Journalist and writer of Falangist ideology born in Granada on November 14, 1914, he was in charge of several newspapers during the Franco regime. He is the author of The Last Days of García Lorca, a documented study on the circumstances of the assassination of Federico García Lorca, which he never finished. The book, reconstructed and published posthumously in 1983, four years after his death, raised a bitter controversy with the heirs of one of the people alluded to. His theory, however, that García Lorca was murdered in the early morning of August 17 (and not on the 18th or 19th as other researchers maintain) after staying a few hours in the former Gobierno Civil has been gaining credibility. Other authors accuse him of altering data to blur the responsibility of the Falange in the assassination.
Among the documents he reproduces in ‘The Last Days of García Lorca’ is the list of the 2,069 people shot in the months following the coup d’état extracted from the register book at the Granada cemetery.
Molina Fajardo’s career as a journalist is intrinsically linked to the post-war period. After joining the Falange he was editor of the newspapers Odiel of Huelva, Yugo of Almería, Sevilla and Patria of Granada, all of them linked to the Franco’s Movement Chain.
As a researcher he is the author of the books Manuel de Falla and the deep song (1962), Flamenco in Granada (1974), History of Granada’s Newspapers (1979) and The Last Days of García Lorca (1983). This last volume, originally published by Plaza y Janés and which has been re-edited several times, was the result of interviews and research he conducted over many years among protagonists and direct witnesses of the events that ended with the murder of the poet from Granada.
The volume, which reproduces numerous raw documents found in his personal archive, is one of the most cited in the bibliography on the firing squad. The book was presented in January 1983 and from that moment on it was involved in controversy. The children of the lieutenant of infantry of the Assault Forces, Rafael Martínez Fajardo, filed a lawsuit against the author’s widow, Ángeles González, for claiming that their father was in charge of transmitting the order, coming from Madrid, to kill García Lorca.
The children of the lieutenant alluded to (among them the journalist of Ideal Rafael Martínez Miranda) alleged that their father did not intervene in the death of the poet because that day he was part of a column that was on its way to take Huétor Tájar, a town located east of Granada. The plaintiffs, however, desisted in exchange for eliminating the reference in a second edition.
Among the documents reproduced in Molina Fajardo’s book is the list of the 2,069 people shot in the months following the coup d’état, taken from the register book at the Granada cemetery. The original burial book mysteriously disappeared and has never been found or returned.
Molina Fajardo died in Granada on November 3, 1979. His personal archive was donated by the family to the Federico García Lorca Research Center in Fuente Vaqueros (Granada).
