The government of Spain, which in 2019 exhumed the dictator Francisco Franco of a monumental mausoleum near Madrid, will do the same with the remains of the founder of the Falange fascist party, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, buried in that same place, the government reported on Thursday. The exhumation will take place on Monday, a government source said, without indicating which cemetery the remains will be transferred to.
“It is one more step” so “that no person is exaltedto any ideology that evokes the dictatorship,” the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, told reporters.
Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), was executed in November 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), provoked by a military uprising against the Republican government.
After the civil war, Franco ruled with an iron hand until his death in 1975.
The tomb of Primo de Rivera is located in the basilica of the former Valley of the Fallencalled Cuelgamuros Valley since 2022, a gigantic Catholic complex 50 km from Madrid, where Franco was buried from 1975 until the government of the socialist Pedro Sánchez decided to exhum him and transfer him to a more discreet grave in 2019.
The exhumation of Primo de Rivera will take place after the entry into force, last October, of a law to compensate the victims of Francoism.
Democratic Memory
The call Democratic Memory Law It establishes that “there cannot be any preeminent place” of burial “for people who were involved in (…) the coup d’état” of 1936, Félix Bolaños explained months ago.
In November, the Spanish authorities exhumed the remains of the Spanish General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, from the church of La Macarena in Seville (Andalusia, south).
This general was the highest military command in southern Spain and is considered responsible for the thousands of executions after the early triumph of the 1936 military uprising, including that of the poet Federico García Lorca.
After coming to power in 2018, Pedro Sánchez made compensation for the victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) a priority.
The Democratic Memory Law contemplates as the main measure that the State take charge, for the first time, of the search and identification of the disappeared victims.
But the right, which accuses the left of trying to reopen the wounds of the past with the alibi of memory, has promised to repeal the law if it returns to power in the elections at the end of the year.
Source: Ambito
