Forensic experts have begun exhuming the remains of victims of the Spanish Civil War from the former mausoleum of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The Spanish government reports this on Monday. A multidisciplinary team, including archaeologists and geneticists, is working to recover the remains claimed by the relatives of 128 victims.
“It is justice for all those families who have asked for the remains of their loved ones to be found,” Félix Bolaños, the minister responsible for the excavations, told Spanish channel RTVE. He emphasized that the excavations were commissioned by both Republican and Francoist families and called the operation a matter of “pure humanity”.
For years, family members have wanted access to the remains of their loved ones to bury them themselves. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), bodies from all over Spain were brought to the ‘Valley of the Fallen’ and often (re)buried anonymously. In total, tens of thousands of victims of the civil war are buried there, about 15,000 of whom are anonymous. The valley now has a different name and Franco is no longer there either.
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Franco reburied
His body was transferred by helicopter to a family plot in El Prado in 2019. This happened after a long legal battle, in which Franco’s family tried to prevent the move. In the end, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that Franco could be reburied in El Prado.
Franco, who ruled Spain with an iron fist from the civil war until his death in 1975, still divides the country. The mausoleum, built by political prisoners for eighteen years under Franco’s rule, increasingly became a place of pilgrimage for Franco supporters in the years leading up to 2019.
‘Step towards reconciliation’
The excavations are another step by left-wing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to process the past and tell Spanish history in a different way. Last year, his government passed a law making the government responsible for exhuming and identifying the bodies of victims of Franco’s regime from anonymous mass graves.
Prime Minister Sánchez wants to strip the site of its fascist significance and turn it into a memorial to the 500,000 people who died during the Spanish Civil War. At the time, he called the transfer of Franco’s body a “step towards reconciliation”.