premiered this Tuesday the second part of the And faran a homeabout deaths not sufficiently explained in the military barracks of the first years of democracy. To begin with, the title is particularly well chosen, because it is the expression that was often heard in certain families when one of their young men was preparing the sarrón to go to the military. It manifests an outdated and sexist conviction about the learning that an institution with values that carried the legacy of Francoism could offer.
broadcast at the end of 2024, focused on the testimony of recruits – some of them well-known characters – who explained the nightmare they lived through. Harassment, abuse, rape… most of the time, by veteran soldiers. Savages that had a strange impunity, with commands that were not used to witnessing them or were not there, but of which it is very difficult to preach ignorance about what was happening in those facilities where they commanded. The broadcast of that first chapter had a great response. More citizen testimonies of all kinds were received. It was a look inside the quarters. The second episode deals with the impossibility of being able to look over certain episodes. After eight months of research, Mireia Prats and Joan Torrents have presented the second chapter, focused mainly on the mourning of four families who, so many years later, have not received any clarification about what happened. Soldiers who died doing military service or a recruit who committed suicide shortly after completing it. He had returned with a taciturn character and at home they never knew the reasons for this change that brought him to a bleak end. The witnesses are basically sisters and brothers of the victims. Many years have passed and the parents are no longer there; some became deathly ill from the grief that loss caused them.
Defensa recognized 303 suicides between 1983 and 2001, but it is a highly disputed figure. Many times the military documentation spoke of “accidental deaths”, a concept that could cover up a suicide; but others, closing the case as a suicide could serve as a cover-up for an episode with culprits. The army did not know how to guard the lives of its people. The great sadness that drags the families that participate in the documentary is not only because of the loss of a loved one at an age that does not touch. They also have it because they have not been able to clarify in a reliable way what lies there may be in the scurrilous official explanations they received. A communication, moreover, absent of manifest compassion. The program has a clear subtitle: “Silent deaths”. Because there are no convincing explanations, and in some cases, also, because the relatives themselves admit that in order to survive the tragedy, they avoided talking about it with their parents.
One case is closed as a suicide because the soldier appears with a letter opener stuck in his chest, but, as the family explains, four days earlier the boy had asked them for a whip. He doesn’t seem to be thinking about death. “We will never know what happened”. Family searches encounter the silence of comrades who have been ordered by the captain to keep quiet about the episode, or locate internal orders to draw up a report exonerating the military court that declared fit for service a boy with a physical clearly incapable of instruction.
The absence of answers does not mean that it is not a well-worked documentary. In the request for documentation, many times it has been found that the Ministry of Defense replies that there are no proceedings. The program team, in the end credits, mentions 26 judicial, military, public office and entity archives that they have searched to no avail. And its editors rightly leave the spotlight to families. There is no narrator. At most some data is overprinted. A good job of the program directed by Montse Armengou.
