Franco’s tomb to surrender civil war dead after family’s legal fight

FOUR decades after the end of the Franco dictatorship, the wall surrounding Spain’s largest mass grave is to come down.

After a six-year campaign, the family of two brothers executed by Gen Francisco Franco’s troops in 1936 will on Monday see work begin on exhuming their remains from the Valley of the Fallen, the monument containing Franco’s tomb where at least 33,000 civil war dead are also interred.

A team of archaeological and forensic specialists will break through the wall surrounding the monument’s vast ossuary in search of the bodies of Manuel Lapeña, a Leftist union leader and father of four, and Antonio, his metalworker brother.

Eduardo Rank, lawyer for the Lapeñas and several other families, said the exhumation was a “historic precedent” that would open the way for others who had “waited for so long”.

The only surviving son of Manuel Lapeña, also named Manuel, is now 94 and has never given up his desire to give his father a dignified burial. He says he should be laid to rest alongside his mother in their hometown in Zaragoza, not “interred alongside his killer, the greatest criminal”, a situation he describes as “an insult”.

Purificación Lapeña Garrido, his daughter, who has led the family’s legal fight, recounts how during her childhood he would say “That’s the man that killed my father” every time Franco appeared on television.

She told The Daily Telegraph that the extra-judicial executions of her grandfather and uncle were an “evil thing” that her family had lived with on a daily basis. Many Spaniards were still unaware of the full horrors of the civil war and dictatorship era, Ms Lapeña said, due to political resistance to digging up the past.

“They don’t want to know, they want everything to be forgotten,” she said, lamenting that “we are still like this after so many years”.