Spain's leading judge agreed on Thursday to investigate the disappearances of tens thousands of people during the 1936-39 civil war and the ensuing Franco dictatorship, many of whom are believed to be buried in mass graves.
Baltasar Garzon ordered the opening of mass graves in 19 locations, including one near the southern city of Granada that is believed to contain the remains of poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was shot by supporters of General Francisco Franco in 1936.
The decision comes in response to a petition last month by associations representing families of the missing, who asked that the bodies of their loved ones be located and the circumstances of their deaths clarified.
The associations earlier this month presented the judge with a list of 133,708 people who disappeared during the civil war and the ensuing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, which lasted until his death in 1975.
Garzon has investigated crimes of dictators in Argentina and Chile but has until now appeared reluctant to probe Spain's Fascist past.
However, he said he would investigate most of the disappearances on the list -- notably 114,266 people who went missing between July 17, 1936 and December 1951.
He also called for the death certificates of Franco and 34 of his senior aides in order to rule out any criminal prosecutions against them.
And he asked the interior ministry to identify the top leaders of the far-right Falange organisation, which supported Franco, with a view to possibly filing charges against any who are still alive.
A judicial source told AFP that the attorney general's office will probably appeal Garzon's decision.
Historians have estimated that about 500,000 people from both sides were killed in the civil war, which was sparked by Franco's insurgency against the democratically elected left-wing Republican government.
It is believed that after Franco's victory, around 50,000 Republicans were executed by Nationalist forces.
While the regime honoured its own dead, it left up to 30,000 of its opponents buried in hundreds of unmarked graves across the country, according to victims' rights associations.
After Franco's death in 1975, all political parties agreed to put the civil war and the dictatorship behind them, and Spain granted an amnesty for crimes committed under Franco's iron-fisted rule.
But in recent years the "pacto de olvido" (pact of forgetting) began to crumble, as associations emerged which sought to recover the remains of those shot and thrown into unmarked mass graves.
Their drive got a boost in 2007, with parliament's approval of the Law of Historical Memory which, for the first time, recognized the victims of the civil war and dictatorship.
The law obliges local administrations to cooperate in the search for victims of the Franco regime. It also requires statues, plaques and other symbols of the dictatorship to be removed from public buildings.
