The wounds of the Francoist past are reopening. Forty-four years after the end of the dictatorship, Francisco Franco, the winner of the bloody civil war that led Spain with an iron fist until his death in 1975, will be exhumed, Thursday, October 24, to his monumental mausoleum near Madrid. The head of government, the Socialist Pedro Sanchez, made the transfer of the remains of the "Caudillo" a priority from his coming to power in June 2018, so that this mausoleum can no longer be a "place of apology" of Francoism.
"This is a great victory of dignity, memory, justice and reparation, and therefore of the Spanish democracy," he said on Wednesday. This exhumation, broadcast live on television, will begin at 10:30 (8:30 GMT). The remains of the dictator will be transferred, by helicopter if the weather permits, from the mausoleum of "Valle de los Caidos", located about fifty kilometers from Madrid, to the cemetery of Mingorubbio where his wife rests in the north of the Spanish capital.
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A transaction delayed by more than a year
Promised for the summer of 2018, the operation was delayed by more than a year by the successive lawsuits of the dictator's descendants. With less than three weeks of legislative elections on November 10, critics of Pedro Sanchez, right and left, accuse him of making it an electoral argument, while a week of violent demonstrations in Catalonia have put the Socialist in trouble . The leader of the radical left of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, joked about the "mummy [of Franco] exit" just before the elections.
Ordered by Franco in 1940 to celebrate his "glorious Catholic" Crusade against the Republicans "without God", the construction of the "Valle de los Caidos" (the valley of those who fell) lasted almost twenty years and was carried out by thousands of political prisoners. This complex comprising a basilica carved into the rock is overlooked by a 150-meter high cross visible for tens of kilometers around.
In the name of an alleged "national reconciliation", the "Caudillo" had transferred the bodies of more than 30 000 victims of the civil war: Francoists, but also Republicans, out of cemeteries and mass graves without their families have been informed.
A grave always flowery
Since his death in 1975, the tomb of the dictator, located at the foot of the altar of the basilica, was still in bloom. Wind standing against this exhumation, the heirs of Franco conducted a judicial guerrilla and attempted to bury him in the cathedral of Almudena in central Madrid, where lies the daughter of the dictator, but ran up against the refusal of justice .
At the call of the Francisco Franco Foundation, which defends the dictator's legacy, his nostalgic counted to gather Thursday in Mingorrubio, but this event was banned.
The government of Pedro Sanchez acts on the basis of a vote in 2017 of the Spanish parliament requesting the exhumation of Franco, but remained a dead letter because of the opposition of the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy (People's Party), whose deputies were abstained.
Divisions around Franco's memory
Since the adoption in 2007 by a previous socialist government of a "law of historical memory", the right continues to blame the left for wanting to reopen the wounds of the past that are far from closed.
In power from 2011 to 2018, Mariano Rajoy publicly boasted not to have spent a single euro to implement this law to remove the remains of the dictatorship, to identify the tens of thousands of bodies thrown into mass graves and to rehabilitate the memory of Republicans defeated and condemned under Francoism.
And the exhumation of Franco, described again Wednesday as "profanation" by an editorialist of the conservative daily ABC, highlighted these divisions. "What will happen next? ... Will the parishes of the district burn like in 1936 [at the beginning of the civil war]?", Declared at the beginning of October the president of right of the region of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, triggering the controversy.
With AFP