INTL Spain begins exhuming late dictator Gen. Franco’s remains

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Plain Jane

Just Plain Jane
https://www.apnews.com/af1a156051584b37bbf8f45a940a2146

MADRID (AP) — Spain on Thursday began exhuming the remains of Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco from his grandiose mausoleum outside Madrid so he can be reburied in a small family crypt elsewhere.

The government-ordered, closed-door operation Thursday satisfies a fulfills a decades-old desire of many in Spain who considered the vainglorious mausoleum that Franco built mausoleum an affront to the tens of thousands who died in Spain’s Civil War and his subsequent regime and to Spain’s standing as a modern democratic state.

The operation, which has been criticized by some conservatives, was broadcast live by Spain’s main TV channels and media websites.

Franco’s coffin was being extracted from under marble slabs and two tons of granite at the Valley of the Fallen mausoleum. Depending on the weather, it was being taken by helicopter or hearse to Mingorrubio cemetery where his wife is buried, a 57-kilometer (35-mile) drive away.

The exhumation and reburial will not put an end to Franco’s legacy on Spain’s political scene, since it comes just weeks ahead of the country’s Nov. 10 general election where Spain’s main left- and right-wing parties are battling for power once again.

Franco ruled Spain between 1939 and 1975, after he and other officers led a military insurrection against the Spanish democratic government in 1936, a move that started a three-year civil war.

A staunch Catholic, he viewed the war and ensuing dictatorship as something of a religious crusade against anarchist, leftist and secular tendencies in Spain. His authoritarian rule, along with a profoundly conservative Catholic Church, ensured that Spain remained virtually isolated from political, industrial and cultural developments in Europe for nearly four decades.

The country returned to democracy three years after his death but his legacy and his place in Spanish political history still sparks rancor and passion.

For many years, thousands of people commemorated the anniversary of his Nov. 20, 1975, death in Madrid’s central Plaza de Oriente esplanade and at the Valley of the Fallen mausoleum outside of the capital. And although the dictator’s popularity has waned immensely, the exhumation has been criticized by Franco’s relatives, Spain’s three main right-wing parties and some members of the Catholic Church for opening old political wounds.

The exhumation was finally authorized by the Supreme Court in September when it dismissed a months-long legal bid by Franco’s family to stop it.


The exhumation stemmed from amendments of a 2007 Historical Memory Law that aimed to seek redress for the estimated 100,000 victims of the civil war and the Franco era who are buried in unmarked graves, including thousands at the Valley of the Fallen. The legislation prohibited having Franco’s remains in a public place that exalted him as a political figure.

Having been unable to press ahead with the exhumation last year, Spain’s interim Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wanted the exhumation and the reburial completed by the Nov. 10 election, a move that opposition parties say smacks of electioneering.
 
P

Plain Jane

Just Plain Jane
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ebases-his-legacy-grandson-says-idUSKBN1X22SH

NEWSOCTOBER 23, 2019 / 6:36 PM / UPDATED 3 HOURS AGO
Franco exhumation a political game that debases his legacy, grandson says
Clara-Laeila Laudette
3 MIN READ

(This version of Oct. 23rd story corrects paragraph 6 to show court approval was last month)

By Clara-Laeila Laudette

MADRID (Reuters) - A decision by Spain’s government to remove Francisco Franco’s remains from a state mausoleum is simply an act of political opportunism ahead of next month’s election, the late dictator’s oldest grandson and namesake said on Wednesday.

Francisco Franco y Martinez-Bordiu will play a leading role in Thursday’s low-key ceremony in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid.

He criticized both politicians and the judiciary for allowing his grandfather’s exhumation, and reburial in a nearby private family vault, to proceed.

“I consider the exhumation a profanation,” he told Reuters late on Wednesday from his home in Madrid’s embassy district.

“I feel a great deal of rage because (the government) has used something as cowardly as digging up a corpse as propaganda, and political publicity to win a handful of votes before an election.” Spain goes to the polls on Nov. 10.

A long-standing ambition of the acting Socialist government, the exhumation was ratified by parliament and approved last year by the Supreme Court, which viewed it as a valid interpretation of a 2007 law promoting recognition of those who suffered under Franco’s regime.

