A dark and painful part of Spain’s history was back under the spotlight yesterday, when the remains of dictator Francisco Franco were exhumed from a landmark basilica in the hills near Madrid.
The delicate operation to move his remains to a more discreet resting place began yesterday morning, despite a long-running legal battle by the dictator’s family.
However, it threatens to open barely healed wounds in a nation riven with contradictions — where more than 100,000 people are still listed as missing following the 1936-1939 Civil War and its aftermath, yet where villages bear names in honor of the dictator who ruled until his death in 1975.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Obviously, there are wounds that remain raw given that you have more than 100,000 people still lying in ditches and mass graves,” Newcastle University historian Alejandro Quiroga said.
The figures make Spain the nation with the second-largest number of “disappeared,” following Cambodia, he said.
Forty-four years on, the single-biggest symbol of the war and the decades of dictatorship is the Valley of the Fallen, a vast temple-like complex about 50km northwest of Madrid, where Franco is buried.
That such a monument exists makes Spain the “great anomaly of western Europe,” with no such parallel in any other European state that survived a totalitarian leader, be it Germany, Italy or Portugal, Zaragoza University modern history professor Julian Casanova said.
Topped by a 150m cross, the hillside basilica has attracted both tourists and right-wing sympathizers, with many on the left repulsed by the memorial, comparing it to a monument glorifying Hitler.
For that reason, the government of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has insisted on Franco’s remains being removed, saying the nation should not “continue to glorify” the dictator.
Built by Franco’s regime from 1941 to 1959 — in part by the forced labor of about 20,000 political prisoners — the site contains the remains of more than 33,000 dead from both sides of the civil war.
However, it has long been a draw for those nostalgic for the Franco era, who go there to hold masses in his honor and celebrate his memory.
Historians agree that removing Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen would be a “step” toward normalization for Spain.
Unlike other figures like Hitler or Mussolini, Franco survived World War II and did not drag Spain into the conflict, dying three decades later while still in power.
On his death, the political leaders agreed on a transition to democracy that “maintained the political, social and economic elites that existed under Franco ... and implicitly maintained the idea that the Franquist past would not be the basis for political confrontation,” Quiroga said.
However, in 2007 the Spanish parliament, under a Socialist government, approved the “historical memory” law that aimed to give greater recognition to victims on both sides of the civil war.
The law involves the removal of all symbols honoring Franco, and requires the state to collaborate in the search for and exhumation of the mass graves of those who disappeared.
However, its implementation has been blocked by the right, leaving those associations dedicated to tracking down the disappeared to pursue their thankless task “entirely alone,” Open University historian Marc Gil said.
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