MADRID: Victims’ remains from the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship are being recovered for the first time from Spain’s largest mass grave, the government said, reported German news agency (dpa).
Work to exhume 128 bones of the dozens killed during the war, fought between 1936 and 1939 and Franco’s dictatorship, from 1939 until his death in 1975, started on Monday following a court order fought for by victims’ families, said the Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory.
The excavations were authorised by the court at the request of the families after “overcoming numerous legal obstacles”, it added.
The huge mausoleum in the Sierra de Guadarrama, with a basilica and a 155-metre-high granite cross, was driven into the rock by some 20,000 forced labourers between 1940 and 1959.
According to various estimates, the remains of 30,000 to 35,000 identified and unidentified victims of both warring parties, the “Franquistas” and the Republicans, rest there.
So far, there have only been two exhumations there. The left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez first arranged for Franco to be reburied in the autumn of 2019. The bones of the fascist dictator now lie in a cemetery on the northern edge of Madrid.
In April, the body of fascist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera was dug up and moved to a normal cemetery.
The mausoleum, which is visited by around 400,000 people a year and has been called “Cuelgamuros Valley” since last year, was a place of pilgrimage for many people who worship dictator Franco and Primo de Rivera and cultivate extreme right-wing ideas.
With the reburials, Madrid wanted to put a definitive end to this and turn the valley into a “place of reconciliation”.
The number of disappeared victims of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship is estimated to be at least 100,000 to 150,000. The search for the tens of thousands of victims buried anonymously throughout the country was made a “state duty” last autumn with the passing of the law on “democratic memory”.
The law allows families to apply to the court for exhumations in the Cuelgamuros Valley. – BERNAMA-dpa