The same court rejected an appeal against the operation lodged by the Franco family, which was also refused leave by authorities to drape the coffin in the national flag and invite media to the ceremony.

“They have sought to restrict access to such a point - because they want their own photographs, their own images. It is nonsensical that they would refuse to let us drape the Spanish flag over the casket,” he said.

“They have buried him where they’ve wanted and how they’ve wanted, completely ignoring any right that we (might) have.”

More than four decades after the dictator’s death in 1975, the exhumation has touched a nerve in a country where divisions over his legacy remain acute.

An El Mundo poll this month showed 43% of Spaniards favored the operation, while 32.5% opposed it.

Franco’s admirers saw him as a firm hand who fostered Spain’s longest period of peace after centuries of turmoil.

Opponents, meanwhile, have long questioned the propriety of a man who unleashed a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died being buried alongside some of his victims. Thousands of dead Republicans were moved into the valley without their families’ consent.

For Franco’s 64-year-old grandson, the impact of the exhumation has parallels with another political crisis, in Spain’s far northeast.

“(This) has only served to divide the country, create ...separatists and unionists, because it’s a way of creating a captive vote. It’s like the separatists in Catalonia, who are so fashionable these days.”

Reporting by Clara-Laeila Laudette; Editing by John Stonestreet and Lincoln Feast.

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
 
P

Plain Jane

Just Plain Jane
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ranco-exhumation-is-bittersweet-idUSKBN1X30NR

NEWSOCTOBER 24, 2019 / 3:12 AM / UPDATED AN HOUR AGO
For prisoner of Spain's Franco, exhumation is bittersweet
Clara-Laeila Laudette
4 MIN READ

MADRID (Reuters) - For one activist jailed by Spain’s Fascists for his political views, Thursday’s exhumation and reburial of Francisco Franco’s bones after decades lying in state marks a bittersweet moment.

Now 93, Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz was forced as a prisoner of the Franco regime to help build the Valley of the Fallen, the mausoleum that has been the dictator’s resting place since his death in 1975.

“It was time (to move him). It was overdue,” retired historian Sanchez-Albornoz told Reuters.

“We’ve waited many decades for (Franco) to disappear from this monument, which ... was the shame of Spain. All the dictators of Franco’s ilk have vanished from Europe - Hitler, Mussolini - and were not honored with such tombs.”

In a carefully choreographed ceremony, Franco’s remains will be removed from the Valley of the Fallen and reburied in a family plot under a plan ratified by a divided parliament and approved last month by Spain’s Supreme Court.

In 1947, with the civil war that convulsed the country from 1936 to 1939 still fresh in collective memory, a military court sentenced Sanchez-Albornoz to forced labor for membership of an anti-Fascist student association.


Four months later he escaped to France with the help of compatriots exiled there who, he recalled, provided him with false papers, cash and a car they borrowed from U.S. novelist and liberal activist Norman Mailer, who was touring Europe at the time.

“Spain at the cusp of 1948 was still one huge jail,” he said. “Driving down the road, there were military police barricades every 20 kilometers (12 miles) who would stop you and ask for your papers.”

“I SEE THIS AS A BEGINNING”
Sanchez-Albornoz was one of the lucky ones.

Many of his fellow prisoners died and were buried in the valley, along with other opposition activists - and he hopes the removal of Franco’s remains might open the door to using modern forensic techniques to identify some other bodies it contains.

“Some might think that Franco’s exhumation is the end of a phase. I see this as the beginning of one,” he said in his Madrid apartment.

“Many more exhumations await, of those who were executed by the regime or moved there against or without families’ permission. Families have requested their bodies be returned, so they can be buried with their kin, in their home towns.”

Without such an effort, he believes Spain will struggle to come to terms with Franco’s still divisive legacy.

And while he tolerates those who oppose the exhumation, his hostility towards Franco remains acute.

“He should not have been buried in the first place. He should have suffered the same fate as his victims,” he said.

Sanchez-Albornoz views the millions of euros successive government have spent maintaining the mausoleum as an “inexplicable contradiction” between democracy in theory and practice.

