As Spain prepares to exhume Franco, it faces 33,000 who share his grave
MADRID — The exhumation of Spain’s former dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, expected in the coming week, will be “a great victory for Spanish democracy,” argues Pedro Sánchez, the caretaker Socialist prime minister.
Other Spanish politicians have denounced the decision to remove Franco as an attempt to reopen old wounds in Spanish society, 44 years after Franco’s death and 80 years after he won the Spanish Civil War — and to bolster Sánchez’s campaign before elections Nov. 10.
And then there is the issue of the thousands of people whom Franco buried in his memorial, known as the Valley of the Fallen, a huge monument carved into a mountain outside Madrid. Several of their relatives are now hoping that Franco’s exhumation will help their own quest to rebury their loved ones.
Among them is Fausto Canales, 85, who painstakingly researched the history of his lost father and uncle, to discover that the brothers both ended up in the Valley of the Fallen, for very different reasons.
The father of Canales was shot by fascist sympathizers of Franco in August 1936, a month after Franco and other officers staged a military coup that turned into a three-year civil war.
His uncle was killed in January 1937, while fighting in Franco’s army.
“Exhuming Franco is very important, but it should also help our society care far more about the many who were dumped in the mausoleum built to the glory of Spain’s dictator, without the consent or even the knowledge of their families,” Canales said in an interview in his small Madrid apartment.
“If we really want to overcome the wounds of our civil war and build a more educated society and more profound Spanish democracy, we have a huge workload left before us, which certainly includes giving every victim a proper burial,” Canales added.
Historians agree that Spain still needs to do much to come to terms with its past century.
“Franco, who was also an ally of Hitler and Mussolini, is now the only dictator of Europe who remains buried in a place of honor, which on top of that is maintained with public money,” said José Álvarez Junco, a leading Spanish historian.
The Valley of the Fallen is one of Europe’s largest burial sites, home to the remains of more than 33,000 people, about a third of whom are unidentified. Many died fighting for Franco, but others were his opponents, including some Republican prisoners of war who died while working on the construction of the mausoleum, which took 18 years to complete.
Upon taking office in June 2018, Sánchez promised to exhume Franco “immediately,” as part of a broader effort to revive a law of historical memory. The legislation was approved in 2007 under a previous Socialist government, but was then shelved and deprived of state funding by the conservative government that followed.
One of the main goals of the law was to finance the opening of more than 2,000 mass graves that dot Spain and to identify the remains of those inside, mostly people who died during the civil war.