verbal violence that are unbearable. There is a desire for violence, a longing to see the pit-keepers returned, a civil war impulse that ranges from a Trump who threatens the city of Chicago (like Los Angeles before him) to the Tellados and the countless ghosts of the Hispanic far right. Alert.