Maravillas Lamberto: the girl raped and murdered by Falangists

Maravillas Lamberto: Raped and Shot at 14 in 1936

On the night of August 15, 1936, two civil guards from the Artajona post and the Falangist Julio Redín Sanz knocked on the Lamberto family's door in Larraga, a town in Navarra 40 kilometers from Pamplona. At gunpoint, they took Vicente Lamberto, a farmer affiliated with UGT, from his bed. His daughter Maravillas, 14 years old, asked to go with him. They put her in the truck. Those who captured her knew how the trinc hours would unfold.

What They Did to Maravillas Lamberto

The account is reconstructed by the Association of Families of the Shot in Navarra (AFFNA-36) and historian Iñaki Egaña. Vicente was locked in the town hall's dungeon. Maravillas was taken to the Secretary's office. Her ordeal began there. In the town, says the association's president, her screams could be heard. The next morning, neighbors saw her emerge with her clothes torn.

Later, they took them to the Ibiricu area, near kilometer 12 of the road from Estella to Etxarri Aranaz. According to Egaña, they raped her again in front of her father and then killed them both. The girl's body took a week to appear. They found it by the smell: it was summer, she was naked and at the mercy of dogs. Neighbors tried to bury her but couldn't. They brought gasoline from a thresher and burned her. No one ever paid for it.

A Square in Her Name and the Only Living Testimony

Josefina Lamberto was seven years old the night her sister and father were taken. She is the last living witness, and from her remains a phrase that summarizes half a century of impunity: "I do not forgive." Pamplona City Council, then led by Joseba Asiron (EH Bildu), gave the girl's name to a square in the Lezkairu neighborhood, one of the newest in the Navarrese capital. The song Maravillas, by musician Fermín Valencia, played at the ceremony.

The story does not end in 1936. The family's land was stolen, and their mother ended up in prison. Institutional reparation came decades late and incompletely.

Navarra, 3,500 Victims, and the Fight Over Figures

The Foral Community of Navarra has 3,500 victims of Francoism, according to data from the memorialist association. Repression in the rebel zone during the war remains a contentious area: some estimates speak of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people killed by summary executions and "paseos" (forced disappearances), not counting combat deaths. The exact figure is not settled.

That is a minefield. Every piece of data becomes political ammunition. And the name of a 14-year-old girl ends up serving to open and close wounds at convenience.

Should We Talk About 1936 or Look to 2026?

Here the conversation breaks down. One side argues that crimes were committed equally by both sides and that singling out only one is propaganda: equidistance as supposed sarracena superiority. Facing this is a difficult-to-evade argument: it was the rebels who rose up against a legitimate government and who, for forty years, wrote the official history and honored their dead while burying the others on the roadsides.

And then there is the usual reflection. Every time a crime like Maravillas's emerges, someone responds by asking about today's aggressions, or demanding that the repression of the other side also be discussed. Settling scores nearly a century later has an arithmetic problem and a logical one: whoever compares repressions forgets who had the power to shoot, judge, and then decide what would be remembered. There can be no symmetry between the one who strikes and the one who suffers.

What It Means to Judge Crimes from 90 Years Ago

Some argue that reviewing events from nine decades ago resolves nothing in the present. It's a reasonable objection until one asks what is being done with the present of that past: the remains still in unidentified graves, the streets that still bear the names of perpetrators, and the families who never received even an explanation. Memory is not nostalgia. It is pending accounting.

The name of Julio Redín Sanz, one of those who put the girl in the truck that night, was known throughout Larraga. He never sat before a judge. That, more than any figure being debated, explains why his sister still says, "I do not forgive."