Franco exhumed and reinterred in civic plot
THE remains of Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco have been exhumed from his tomb in a grandiose Catholic basilica and reinterred in a municipal cemetery as Spain continues to grapple with the legacy of his brutal regime.
The exhumation marks the fulfilment of a key policy pledge by Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, to “dignify democracy” 45 years after Franco’s death, in accordance with Spain’s law of historical memory.
“With this decision, we bring to an end the moral insult that is the exaltation of a dictator in a public space,” said Mr Sánchez.
General Franco ruled from 1939, when his fascist nationalist forces won the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1975.
The 1.5-ton granite slab on top of Franco’s tomb at the Valley of the Fallen was removed in the presence of 22 members of Franco’s family and Dolores Delgado, Spain’s justice minister.
Franco’s embalmed body, still inside a zinc box and the wooden coffin, were removed from the tomb positioned under a 150m (490ft) stone cross above the Valley of the Fallen basilica that the dictator commissioned and had filled with the bodies of more than 33,000 of the civil war dead.
A helicopter transported the coffin 20 miles to Mingorrubio cemetery, where the dictator’s remains were reinterred in a family pantheon next to where his wife, Carmen Polo, is buried.
Madrid authorities refused to grant two requests by pro-franco associations to hold prayers next to the cemetery in protest.
In spite of the refusal, around 500 Franco supporters gathered as near to the cemetery as the police cordon allowed, some performing stiff-arm fascist salutes.
Guillermo Rocafort, secretary of the Memory and Roots association, was furious at the exhumation. “Franco is a historical figure in Spain, like Churchill is in Britain,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
Juan, a follower of the Falangist ideology connected with Franco, said moving the body would not resolve Spain’s division over the dictatorship.
“This will only make things worse, and bring about more confrontation.”
Spain’s parliament passed a reform to existing historical memory legislation to allow for Franco’s exhumation more than a year ago. However, the dictator’s family, the Benedictine monks at the basilica and the Francisco Franco Foundation led a legal battle against a move they claimed violated the rights to freedom of worship and burial rites.
Last month, Spain’s supreme court dismissed all grounds for a legal challenge. Franco’s grandchildren had asked that, in the event of his exhumation, the dictator be reinterred in Madrid’s Almudena cathedral, but the government opposed such a prominent location. Francis Franco, the dictator’s grandson, said the family was “indignant” at being forced to undertake the reburial.
While Spain’s main conservative force, the Popular Party, has remained cool on the subject, insisting that the exhumation of Franco is an irrelevance, the country’s new populist Right-wing Vox party slammed the move.
“It is a profanation against the family’s will,” said Santiago Abascal, the Vox
‘This will only make things worse, and bring about more confrontation’
leader, accusing Mr Sánchez of “scavenging” for votes. Sir Paul Preston, an historian who has written a biography of Franco, said: “It should have happened a long time ago but, even now, there is sufficient pro-franco sentiment in Spain to make it a difficult task.
“The best that it can do now probably is make many on the Left feel that it completes the transition process.”
Miguel Ángel Capapé, who is campaigning to have the remains of two relatives executed by fascist forces in 1936 removed from the Valley of the Fallen, said: “These people were murdered, buried in mass graves and then transferred to the Valley of the Fallen without permission, adding insult to injury. It is an offence to the victims to have been buried alongside their executioners.”
More than 100,000 victims of fascist repression remain in unmarked mass graves dotted around Spain.