Historical exhumation of remains of General Franco

[Akrapovic]

The act has generated controversy among those in favor and against the legacy of the dictator whose body rested for 44 years in a mausoleum near Madrid.

After several delays, the exhumation of Francisco Franco's remains from his monumental mausoleum on the outskirts of Madrid, planned at 10:30 a.m. Spain time and early today in Colombia. This act occurs 44 years after the end of a dictatorship whose wounds have not finished healing.

The government of Pedro Sánchez (PSOE), in power since June 2018, had made the exhumation one of its flags so that the Valley of the Fallen complex ceased to be a place of “exaltation” of the Franco dictatorship (1939 -1975).

It is a “great victory of dignity, of memory, of justice, of reparation and, therefore, of Spanish democracy,” said Sánchez.

The offal of the dictator, transferred from the Valley of the Fallen, about 50 km northwest of Madrid (in the Sierra del Guadarrama), will rest from today in the cemetery of El Pardo-Mingorrubio in the north of the capital, where his wife.

Sanchez promised the exhumation for the boreal summer of 2018, but was delayed more than a year by the judicial battle raised by the descendants of the dictator who led Spain with an iron hand after driving a coup against the Second Spanish Republic and imposing itself on the Civil War (1936-1939).

The opposition accuses the leader of the PSOE of using this transfer to obtain electoral revenues just over two weeks from the legislative elections of November 10, which he arrives in a situation compromised by the week of violent riots in Catalonia.

Flowers and tributes

 Commissioned by Franco in 1940 to celebrate his "glorious crusade" against the "Godless" Republicans, the construction of the Valley of the Fallen lasted almost twenty years and thousands of political prisoners participated in it.

The complex, located in the mountains located north of the Spanish capital, consists of a basilica carved into the rock of the mountain and crowned by a huge cross 150 meters high, visible from many kilometers around.

In the name of an alleged national reconciliation, the ‘Caudillo’ had the bodies of more than 30,000 victims of the conflict moved after the inauguration of the mausoleum in 1959.

 
Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón with General Francisco Franco in a photo taken on June 10, 1971.
Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón with General Francisco Franco in a photo taken on June 10, 1971. AFP

Among them were fighters from the Franco side but also Republicans taken from cemeteries and mass graves without informing their families.

Since his death in 1975, Franco has been in a grave, always adorned with fresh flowers, at the foot of the altar of the basilica.

His descendants filed a saving of resources against exhumation and tried to reinhumate him with his daughter in the Almudena Cathedral, in the center of Madrid, but the Spanish Supreme Court rejected them.

The Francisco Franco Foundation, which defends the dictator's legacy, called a demonstration in the Mingorrubio cemetery to pray "for whom he did so much for Spain and its greatness", but the authorities banned it.

The controversy

 The government acts on the basis of a 2017 decision of the Spanish Parliament requesting the exhumation of Franco, who then fell into a sack broken by the opposition of the conservative executive of Mariano Rajoy, of the Po[CENSORED]r Party, whose deputies abstained.

Since the adoption in 2007 by the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE) of a "Law of Historical Memory", the right accuses the left of wanting to reopen the wounds of the past.

Rajoy, in power between 2011 and 2018, boasted of not having spent a euro to apply this law aimed at removing the vestiges of the dictatorship, identifying tens of thousands of bodies still buried in mass graves and repairing the memory of the defeated Republicans and condemned by the Franco regime.

The exhumation of Franco, was described as "desecration" by a columnist from the conservative newspaper ABC, revived these divisions.