After two in the morning on Thursday, a group of men and women, more than twenty, in mourning, long coats and jackets, discreetly, in whispers, declining to make any statements, came out from the side of the Macarena Basilica and They stood at their gates. The older brother Jose Antonio Fernandez Cabrera He left the temple, together with three other members of the Governing Board, inside a car. The door of the Basilica opened and the white car of a funeral home came out to the applause of the relatives and the muffled cry of “Long live Queipo”.
Then came the voice, loud and clear, from Paqui Maquedagranddaughter of murdered, referent of the memorialist movement, one of the victims, of the association ‘Nuestra Memoria de Sevilla’. “Honor and glory to the victims of Franco’s regime & rdquor;, to list the names of those killed. “Yesterday, today, always & rdquor ;, “the person responsible was Queipo, it was his murderer & rdquor ;, “we fulfilled a historic debt & rdquor ;, “they are still lying in the ditches & rdquor ;, Maqueda shouted alone with her head held high. A car stopped and shouted a sonorous insult.The family was distributed in several vehicles and discreetly withdrew.
This was the moment of Queipo’s departure from Llano de la Macarena, 71 years after he was buried in the Basilica of which he was a great benefactor, with royal honors. The law of democratic memory forced the coup leader general, to whom it is attributed more than 45,000 murders, will leave a space open to the public and visited by more than a million people every year. It was without prior notice that one of the greatest genocides of the Spanish Civil War was unearthed, according to newspaper archives. The Brotherhood had already warned that they did not want to do any television show at the moment.
Around nine o’clock at night, the family of Francisco Bohorquez, who was the war auditor, unknown until the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory ordered his departure from the temple, just like Queipo, in the letter he sent to the Brotherhood with the entry into force of the law on the 24th of october. His grave had been covered and relegated to the background. At ten minutes to twelve on November 2, a hearse removed his remains and his family left the church by the side. Neither the Brotherhood nor the Government, which claimed to have no record of the exhumation, wanted to confirm what was an open secret.
Inside you could still hear two hours the clear and strong sound of hammer drills drilling the tombstone of General Queipo de Llano and his wife, Genoveva Martí. At the gates the group of journalists and cameras was getting bigger and bigger.
There, on a bench in the last row, seated, very aware of the mobile, a woman watched in silence without missing a detail. She remembered her grandmother, very devoted to Macarena, with whom she used to pray to the Virgin and who never looked to her left, where the tomb of the coup plotter was, with the date of the military uprising and all the charges and honors from him. Distinctions that in 2009 were removed from the tombstone. She remembered her family, from whom everything was taken from her in Carmona, a town in Seville, the struggle of the families of many of the 1,400 murdered who lie in a mass grave in Pico Reja, in the Seville cemetery, a few kilometers from the Macarena arch. He asked for a cigarette to calm his nerves, even though he hadn’t smoked for more than five years. “Today justice is done & rdquor;, he repeated to the journalists who approached him to ask him who he was and why he was there, “it is a historic moment for the victims, for the memorial movement, for the city of Seville & rdquor ;. Paqui Maqueda endured the two hours to shout loud and clear: “Honor and glory to the victims & rdquor ;. Later, calmer, hugging another colleague from the association who arrived at the last minute, she repeated: “I’ve always wondered what my grandmother would think. Now the Virgin of the Macarena is going to come out much more dignified through that door & rdquor ;.