Plan to exhume remains renews conflict
SAN LORENZO DE EL ESCORIAL, Spain — After celebrating Mass last month, congregants here at the Valle de los Caídos basilica walked to the back of the altar to pay homage to Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who is buried here.
They stood in silence before the tomb. A handful made a fascist salute. Some bent down to touch the stone slab, which is engraved with Franco’s name and was covered with two bouquets of flowers. One person tried to take a photograph — only to be told off by a security guard.
“Franco was a dictator, but a good one,” said Estela Tapias, who attended the Mass with her husband and two children. “I really don’t understand why these communists want to take him out.”
By “communists,” she was referring to the Socialist government, led by Spain’s new prime minister, Pedro Sánchez.
Sánchez unexpectedly came to power in June, replacing Mariano Rajoy and his conservative administration. Within days of taking office, he announced his government wanted to exhume Franco and move him to a more modest burial place, as part of an effort to atone for the crimes of the civil war and the repression that followed the conflict.
The basilica and its giant stone cross dominate the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen, and were built by Franco to honor those who “fell for God and Spain” in his 1939 victory in the Spanish Civil War.
The site, near the town of San Lorenzo de el Escorial, about an hour’s drive northwest of Madrid, is one of Europe’s largest mass graves, housing the remains of at least 33,000 people. Most had fought for Franco, but the monument also contains the bones of many of his Republican opponents who were anonymously dumped there, some of which were allegedly gathered from mass graves across the country to swell the numbers.
Some families have been demanding their loved ones be returned to them for proper burial. In April, the remains of four men — from both sides of the civil war — were extracted from the site at the request of their relatives after a lengthy legal battle. The ruling could pave the way for hundreds more to be exhumed.
Nobody casts a longer shadow over Spanish politics than Franco, even decades after his death in 1975. Almost every aspect of his legacy has fueled dispute, extending recently to the renaming of squares and streets associated with his regime. Some cities controlled by left-leaning politicians want to carry out other exhumations, notably in Seville, where one of Franco’s military commanders, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, was also buried in a basilica.
Paul Preston, a British historian and biographer of Franco, said Spain was an anomaly in Europe in keeping a “place of pilgrimage for its fascist dictator” — there are no monuments to Adolf Hitler in Germany or in Austria, nor to Benito Mussolini in Italy. Among the more than 250,000 visitors to the Valle de los Caídos each year, Preston said, many are devotees of Franco “brought up to believe that he was a benefactor for Spain.”
Sánchez leads a fragile Socialist government that has only a quarter of the seats in parliament.
But he could order Franco’s removal by decree. The exhumation plan — which was proposed a decade earlier by the previous Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — is likely to win support from the leftist Podemos party and from Basque and Catalan nationalist lawmakers who joined forces with Sánchez to allow him to replace Rajoy.