Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Spain dictator exhumed from posh site, reburied
MADRID — Spain on Thursday exhumed the remains of dictator Gen. Francisco Franco from his grandiose mausoleum outside Madrid and reburied them in a small family crypt north of the capital.
The daylong operation featured Franco’s coffin being flown by helicopter to its new resting place. The event was broadcast live on television and watched closely across the country.
Large parts of the ceremony were carried out in private, however.
Spain’s Socialist government was behind the decision to move the 20th-century autocrat’s remains, saying it wanted to settle a long-standing debt to its victims.
Many in Spain considered the Valley of the Fallen mausoleum, which Franco had built for his tomb, to be an insult to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Spain’s 1936-39 civil war, which Franco’s forces won, and to those who suffered persecution under his subsequent near-four-decade regime.
The shrine exalting a dictator also was considered a smear on Spain’s standing as a modern democratic state.
Many of Franco’s victims are buried in unmarked graves in the same mausoleum, which was carved out of a mountainside using convicts as part of the workforce, including political prisoners under Franco.
In a rigorously planned operation, the coffin was extracted from under marble slabs and two tons of granite at the mausoleum in a ceremony attended only by 22 Franco family members, government officials and workers.
A brief prayer was said in accordance with a request from Franco’s family before the coffin was carried out of the mausoleum by some of his grandchildren. It was then taken by an army helicopter to the Mingorrubio cemetery, 20 miles away, where Franco’s wife is buried.
Several hundred people, many waving Franco-era flags and symbols and chanting “Viva Franco,” gathered near the cemetery while police guarded the area. At one point, several of them extended their arms in fascist salutes and sang “Cara al Sol” (Facing the Sun), the Spanish fascist anthem.
The private reburial service was over by mid-afternoon, and only a handful of people remained outside the cemetery praying.
Speaking from government headquarters later, Spain’s interim Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said the exhumation “puts an end to a moral affront that is the exaltation of a dictator in a public place.”
He said it was necessary now to begin the process of identifying the thousands of Franco’s victims who were also buried at the mausoleum.
“It’s an infamy that has to be repaired,” he said.
Outside the new burial ground, 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.”
In a statement, Franco’s grandchildren said, “the government, aided by other powers of the state and the
Church’s hierarchy, has completed the profanation of the sepulcher of our grandfather Francisco Franco, gravely violating our basic rights.”
“What the government presents as a ‘victory of democracy’ is no more than a shameless media circus only seeking propaganda and electoral gains,” they added.
The exhumation and reburial will not put an end to Franco’s legacy on Spain’s political scene, since it comes just weeks ahead of the country’s Nov. 10 general election.
Franco ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 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 Roman Catholic Church, ensured that Spain remained virtually isolated from political, industrial and cultural developments in Europe for nearly four decades.
The country returned to democracy three years after his death but his legacy and his place in Spanish political history still sparks rancor and passion.