He refers to the valley only by its pre-Franco name of Cuelgamuros and describes his relationship with it as special - “a place of imprisonment, but also of liberation.”

Spain’s governing Socialists have long sought to turn it into a memorial to the around 500,000 civil war dead.

But should the mass graves ever be exhumed and victims’ remains returned to their ancestors, Sanchez-Albornoz favors a simpler fate. “Let nature take charge of that place’s destiny,” he said.

(Corrects paragraph 5 to show supreme court approval was last month)

Reporting by Clara-Laeila Laudette; Editing by John Stonestreet and Andrew Cawthorne

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
 
T

TerryK

TB Fanatic
Spain and it's socialists are trying to erase their past in the same way the liberal socialists here are.
Like him or not, Franco was a major part of Spain and it's history.

I lived in Spain, both when Franco was alive and after he died.
The change in the country after his death confirms a theory of mine that left to themselves a population will gravitate towards socialism.

When Franco was in charge, the trains ran on time. It was safe to be out on the streets at night. As long as you didn't get involved in political activities, drugs, or religion (Spain was officially and legally Catholic then) you could pretty much do what you wanted and live how you wanted.
Yep the Guardia Civil (federal police) carried sub machine gun and always traveled in pairs. If your car broke down in the middle of the night on a road 50 miles from a town, they would stop and help you. If there was a civil disturbance or even a big fight in a bar, all they had to do is walk in the door and you could hear a pin drop.
They were Franco's personal SS. Spain was masculine and machismo was standard back then. Oh, and the women of Spain were something else.
When he died, half the country mourned and the other half quietly rejoiced. Tens of thousands of people paid their respects at his funeral and gave him one last fascist salute.

Afterwords things started to change rapidly.
It didn't take long for socialist and even hard communist parties to gain influence.
Society changed right down to the social structure of Spanish families. The change was like night and day in what TV and newspapers put out.
The country became more feminine. Male and female roles began to change.
The Catholic church lost a lot of its power. Scandals surfaced about the Catholic churches selling thousands of babies in the past, to rich Spanish couples and telling the poorer women their babies had died on birth.
Spanish priests who once freely grabbed women on public trains were now attacked if they dared to try, although I understand that it is still not uncommon for Spanish priests to have mistresses.

Spain has gone from being more conservative than post WWII America, to being quite the liberal bastion.
Franco once was able to hold all the different ethnic groups together under the principle of "one Spain"
That is gone now, as Basques in Northern Spain consider themselves separate as do those in Catalonia. And to be fair, their culture, customs and even their languages are different.
Spain never was really one country. Even the Romans realized that when they conquered Spain and they ruled it as separate entities. It took a strong man, dictator, like Franco to hold it together and since his death the different ethnic groups in the country have moved inexorably towards separatism.

It's still a nice place to visit, but if you are going to go, you probably need to go soon, before the socialists manage to erase the country's history and customs. That revisionism seems to be going on all over the world now days.
 
Dobbin

Dobbin

Faithful Steed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valle_de_los_Caídos#Franco's_tomb_(1975–2019)

In 1975, after Franco's death, the site was designated by the interim Government, assured by Prince Juan Carlos and Prime Minister Carlos Arias Navarro, as the burial place for Franco. According to his family, Franco did not want to be buried in the Valley, but in the city of Madrid. Nonetheless, the family agreed to the interim Government's request to bury him in the Valley, and has stood by the decision.

Before his death, nobody had expected that Franco would be buried in the Valley. Moreover, the grave had to be excavated and prepared within two days, forcing last minute changes in the plumbing system of the Basilica. Unlike the fallen of the Civil War who were laid to rest in special tombs behind the chapels on the sides of the basilica, Franco was buried behind the main altar, in the central nave. His grave is marked by a simple tombstone engraved with just his Christian name and first surname, on the choir side of the main high altar (between the altar and the apse of the Church; behind the altar, from the perspective of a person standing at the main door).

