Confronting its troubled past, Spain exhumes Franco

MADRID: Cries of “long live Franco!” accompanied the laurel wreath-draped coffin of General Francisco Franco on Thursday as Spain removed the remains of its former dictator from the state mausoleum where he was buried in 1975.

Hailed by acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez as a step toward national reconciliation, the exhumation was the most significant move in years by Spanish authorities to lay the ghost of the general whose legacy still divides the country he ruled as an autocrat for nearly four decades.

Sanchez said the unearthing of the coffin and its reburial in a private grave - a transfer that Franco’s family had sought to block through the courts - would strengthen Spain’s democratic credentials.

“Modern Spain is the product of forgiveness, but it can’t be the product of forgetfulness,” Sanchez said in a televised address. “A public tribute to a dictator was more than an anachronism. It was an affront to our democracy.”

His Socialist Party, which faces a national election next month, has long sought to strip the huge monument in the Valley of the Fallen of its status as a memorial to Franco.

It was built on the dictator’s orders and contains the remains of combatants from both sides of the civil war he unleashed in 1936.

Around 500,000 people were killed in three years of conflict between Franco’s nationalist rebels, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, and left-wing Republicans.

Tens of thousands more were killed or imprisoned in the ensuing dictatorship that lasted until his death decades later.

In Thursday’s ceremony, rich with symbolism of a bygone age and witnessed only by relatives and a small group of officials, Franco’s coffin was taken from its tomb as crowds of media and onlookers gathered outside.

Family members carried the coffin to a waiting hearse which transferred it to a helicopter for the short flight to the Mingorrubio cemetery north of Madrid.

There, to a backdrop of supporters chanting his name, Franco’s remains were taken into the family vault for reburial next to his wife in a second private ceremony.

The exhumation is “intensely symbolic for Spain”, said political scientist Pablo Simon, “because the (Franco) monument has always been connected to those who miss the old regime”.