Three Catarroja Women Executed in 1936

The story here is Civil War memory — but in a very specific, very local form. A report published on May 9, 2026 says three women from Catarroja were sent before a firing squad in 1936 under the authority of Óscar Boán Callejas, a military officer who later served as mayor of Cangas. That matters because these cases are not just about counting victims anymore. They are about attaching names, places, and command responsibility to killings that sat for decades inside scattered files and family memory. ### Who was Óscar Boán Callejas? Boán Callejas was a lieutenant colonel and a Francoist official with a public life that stretched beyond Galicia. He is already known in Valencia memory work because he presided over the military process that ended with the execution of Juan Peset Aleixandre, the former rector of the University of Valencia, who was shot in Paterna on May 24, 1941. The new reporting pushes his footprint further back into the first months of the war. (farodevigo.es) ### What changed this week? What changed is not a court ruling or an exhumation. It is the publication of a fresh reconstruction that identifies three women from Catarroja as victims tied to Boán’s repressive activity in 1936. Faro de Vigo frames them as “the other victims” of the former Cangas mayor, which tells you the angle — this is an expansion of the known victim list around one perpetrator, not a generic look back at the war. (memoriarepressiofranquista.blogspot.com) ### Why Catarroja? Catarroja sits in the Valencia area, where Francoist repression has been studied town by town, often through military case files, municipal records, and cemetery evidence. The catch is that local histories usually surface victims first and only later connect them to the officers, tribunals, and chains of command that made the killings possible. So when one name keeps appearing across several municipalities, that is a big deal. (farodevigo.es) It turns a local tragedy into a map of how repression traveled. ### Which other towns appear in the report? The report does not stop at Catarroja. It also links Boán to executions in Ontinyent, Albaida, Llíria, and Sagunt. Basically, the picture is of one officer whose role was not confined to a single town or one isolated case. That wider geography is what gives the finding weight — it suggests an operator moving through the machinery of early Francoist violence across Valencia province. (patrimoniocultural.defensa.gob.es) ### Why focus on three women? Because women’s repression in the Civil War and dictatorship was often doubly erased. Some were shot outright. Others disappeared into records that centered male combatants, military defendants, or political leaders. Later memory work has had to recover women from the margins — not just as relatives of the dead, but as direct victims of execution and political punishment. These three names matter for that reason too. (farodevigo.es) ### Is this about graves or about archives? Mostly archives — at least in this round. Spain’s democratic-memory infrastructure now includes victim databases, military judicial indexes, and archival guides that make this kind of reconstruction easier than it was even a decade ago. But easier does not mean easy. Researchers still have to stitch together fragments from defense archives, local records, and press reports to show who ordered what and where. (guardianasdelamemoria.com) ### Why does naming the perpetrator matter? Because memory politics changes when the story stops being “terrible things happened here” and becomes “this officer was involved in these deaths in these towns.” That is more concrete. It also makes denial harder. Families often knew the loss. Towns often knew the rumor. What archives can do is pin responsibility to a person inside the state machinery. (patrimoniocultural.defensa.gob.es) ### Bottom line? This is a small story in numbers — three women in one town — but a big one in meaning. It adds names to the dead, ties those deaths to Óscar Boán Callejas, and widens the map of how Francoist repression worked across Valencia in 1936. (farodevigo.es)