The mass grave of Carmelo Delgado Delgado

The Puerto Rican volunteer Carmelo Delgado Delgado, believed to be the first U.S. citizen volunteer executed by the Francoists after being sentenced by a military tribunal, was buried in a mass grave in Valladolid in 1937. His remains were exhumed in 2022, 85 years later.

Carmelo Delgado was a law student at the Central University of Madrid when the military uprising against the legitimate Republican government occurred, and he joined the student militias to defend the government in Madrid. On 4 November 1936, he was captured in the town of Alcorcón and transferred to the prison in Valladolid. A military tribunal sentenced him to death for the crime of rebellion on 16 February 1937. He was executed on April 10 in the Campo de San Isidro on the outskirts of Valladolid, along with two other condemned men, and was buried the following day in mass grave number 6 of El Carmen cemetery. His family searched for the grave unsuccessfully for decades because the official version claimed that the graves of those executed had been removed and the remains thrown into a communal ossuary.

There are more than 2,500 mass graves in Spain. The first to demand justice for the missing Republicans were family members and friends who, in the early 21st century, began searching for their remains in places pointed out through stories told by their grandparents. Later, the Associations for the Recovery of Historical Memory, founded across the country, supported these efforts. The Historical Memory Law of 2007 and the Democratic Memory Law of 2022 have helped facilitate the process. In Valladolid, the local Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory began searching for 10 documented mass graves in El Carmen cemetery in late 2015. Since then, they have exhumed 320 bodies from five graves, including grave number 6.

The 73 bodies recovered from the grave included those of three men side by side, very close to the surface, whose ages match those of Carmelo and the two others executed with him. The location of the bodies in the grave corresponds with the date of their execution, just days before the grave was sealed. The remains of Carmelo Delgado Delgado, identified as body number 21 from grave number 6, now rest in the vault of the Memorial built in 2019 in recognition of those repressed by Francoism in Valladolid. The names of 2,647 victims, including the name of the Puerto Rican, cover the walls of the Memorial.

TTR