About to Exhume Franco, Spain Faces 33,000 Others Buried With Him

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/world/europe/spain-franco-exhume-fallen.html

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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 Mr. Sánchez’s campaign ahead of elections on 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

But Mr. Sánchez’s exhumation plan turned into a yearlong court battle with the dictator’s living relatives. This month, the Supreme Court finally overruled the family’s opposition, allowing the government to relocate Franco to a cemetery where a family crypt stands, and where Franco’s wife was buried. The government has promised to transfer Franco by Oct. 25.

Mr. Canales has been on a long judicial crusade of his own, trying to gain permission to remove the remains of his father and uncle from the Valley of the Fallen. He is now awaiting final clearance from the authorities to open the two boxes that are believed to contain his relatives. Mr. Canales’s father is thought to be in Box 198, while his uncle is in Box 10,672, in another crypt and alongside other soldiers who fought for Franco.

The gap in the boxes’ numbers reflects the fact that the two men ended in the Valley a decade apart, even though they died within months of each other.

Mr. Canales’s father, who was called Valerico, was harvesting the fields when the war started. A month later, he was detained during a night raid by Fascist militants and shot dead about 15 miles outside his village, alongside six others. Their bodies were thrown into a dry well.

In 1959, however, their remains were secretly transferred to the Valley of the Fallen, just in time for Franco to inaugurate his mausoleum. After Franco died in 1975, he was buried in a tomb behind the altar of the Valley’s basilica.

Mr. Canales’s uncle, Vitorino, met a similarly brutal death. A week after his brother was detained, he fled their village. He then got enlisted into Franco’s army in Salamanca, and died while fighting to conquer Madrid.

He was buried in a military cemetery in Griñón, south of the city. In 1968, Franco’s regime transferred the remains of about 3,000 soldiers from Griñón to the Valley of the Fallen.

“My family spent years living with the rumor that my father had been shot, but with no idea where and with my mother simply crying whenever his name was mentioned,” Mr. Canales said.

“We knew about my uncle because his name got engraved on the facade of our village church, on a plaque for those who had fallen for God and Spain. So we knew he had died for Franco, but people were just too afraid to ask exactly how.”

Mr. Canales started devoting his time to searching for his relatives two decades ago, after he retired from his job in the Spanish Agriculture Ministry. In 2003, he and other villagers managed to dig up the dry well where his father had been dumped, with the help of an archaeologist and a forensic scientist. They found inside a fractured skull and some other bones and teeth, for which they built a small granite memorial.

“I was an infant when my father was taken away, too young to remember even his face, but it doesn’t mean that I have not suffered, or that I was ever able to forget him,” Mr. Canales said. “We have all lived for far too long under a rule of silence, knowing nothing about our loved ones.”

Mr. Álvarez Junco, the historian, said that Spain faced a difficult task to overhaul the Valley of the Fallen after removing Franco. He suggested it should become a secular memorial, offering visitors a balanced historical account, including about how prisoners of war worked in its construction.

“It is a place that contains the essence of Franco’s regime and should be visited like Auschwitz or E.S.M.A.,” he said, referring to the Buenos Aires naval school that was used as a torture center by Argentina’s dictatorship.

Not everyone agrees. “I would not spend one cent,” on exhuming Franco, Pablo Casado, the leader of the main opposition Popular Party, said last month. “I’m more worried about living dictators than dead ones,” he added. “I would like to speak about the Spain of my children rather than that of my grandparents.”