Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica

The Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH, Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory) is a Spanish organization that collects oral and written testimonies about the White Terror of Francisco Franco and excavates and identifies their bodies that were often dumped in mass graves. The ARMH arose as a result of the exhumation of a mass grave containing the remains of 13 civilian Republicans murdered by a group of Falangist gunmen in October 1936. As a result of the strong media coverage of the exhumation, hundreds of letters, calls and e-mails reached those responsible for the work. Given the volume of cases of extrajudicial killings and disappearances coming from all over the country and always with the same pattern: kidnapping-murder-disappearance, it was decided to create a civil association to channel all these cases and try to answer questions that the Spanish state has never given. The result is the largest archive of stories of missing persons in all of Spain. The final push for the association's activities came in October 2007, with the entry into force of the Law on Historical Remembrance (Ley de Memoria Histórica de España), which included the recognition of all victims of the civil war and dictatorship, as well as the opening of the mass graves containing the remains of those murdered by the rebels during the civil war, and until then carried out by ARMH.