The remains of the sailors Tomás Ladrón de Guevara and José Antonio López will finally rest near their family, in Cádiz, after 51 years of uncertainty. Both, uncle and nephew, capsized off the coast of Lanzarote on February 6, 1973 along with ten other crew members of the Cádiz fishing boat Domenech de Varó and rested in anonymous graves in a cemetery on the island until this Monday.
Ana Ladrón de Guevara grew up with the story that her father Tomás Ladrón had died and his body had been swallowed by the sea. Of that shipwreck there were only two survivors, the skipper of the boat Vicente Pérez and the sailor José Manga, who were able to reach land on their own. Of the deceased, only the corpses of three crew members were recovered and identified. The first was that of the mechanic José Bernal, then that of the sailor Antonio Rodríguez and, finally, that of the foreman Manuel Valiente.
The rest of the relatives then gave up the lifeless bodies of their loved ones for lost. The official version they had received said that they lay at the bottom of the sea. Widows and orphans were left without the possibility of burying them, believing that they could never recover them. The relatives of the sailors did not know until a few years ago that another five bodies, recovered in the shipwreck area in the following days, were buried without a name in the San Román cemetery in Arrecife and that two bodies were never recovered.
Until now, the remains of these two residents of Barbate rested next to three other sailors behind tombstones with the numbers 70, 72, 73, 75 and 76. This Monday, Ana Ladrón and her brother, were able to breathe. Identified by a Madrid genetics laboratory hired by the family: with a 99.9% probability, it is them.
"You are not prepared. When they told me yes [that it was my father] there were days that you cannot even imagine. I couldn't stop crying with joy, with happiness. It has been a very hard, emotional, happy and sad day", says the woman from Cádiz on the other end of the phone after seeing this morning how they exhumed the remains of her father and her cousin. It will not be until this Tuesday when she can take her ashes with her and on Thursday when she will land in Cádiz, where she will leave her father's ashes next to her mother's body.
Hers is a bittersweet feeling, finally closing the cycle of what happened to her father that February, the joy of being able to have her father with her, and the sadness of not being able to tell her mother. "So many years there my father when he could have been with my mother", she continues, "she died with the sorrow".
This resident of Barbate wanted to visit the coast of Mala this Monday afternoon, where the fishing boat in which her father was working capsized and where his remains were found.
Luis Moreno, on behalf of the social and cultural Association for the Historical Fishing Memory of Lanzarote Ángel Díaz, has been helping the families for two years to solve the mystery of whether those anonymous niches were waiting for their loved ones. Now he accompanies the children of those relatives to find out if the remains of their parents are in the cemetery or their bodies lie in the Atlantic.
