The Atlantic: The Politics of a Long-Dead Dictator Still Haunt Spain

The many Spaniards who revile Franco tend to stay far away from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast, surreal monument outside Madrid where thousands of those killed in the Spanish Civil War are interred along with its victor. Its 150-meter high cross is visible from miles away, looming starkly over what is often referred to as Spain’s largest mass grave. The remains of more than 33,000 people who fought on both sides in the 1936-1939 conflict are buried here, transported—often without permission—from other sites after the Valley was finished in 1958. Their graves, unlike Franco’s, are unmarked, and the identities of more than a third remain unknown.

To many families of the fallen, the presence of Franco—who was buried here after his death in 1975 on the orders of the then King Juan Carlos I—is a final insult, converting what was conceived as a monument to the war dead into the pharaonic tomb of a fascist dictator. Up to 1 million people died in the three-year conflict, which Franco helped spark by leading a military revolt against Spain’s elected government, then run by the left-wing Republicans. Thousands more died during the purges that followed Franco’s victory and the imposition of a dictatorship that lasted until his death. That period remains burned into the memory of many in Spain, which unlike countries such as Germany or Argentina has never undergone a process of reconciliation. The lack of such a process, some argue, has left the wounds of the era seeping into politics and society four decades on. [...]

Argelia Queralt Jiménez, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona, said the exhumation of Franco and the historical memory drive would help defuse the perception among Catalan separatists of Spain as “Francoland,” a country that had not fully abandoned dictatorship for democracy. In an interview, she said that perception had little basis in reality, but explained that the failure of the Spanish right to discuss the Civil War and subsequent regime had effectively “normalized” and justified that assault on the democratic order. Meanwhile, the story of one side—of the defeated—had been “silenced” and victims treated with “disdain,” said Queralt.

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