The family of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spain’s fascist Falange party, will exhume his remains from the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid before they are removed under new legislation designed to honour the victims of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship.
Primo de Rivera, who was executed in prison in November 1936, was eventually laid to rest in the valley’s basilica in 1959. The remains of the basilica’s most infamous occupant, Gen Francisco Franco, were removed almost three years ago to end what Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called “the moral insult that the public glorification of a dictator constitutes”.
Last week, Spain’s senate approved legislation intended to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the conflict and subsequent dictatorship. It includes measures to “redefine” the Valley of the Fallen – a mass grave that houses the bodies of almost 34,000 people from both sides of the civil war – by turning it into a civil cemetery.
On Monday, Primo de Rivera’s family announced they would seek to exhume his body and have it reburied, as he had requested, “in holy ground and in accordance with Catholic rites”.
In a statement obtained by Spain’s ABC newspaper, the family said the decision meant the authorities would not have to conduct the exhumation as laid out in the new law, adding: “The exhumation process should, and will, remain a strictly private family affair so that it doesn’t become a public spectacle that could lead to confrontations between Spaniards.”
The Spanish government thanked the family for its “willingness to proceed with the exhumation and comply with the democratic memory law”.
Last week, Félix Bolaños, the cabinet minister responsible for overseeing Spain’s efforts to come to terms with its history, said the law was very clear that there could be “no prominent place for people who were involved in the dictatorship, or the coup d’état”.
The legislation will also create a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves and ban groups that glorify the Franco regime.
According to Sánchez’s government, the legislation will help “encourage a shared discussion based on the defence of peace, on pluralism and on broadening human rights and constitutional freedoms”.
The law, however, was not well received by the Spanish right. A senator for the conservative People’s party accused the government of trying to “rewrite history”, while the far-right Vox party described it as a “despicable and wretched attack” on Spain’s recent history.
