Historian Mario Amorós has published a biography that includes unpublished letters from Chilean diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch to Francoist minister Sánchez Mazas. The correspondence proves that Franco's regime acknowledged the death sentence of the poet from Orihuela for acts of little significance. Hernández was executed in 1942 following his activity in the Civil War. The work sheds light on the diplomatic efforts to save his life and the stance of Francoism, which downplayed the reasons for the execution.
Technology at the service of historical memory 📜
Access to these documents has been made possible thanks to the digitization of historical archives and the use of optical character recognition (OCR) tools to transcribe manuscripts from the era. Researchers apply network analysis techniques to trace connections between diplomats and Francoist authorities. The geolocation of detention sites and database systems allow cross-referencing of judicial records with private correspondence, facilitating the verification of facts and the contextualization of the regime's decisions.
Francoism and its curious scale of severity 😅
According to the revealed papers, the regime considered the poet's acts to be of little significance, but sufficient to send him to the firing squad. One imagines the Francoist scale of values: writing subversive verses was a minor offense, but organizing a republican poetry contest perhaps already warranted life imprisonment. In the end, the dictatorial bureaucracy proved to be as absurd as it was lethal. Good thing they at least left written record of their own moral absurdity so that today we can laugh bitterly.