2023-04-23 18:22:00
It was the family who requested the exhumation following the publication of the law. It will be conducted this Monday, April 24, the anniversary of the birth of the founder of the phalanx, in 1903. His remains will be moved to the cemetery of San Isidro, in Madrid.
Spain: final adoption of a law rehabilitating the memory of the victims of Francoism
A legend to legitimize his power
Primo de Rivera is above all a symbol. Imprisoned under the Second Republic shortly before the July 1936 coup d’etat for an assassination attempt, he was shot shortly following its outbreak and took part neither in the war nor in the resulting dictatorship. A charismatic man, he founded the fascist party La Phalange in 1933, and used his energy to destabilize the republic and try to overthrow it.
Franco doesn’t like it. But at the end of the civil war, he needs to consolidate his power. He claimed to be guided by the precepts of Primo de Rivera and made La Phalange the single party which structured the political life of the country, one of the three pillars of the regime, along with the Church and the army. In 1959, the dictator inaugurated the monumental abbey in the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caidos), where he had the remains of the founder of the party buried to confer on him the status of martyr, assassinated by the Republicans, the first of those who fell.
The new law on democratic memory, one of the flagship texts of the left-wing government currently in power in Spain, which came into force in October 2022, provided for the exhumation of the founder of the Falange. The text (which also changed the name of the site, which became the Cuelgamuros Valley once more) aims to rebalance the fuzzy memory that surrounds this historical episode in Spain. A section of society resists removing the commemorative elements of Francoism or shedding full light on the repression and its human rights violations. But another considers having been silenced following the dictatorship and never having been able to heal her wounds.
In Seville, a Francoist general changed his grave following a new law
A memory fracture
The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory appreciates but regrets that the families of the victims of Francoism did not have the right to the same attention from the government as that of Primo de Rivera. On the right, the close guard of the president of the Popular Party (PP), Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, criticizes the fact that the exhumation is announced in the run-up to the local elections on May 28. But the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the second most influential figure in the party, believes that it is an attempt to “rewrite” history and that “historical memory” is a “failure the truth”. On the far right, the president of the Vox party considers that this approach comes “to desecrate graves” to “dig up hatred.”
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