Francisco Franco, the endless controversy over the fate of the dictator's remains – 05/02/2019

When Francisco Franco He died in 1975, his public will was read on television and on the radio. With the epic drama, the Spanish dictator asked, between noble intentions, forgiveness, to maintain the unity of Spain and fidelity to the "future" king, Juan Carlos de Borbón. He also asked to die as a Catholic. He did not reveal how or where he wanted to be buried.

At the time, the Council of Ministers decided with King Juan Carlos, now emeritus, how to be buried the burial of the man who cultivated tyranny in Spain for 36 years. The king, the same who in 2014 abdicated in favor of his son Felipe, the current monarch, ordered in writing to the Abbot of the Holy Cross of the Valley of the Dead that the General be buried there.

With a short "Francisco Franco" engraved on the stone, the tombstone rests since at the foot of the main altar of the Basilica of the Valley of the Dead, a politico-historical gesture that has unveiled the government of the socialist Pedro Sanchez since his took office in June. of 2018.

As soon as he became the seventh president of Spanish democracy by a motion of censure that expelled Mariano Rajoy from La Moncloa, Sánchez he did not hide his intention to ban Franco from the valley of the dead. He wanted to make it "a place of memory, not the exaltation of the dictatorship". He promised, before the elections, that he himself had to foresee April 28th that the exhumation would take place, if the Supreme Court allows it, on June 10th.

With the transfer of the remains of Franco, the Socialists seek to put into practice the law of historical memory of the times of the former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, anesthetized after the arrival of the People's Party in La Moncloa in 2011 .

Since the PSOE government approved the exhumation on February 15 of this year, the seven grandchildren of Franco, his only living parents, they showed a resistance of all kinds. They even went to the Supreme Court to try to paralyze what, for the government, is a dead end decision.

Exaggerated and imposing, the valley of the dead you are the only one European necropolis that continues to pay tribute to a dictator of the twentieth century.

In April 1940, General Franco himself signed the decree on the construction of a pharaonic monument commemorating the victims of the Civil War, including the victors. But nearly two decades of construction forced him to rethink his goal: the pressure to overcome the dilemma of the two Spaniards as well as the shortage of corpses to feed the hyperbolic mausoleum. leads to the recruitment of people fallen from both sideseven without the consent of their families.

"Many parents pray for decades in graves where there was nothing," say scholars of this period. Other members of the family, such as those of Federico García Lorca, refused to let their victims end up in a necropolis that glorified the civil war and which, perhaps, would one day house the body of the head of so much dead.

The valley of the dead extends over 1,365 hectares of the municipality of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, northwest of Madrid. There you can access the C-600 road from the AP-6 highway, exit Guadarrama.

Franco had sought, for his megalomaniac project, a valley near El Escorial, the Cuelgamuros, as close as possible to the house on which rests Felipe II, king in which the excesses of the Francoism found a great inspiration.

The monument, which was to be the altar of heroic Spain, was raised with the hands of the vanquished: about twenty thousand prisoners of war who, for each working day, were serving two sentences and they received between two and five pesetas.

The mausoleum has moved so much that even the cruelty of the prison has yielded to certain authorizations so that the wives of some prisoners can stay a few days with their husbands while they bite the mountain to embed the monument. They were even allowed to take their children. "For a long time, it was a little home to the family," joked the actor Paco Rabal, who went through Cuelgamuros. His father, Benito Rabal, was one of the first workers to have participated in the construction of the mausoleum.

The work lasted until 1959, almost twenty years during which Franco did not measure the exuberance of his project and underestimated its disadvantages.

It took fourteen months to mount the mast he wanted and the calculation of the wind resistance was made according to winds ranging from 50 to 300 kilometers per hour that can blow for a thousand years. The cross, which weighs 180,720 tons, was not completed until September 1956..

Some historians, such as the British historian Hispanist and Franco, Paul Preston, claim that during the official inauguration of the Valley of the Dead, which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the Civil War victory, the General had visited the basilica with the architect Diego Méndez and, pbading in front of the space that his grave occupies today, he said: "Well, Méndez, and in his day, I am here, huh? "

Franco is not the only famous guest of the Valley of the Dead: they accompany him José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange and first-born dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, and some 34,000 victims of the Civil War who are buried there. To arrive at the exact number is a chimera for two reasons: either because there is no trace of the deceased, or because many bodies have arrived in unspeakable conditions.

It is known that no women were buried there and that most of them were buried in 1959, 1961 and 1968, most of them from some 480 mbad graves. The last to arrive was a deposed Franquist whose remains had been buried in the valley of the dead in 1989.

On these burials, there are 12,410 whose register remains unknown. In many tombs, there are only bones in disorder.

When the government of Pedro Sánchez announced the exhumation, the Franco-Franquille family is risky to a burial in the crypt of the Cathedral of La Almudena, one of the clbadics to be visited by tourists attracted by the legend of the image of the Virgin. been taken to Spain by the Apostle Santiago. The government has ruled out the transfer of the dictator's remains to a Madrid icon such as La Almudena in order to prevent the fervor of Francoist nostalgia from disrupting public order.

The Vatican, for its part, said that exhumation is an issue that, in the legal framework, corresponds to the resolution of the Franco family, the government and the Spanish Church. "That the Church does not oppose the process initiated by the government of Pedro Sánchez to exhume the remains of Franco from the Valley of the Dead, is not the same as saying that the 39 Church supported the exhumation, "said the Secretary General of the Spanish Episcopal Conference. , Luis Argüello.

A few days after the decision of the Spanish government, the justice paralyzed the preparatory tasks for the exhumation. According to the precautionary measure, the project prepared by the cabinet of Sánchez to raise the tombstone of the Basilica of Santa Cruz, where is buried the general, did not have the minimum security conditions.

Judge José Yusty Bastarreche paralyzed the license of the work about to be launched. He argued that the procedure was dangerous for operators.

The government meets him for his personal opinions: Bastarreche would not understand the law of historical memory and would have expressed it publicly. But the judge has fled in a report from architects that "there is a danger to the goods, but especially for people moving a slab of 2,000 pounds". He deliberately omitted, or perhaps adopted, to point out that this study was commissioned by the Francisco Franco Foundation, jealous guard of the general's memory, which is as contrary to the exhumation of his remains as the dictator's grandchildren.

Remove Franco from the valley of the dead, a procedure already planned by the government on the agenda of June 10, pending the decision of the Supreme Court, to which the family came to seek a brake.

For decades, the Franco family kept a family pantheon at the Mingorrubio cemetery in El Pardo, where the widow of dictator Carmen Polo was buried 13 years after the death of Francisco Franco. There, the government proposes to transfer the remains of the general. Without cameras, with complete discretion and no place for morbid.

In the private archives of Franco, preserved in the foundation that bears his name, three pages entitled "The valley of the dead" draws possible epitaphs imagined by the general for his grave: "For a soldier like me, who saw the death of his so many times on the battlefield, who has lost so many comrades of arms that they have fallen with a natural and almost anonymous heroism, a grave all over Spain, with a simple wooden cross, is a sufficient and honorable burial ", says the false modesty of one of the epitaphs.

"The government that manages to get Franco out of the Valley of the Dead will have symbolic political capital in the left-wing region, which has not had any of them," said Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, a professor of art. contemporary history at the Complutense University of Madrid.

"If we have the approval of the Supreme Court, this mausoleum dedicated to the dictator will be gone," said Pedro Sánchez about tevé during the election campaign. It will be past and not present and future. "