MADRID — The Spanish government on Thursday exhumed the remains of the former dictator Gen. Francisco Franco from the underground basilica that he built after winning his country’s civil war. The move had prompted criticism that, coming just two weeks before a national election, it would reopen old rifts in Spanish society.
Franco’s remains were flown by helicopter from the basilica where he was buried in 1975 to a cemetery near Madrid that contains a family crypt where his wife is buried and that is beside El Pardo palace, which Franco used during his rule.
The exhumation and reburial followed a yearlong judicial battle between the caretaker Socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and relatives of Franco who had sought to reverse the decision.
Mr. Sánchez said on Thursday that the exhumation would “bring an end to the moral insult that is the exaltation of a dictator in a public space.”
The government said the exhumation would cost about $70,000. But Pablo Casado, the leader of the opposition Popular Party, said last month that not “one cent” should be spent on exhuming Franco, who governed the country for almost four decades.
“I’m more worried about living dictators than dead ones,” Mr. Casado said. “I would like to speak about the Spain of my children rather than that of my grandparents.”
The exhumation took place ahead of a repeat national election on Nov. 10. The vote — the fourth in four years — was called after Mr. Sánchez and his Socialist party won the last election in April but then failed to garner sufficient support from smaller parties to form a government.
The most recent polls show that the Socialists are set to win next month’s vote, but the gap with the Popular Party has narrowed this month amid an outburst of separatist street violence in Catalonia. As was the case in April, the polls suggest that no party will come close to a parliamentary majority, an outcome that would set off another round of complicated coalition talks.
The exhumation and reburial of Franco lasted about five hours. After his tomb was opened, his remains were carried out of the basilica in his original coffin by his relatives and then flown to the cemetery amid heavy police security. Francis Franco, a grandson of the dictator, sought to take a Spanish flag from the Franco era with him into the basilica, but was stopped by the authorities.
“They want to give the impression that my grandfather is nowadays on his own, but that is not the case,” he told reporters.
Ahead of the exhumation, a foundation dedicated to Franco’s memory had urged sympathizers to pay homage to a leader who “did so much for Spain and its greatness.” In the end, a few hundred people gathered close to the cemetery, among them Antonio Tejero, a former army officer who led a failed military coup in 1981, more than five years after Franco’s death.
Juan Chicharro, the president of the Franco foundation, told Spanish national television that the exhumation was “a surrealist show” that had turned Mr. Sánchez into “a grave defiler.” As Dolores Delgado, the Spanish justice minister, left the cemetery, some sympathizers of Franco shouted insults at her.
The cemetery also contains the remains of several former ministers in Franco’s regime, as well as those of Rafael Trujillo, who governed the Dominican Republic for three decades until his assassination in 1961.
The exhumation also turned into a heated political issue amid further party fragmentation in the country. Vox, an ultranationalist party that won its first seats in Parliament in April, strongly contested Franco’s removal from the basilica.
But associations that represent the victims of Franco have expressed hope that the exhumation will clear the way for an overhaul of the mausoleum, known as the Valley of the Fallen, which took 18 years to build.
The monument, which is maintained using state funds, is one of Europe’s largest mass graves. At least 33,000 people were buried there after the civil war, including those who fought for Franco and others who sided with his Republican opponents.
It also contains the remains of prisoners of war whom Franco used as a labor force to build the mausoleum and basilica. About a third of the remains are unidentified, despite relatives’ efforts to locate their missing loved ones.
In a televised address to the nation on Thursday, Mr. Sánchez said that Spain “owes a debt” to the families of victims of its civil war, as well as to those who later died while fighting Fascism during the Second World War.
He promised to take further measures to help identify and possibly also exhume the thousands of people buried without their families’ consent in the Valley of the Fallen, as well as the dead that now lie “in the thousands of unmarked graves that are found across our country.”
“It is an intolerable aberration that must be confronted with resolution,” he added.
Nicolas Sánchez-Albornoz, a former Republican prisoner who was made to work on the construction of the valley but managed to escape from the site, told Spanish television that Franco should long have been treated “like his accomplices, Hitler and Mussolini.”
“Spanish democracy has lived until now in a contradiction, by tolerating the cult and worship of a dictator who barred democracy,” he said.
Last year, Mr. Sánchez said Franco’s exhumation should form part of a broader effort to revive a 2007 law that was intended to facilitate the opening of the more than 2,000 mass graves scattered across Spain and to identify the remains of those inside, most of whom died during the country’s civil war of 1936-1939.
The law was passed by a previous Socialist government but was later shelved and deprived of state funding by the conservative government led by Mariano Rajoy.
Source : Nytimes
