The cemetery in Bunyola, where the exhumation of a Civil War communal grave started on Monday. | Juanjo Roig

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The regional secretariat for democratic memory will manage the digital archive of 2,761 legal cases between 1936 and 1939. Containing some 300,000 documents related to the repression by Nationalists during the Civil War, the work on locating and digitalising these documents was carried out by the Majorca Memory Association.

The formal process of ceding the archive to the secretariat will be supervised by the regional government's heritage department, which is headed by Francesc Miralles, who was a vice-president of the Council of Majorca during the 2015-2019 administration. The secretariat is headed by Jesús Jurado, who was the other vice-president.

In 2018, the Majorca Memory Association suggested that the transfer of the archive should be made, subject to certain conditions, such as there being the necessary infrastructure. Jurado explains that the documents include charges levelled in legal cases and statements made as well as newspaper reports. The originals, he says, are kept in the military archive, which is where they will stay.

The various cases relate to 4,653 people. Two researchers from the Majorca Memory Association started to compile information after being awarded a grant from the Spanish government in 2010. The work took four years.

In 2016, the Balearic parliament approved the law of disappeared persons. In 2018, there was the law for democratic memory, which established the legal mechanism for archives from the Civil War to be open to the public. The president of the Majorca Memory Association, Maria Antónia Oliver, says that the work of the association is voluntary and that it has gone as far as it can. The current director-general for the government's democratic memory department is Marc Herrera, the great-grandson of Andrés Paris Martorell, who was arrested in 1936 and later released but then assassinated without trial.

Jurado says that the secretariat's objective is to collect all documentation from the period and that having the archive will be a foundation for meeting this objective.