Spain Exhumes Dictator Franco With Civil War Looming Over Vote
Spain Ready to Dig Up Dictator With Civil War Looming Over Vote
(Bloomberg) -- Workers on Thursday lifted the 1.5-ton granite slab from the tomb near Madrid where the late dictator Francisco Franco has lain for the past 44 years. It was a moment laden with significance for Spaniards bracing for general elections next month.
Twenty-two members of the Franco family and the head of the Benedictine monastery that has tended his mausoleum attended the government-ordered exhumation, overseen by Spain’s Justice Minister Dolores Delgado. His grandsons carried his laurel-decked coffin to a car where the prior sprinkled it with holy water before relatives saluted it with a cry of “Viva Franco!” It was then taken by helicopter to the pantheon outside the Spanish capital where his wife Carmen Polo was buried in 1988.
Franco was interred in 1975, amid scenes of military pomp and extravagant mourning, in a zinc and wooden coffin in a basilica hewn from the mountainside near the town of El Escorial. But the monument was considered an offense by many Spaniards: Of the right-wing dictators who upended Europe in the middle of the 20th century, Franco was the only one still honored in his country.
The change of Franco’s burial site to the Mingorrubio cemetery on Madrid’s north-western outskirts marks a political victory for Pedro Sanchez, the Socialist prime minister who made shifting his remains a political priority.
“We’re putting an to end to a moral affront and taking a step forward with the reconciliation that can only come from democracy and freedom,” Sanchez said in a televised statement once the day’s events were over. “The Spain of today is a country completely contrary to what the Francoist regime represented.”
Juan Chicharro, chairman of the National Francisco Franco Foundation, said the decision to exhume Franco would give fresh energy to the ideas and values represented by the dictator.
“Mr. Sanchez has brought back to life a division between Spaniards that didn’t exist,” he told state broadcaster TVE in an interview. “What we are seeing is nothing more than a partial victory -- the war will continue.” He said Franco’s supporters would keep fighting to preserve his legacy through legal means.
The Valley of the Fallen complex was built from 1940 to 1958 by workers who included prisoners that got time off their sentences for contributing to the project. It was funded by public subscription and money from Spain’s lottery and contains the remains of more than 33,700 dead from both sides in the Spanish Civil War.
Francis Franco, the dictator’s grandson, arrived at the mausoleum carrying a Franco-era Spanish flag with its trademark black-winged eagle. He was made to leave it at the basilica entrance before the exhumation procedure began.
“It’s long overdue,” said Paul Preston, a professor of Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics who published a biography of Franco in 1993. “It’s shameful that just outside Madrid there has been this colossal monument to the dictator. In a perfect world, it should have happened a long time ago but in the early years of the democracy, people didn’t dare to.”
Spain’s rightists however have attacked the move as a political stunt designed to fire up Sanchez’s base before an election on Nov. 10. That ballot will again be shaped by fundamental questions about the Spanish state and its constitution, with violent demonstrations in Catalonia, where separatists are protesting against jail terms for the leaders.
In another detail that speaks to Spain’s tense transition to democracy, family members had requested that Ramon Tejero should be the priest officiating at a mass to be held at the Mingorrubio pantheon.
He is the son of Antonio Tejero, the former Civil Guard lieutenant-colonel who led an attempted military coup in 1981. Tejero senior was present at the Mingorrubio cemetery to pay his respects.
Though Sanchez has been in power for 16 months, first as head the government and now as acting chief, he’s had little in the way of concrete achievements to point to. Thursday’s events cement his place in the history books.
To contact the reporter on this story: Charles Penty in Madrid at cpenty@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chad Thomas at cthomas16@bloomberg.net, Ben Sills, Todd White
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