Franco is the only person interred in the Valley who did not die in the Civil War. The argument given by the defenders of his tomb is that in the Catholic Church the developer of a church can be buried in the church that he has promoted. Therefore, Franco would be in the Valley as the promoter of the basilica's construction.
Click to expand...

Dobbin
 
I

intothatgoodnight

. . .
TerryK said:
Spain and it's socialists are trying to erase their past in the same way the liberal socialists here are.
Like him or not, Franco was a major part of Spain and it's history.

I lived in Spain, both when Franco was alive and after he died.
The change in the country after his death confirms a theory of mine that left to themselves a population will gravitate towards socialism.

When Franco was in charge, the trains ran on time. It was safe to be out on the streets at night. As long as you didn't get involved in political activities, drugs, or religion (Spain was officially and legally Catholic then) you could pretty much do what you wanted and live how you wanted.
Yep the Guardia Civil (federal police) carried sub machine gun and always traveled in pairs. If your car broke down in the middle of the night on a road 50 miles from a town, they would stop and help you. If there was a civil disturbance or even a big fight in a bar, all they had to do is walk in the door and you could hear a pin drop.
They were Franco's personal SS. Spain was masculine and machismo was standard back then. Oh, and the women of Spain were something else.
When he died, half the country mourned and the other half quietly rejoiced. Tens of thousands of people paid their respects at his funeral and gave him one last fascist salute.

Afterwords things started to change rapidly.
It didn't take long for socialist and even hard communist parties to gain influence.
Society changed right down to the social structure of Spanish families. The change was like night and day in what TV and newspapers put out.
The country became more feminine. Male and female roles began to change.
The Catholic church lost a lot of its power. Scandals surfaced about the Catholic churches selling thousands of babies in the past, to rich Spanish couples and telling the poorer women their babies had died on birth.
Spanish priests who once freely grabbed women on public trains were now attacked if they dared to try, although I understand that it is still not uncommon for Spanish priests to have mistresses.

Spain has gone from being more conservative than post WWII America, to being quite the liberal bastion.
Franco once was able to hold all the different ethnic groups together under the principle of "one Spain"
That is gone now, as Basques in Northern Spain consider themselves separate as do those in Catalonia. And to be fair, their culture, customs and even their languages are different.
Spain never was really one country. Even the Romans realized that when they conquered Spain and they ruled it as separate entities. It took a strong man, dictator, like Franco to hold it together and since his death the different ethnic groups in the country have moved inexorably towards separatism.

It's still a nice place to visit, but if you are going to go, you probably need to go soon, before the socialists manage to erase the country's history and customs. That revisionism seems to be going on all over the world now days.
Click to expand...

Interesting insight, TerryK - I have heard similar from folks who lived there during Franco's reign, and up to more recently.


intothegoodnight
 
Doc1

Doc1

Has No Life - Lives on TB
"an affront to the tens of thousands who died in Spain’s Civil War"

Typical leftist slant by the MSM. The story would have you believe that tens of thousands of leftists/Republicans died in the war, yet there is no mention of - much less sympathy for - for the many thousands of Nationalists who died. The Spanish Civil War pitted the Republicans, which were an alliance of communists, anarchists, socialists and other leftists, against the Nationalists which consisted of nationalists, Catholics, royalists and others of conservative inclination.

The Nationalists (conservatives) won the war and were never forgiven for this by the liberal, leftist media. Hence, Franco was vilified for decades - and still is - while the media and our history books barely (if at all) mention Stalin's and Mao's tens of millions of murders and pogroms. Franco was a good man and should be seen as a hero to conservatives.

Best regards
Doc
 
SmithJ

SmithJ

Veteran Member
xd83v.jpg
 
Txkstew

Txkstew

Veteran Member
Terry is right on about everything he said. I too lived in Spain when Franco was still alive. I was 10 years old when we first moved there in 1965. I could wander the streets of Madrid anywhere I wanted to go, and not be bothered. Madrid is, and was a huge Metropolis of Millions of people. I've been to "El Escorial" that was built long before he died. It's a huge cathedral that is tunneled into the side of a Mountain. My Mom freaked when I stuck my hand into the Holy Water bowl by the door.

5db1d916ef45f.image.jpg
 
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