Former Spanish dictator’s remains are exhumed from mausoleum
SPAIN HAS exhumed the remains of dictator General Francisco Franco from his mausoleum outside Madrid so he can be reburied in a small family crypt north of the capital.
The government-ordered, closed-door operation satisfies a decades-old desire of many in Spain who considered the mausoleum that Franco, inset, built an affront to the tens of thousands who died in Spain’s Civil War and his subsequent regime, and to Spain’s standing as a modern democratic state.
After his coffin was extracted from under marble slabs and granite, a brief prayer was said in line with a request from Franco’s family. The dictator’s body was then carried out of the mausoleum to be taken to Mingorrubio cemetery, where his wife is buried, 35 miles away.
In a bid to guarantee privacy and avoid the actual exhumation operation being videoed and posted on social media, the government banned cameras and mobile phones among the 22 Franco family members, government authorities and workers allowed into the mausoleum.
Fearing disturbances, the government banned a demonstration against the exhumation by Franco supporters at the Mingorrubio cemetery although some 400 people, some waving Franco-era flags and symbols and chanting “Viva Franco”, gathered near the cemetery while police looked on. Macarena Martinez Bordiu, a distant relative of the dictator, said she felt “outraged” with what was happening and accused the government of “desecrating a tomb”. Ex-Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told Spanish national television that the exhumation “has great significance for our democracy”. He added: “Today our democracy is more perfect.”
Franco ruled Spain between 1939 and 1975, after he and other officers led a military insurrection against the Spanish democratic government in 1936, a move that started a three-year civil war.
A staunch Catholic, he viewed the war and ensuing dictatorship as something of a religious crusade against anarchist, leftist and secular tendencies in Spain.
His authoritarian rule, along with a profoundly conservative Catholic Church, ensured that Spain remained virtually isolated from political, industrial and cultural developments in Europe for nearly four decades.