General Discussion

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/24/franco-victory-people-spain-mausoleum-dictatorship

At last Franco is properly buried. This victory belongs to the people of Spain
The dictator has laid in his pharaonic mausoleum for 44 years. Now the last great symbol of the dictatorship has gone
Irene Lozano
Thu 24 Oct 2019 13.44 EDT

n Spain, the process to exhume the remains of the dictator Francisco Franco from the basilica at the site known as the Valley of the Fallen concluded today. It brought to an end an anomaly that had persisted for 44 years – because in principle, a democracy cannot honour a dictatorship. Until now, Franco had been interred in a mausoleum of gigantic proportions, located in the mountains to the north of Madrid, at an altitude of 1,400 metres and crowned by a 150-metre-high cross that can be seen for miles.

From now on, his remains will lie in the family tomb of an ordinary cemetery, with no flag or honours of any kind. The dictator has left the monument that was constructed on his orders at the end of the civil war, under the initial direction of the Basque architect Pedro Muguruza, a sympathiser with the new regime. It is estimated that the monument’s construction was achieved with the labour of 20,000 Republican prisoners of war and political prisoners, a fact that has been especially hurtful to many.

The dictator’s family and the monks of the basilica had attempted to prevent the exhumation, using all the instruments legally available to them. It is the very strength of the Spanish legal system that has given them the protection that the dictator refused to the millions of Spaniards whom he made his enemies, and to those he executed without mercy. Nevertheless, these legal manoeuvres only delayed the outcome. The fact that the exhumation is taking place today, and not sooner, is due to those who opposed it, not because of government inaction.

The first step towards this conclusion was taken in May 2017, when a parliamentary initiative by the Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE) to reactivate the 2007 law of historical memory and to exhume the dictator generated an extraordinary degree of consensus in the congress of deputies. Only one vote was cast against the measure, and that was by mistake.

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