Spain faces dilemma over Franco's mausoleum

By Sinikka Tarvainen Jun 26, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Madrid - Thirty-five years after his death, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco is still resisting attempts to dethrone him.

Most of the statues and other reminders of his rule have been removed, but his presence continues to linger in the Valley of the Fallen, his monumental burial place in San Lorenzo de El Escorial near Madrid.

For many Spaniards, the underground basilica topped by a 150-metre cross constitutes a monument to Fascism unthinkable elsewhere - yet Spain's successive governments have been reluctant to tackle the sensitive issue.

One month before the 75th anniversary of the start of the 1936-39 civil war, which brought Franco to power, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government has now set up a commission of experts to decide what to do with the embarrassing mausoleum.

The civil war was sparked on July 17, 1936 by Franco's uprising against the leftist republican government, and ended in his victory.

After Franco died in 1975, Spain's new democratic leaders agreed to allow the war wounds to heal, and a collective amnesty was granted to Franco's collaborators in 1977.

It is only in recent years that Spaniards have begun critically reappraising the Franco era, with the Zapatero government passing a Law of Historic Memory in 2007.

The law stipulated recognition of the wrongs suffered by Franco's victims and assistance to associations reopening mass graves.

Franco was responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 opponents during and after the war, according to judge Baltasar Garzon, who was forced to drop his inquiry into Franco's crimes under pressure from some legal experts and conservative politicians.

The government has granted Spanish nationality to about 190,000 descendants of people who fled Franco into exile, mainly to Latin America. Nearly 600 street names or statues paying tribute to the dictator and his collaborators have also been removed around Spain.

Yet nothing has yet been done about the Valley of the Fallen, the biggest Francoist monument, which was built by thousands of republican prisoners.

It was a 'humiliation' that such a place continued to be maintained with tax money, said the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory, which campaigns for the rights of the dictator's victims.

The 'monument to war and (Franco's) National-Catholicism' now needs to be turned into a 'place of reconciled memory,' said Ramon Jauregui, a minister for the prime minister's office.

There are proposals to turn the Valley of the Fallen into a kind of museum documenting the Franco era, though some historians think that's not enough.

The commission of experts, which is due to report within five months, now faces some tricky decisions.

It has to determine whether the remains of Franco and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera - the founder of Franco's Falangist party - should remain buried in the basilica in the Valley of the Fallen.

'The dead should be left in peace,' Franco's daughter Carmen Franco Polo said, opposing a proposal that her father's bones should be moved to a cemetery adjoining his former residence.

One ultra-conservative association even threatened to sue the government if it exhumed Franco's remains.

The commission of experts will also discuss the fate of more than 30,000 other people buried in the Valley of the Fallen.

Most of them fought on Franco's side, but they also include hundreds of republicans whose bones were dug up from mass graves to increase the number buried in the mausoleum.

Eleven of the republicans' families want to give their loved ones new burials, but forensic experts say the bones are too deteriorated and mixed with each other to be identified.