It is best to ground a discussion of the exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War in a quantitative base.1 To begin our analysis, then, we will summarize current available data regarding the number of civilians killed during the conflict and the postwar period. First, however, we have to indicate that no elected Spanish government has commissioned a quantitative investigation of human rights violations during the conflict and dictatorship, unlike other cases of large-scale political violence where countries have implemented truth commissions in order to establish the extent and patterns of violations of human rights.2 In the Spanish case, this task has fallen on historians, who have researched diverse archives and recorded interviews with families and witnesses in order to elaborate lists of victims as a base for further historical research (e.g., chronological patterns of violence and political affiliations of the victims). Some authors have published summaries of these studies (Juliá 1999; Espinosa 2009; Preston 2012), and in these works, it has been estimated that during the Spanish Civil War and the first decade of the dictatorship that followed, at least 170,000 persons were killed away from the battlefield, most of them buried in mass graves located in open countryside and in cemeteries. More specifically, this number refers to “violent deaths away from the frontline [. . .]. Victims of paseos, sacas,3 shootings along the walls of cemeteries, executions carried out by death sentences from courts-martial or popular tribunals” (Juliá 1999, 407-14).4 Republican violence of this kind had a cost in lives of 38,563 persons, while the fascist violence had a cost in lives of at least 129,472 persons, taking into account that data from several Spanish provinces are still incomplete (Espinosa 2009, 442-43).