A part of the Primo de Rivera family agreed that the remains of José Antonio, founder of the Falangeremained in the burial ground of Cuelgamuros even though they were not in a pre-eminent tomb and in sight, but as anonymous as the other remains of those shot and killed in battles of the Civil War that lie there.
This is also what the Government thought in a first phase of elaboration of the project to resignify the Valley of the Fallen, sources close to those works confirm to this newspaper. Finally, the opinion prevailed within the family that his ancestor must be buried. in a Catholic cemetery, as the politician himself expressed in his will. And the Executive has granted this Monday, the day of the week in which the National Heritage monuments are closed to the public, to carry out the exhumation.
The approval of the current Democratic Memory Law, which evolves from the Historical Memory Law woven under the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapateromoved the Primo de Rivera to anticipate with their private exhumation what would have been an ex officio state exhumation before the end of the legislature, since the legal text proscribes that no body has a pre-eminent place in Cuelgamuros over the others, and that has led finally to the funeral ceremony this Monday.
In 2011, the Zapatero government did not have a direct channel of communication with the Primo de Rivera family. The Gipuzkoan socialist Ramón Jáuregui was Minister of the Presidency at the time and directed the project to resignify the Cuelgamuros monument, as today its successor Felix Bolanos directs the policy of Memory of the Executive. Jáuregui recalls that there was “a message from the family indirectly transferred to the Government”, and adds: “I don’t know who did it. I know that came to the committee of experts that I created”. He is referring to the group of specialists he brought together in Moncloa to prepare a first report on the feasibility of transforming the Valley of the Fallen monument.
The Primo de Rivera family does not confirm this point, since it is completely silent about this historic new transfer of the remains. At that time, the Executive had not yet leaned towards a deconsecration of the cemetery, which, in short, is the Valley of the Fallen. he was alive too Miguel Primo de Rivera y Urquijoformer mayor of Jerez, one of the promoters of the Transition, senator by appointment of King Juan Carlos and head of the Primo de Rivera family.
Today the Primo de Rivera located at the top of the family is Ferdinand, Madrid investment fund broker and former executive of Chase Manhattan Bank. Part of the titles of nobility that he possesses, those granted by the dictatorship as the Dukedom of Primo de Riverahave been withdrawn in application of the Democratic Memory Law.
private act
The exhumation of this Monday has a background of political didactics similar to that of the exhumation of the remains of Francisco Franco, on October 24, 2019, but in its form it is a totally different act. The transfer of the body of the dictator was an expulsion decided by the government of Pedro Sanchez, and as a public and volitional act of the Executive, a television broadcast was even organized. Today’s exhumation is a family decision of the Primo de Rivera, and as a private act, the Government only comments on it as “one more step in the redefinition of the venue”, as Bolaños said last Friday.
All the protocol and the Hertzian account of the transfer of Franco’s remains was left to the then Vice President of the Government, carmen baldand the director of the Cabinet of the Presidency, Ivan Redondowith the then Minister of Justice and major notary of the kingdom, Dolores Delgadoas a caryatid in Cuelgamuros.
The current Minister of the Presidency was also in the Valley that day. On this occasion, the Government does not give details of the exhumation “for security reasons as well as for the privacy of the family,” as Bolaños said last week as soon as he arrived in Barcelona.
It has emerged that the family has accepted that the transfer would take place on the same day as the 120th anniversary of the birth of José Antonio. As this newspaper has already announced, the remains go to a tomb owned by the Primo de Rivera in the Sacramental cemetery of San Isidro, one of the most monumental in Europe.
José Antonio Primo de Rivera was tried by the authorities of the Second Republic in a process in which the defendant himself was his own lawyer. Sentenced to death for the crime of rebellionwas shot on November 20, 1936. His remains have changed places four times.
Waiting list
The exit of the corpse of José Antonio Primo de Rivera from his tomb at the foot of the altar of the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen is already part of the political story of this legislature, while in the side crypts of the same temple excavated in the rock of Cuelgamuros The remains of 118 victims of the Civil War and repression await exhumationclaimed by their relatives.
Not five months have passed since the Primo de Rivera family announced their intention to take José Antonio’s body until the exhumation is completed. The Madrid lawyer Eduardo Ranz, lawyer on behalf of the claimants, sees two speeds in terms of mortuary policy in the monument that National Heritage directs under direct dependence of the Presidency of the Government. “As a democrat, it is undoubtedly very good to see the founder of the single party of the dictatorship, the coup general, exhumed. Queipo de Llano or the dictator himself, but this also generates discrimination against the victims, who also have a sentence that authorizes, or orders, the exhumation of their relatives, who lost their lives for thinking differently.”
Ranz refers to the ruling granted by a court in San Lorenzo de El Escorial (the Madrid town in which Cuelgamuros is located) in May 2016, authorizing, in application of a right to adequate burial in force since 2019, the relatives of the Aragonese anarchist brothers Manuel and Antonio Ramiro Lapeña Altabás to recover his remains. The Lapeña brothers had been murdered in 1936 and their bodies thrown into a common grave in Calatayud.
In 1959, the Francoist authorities, without informing the family, they took the remains to bury them under the Cross of the Fallen. In that year, close to the inauguration of the great monument of National Catholicism, Franco’s civil governors had received orders from all over Spain to provide skeletons with which to fill the crypts of the basilica.
The Lapeña sentence, a judicial milestone, will be seven years late in its execution. For Ranz “it can only be concluded that in the Valley those who are exhumed are the politicians. The focus is missing, but from the victims.”
Related news
Last December, the Primo de Rivera family already began the procedures for the exhumation of the only body in an individual tomb in the Valley of the Fallen after the removal of the remains of the dictator Francisco Franco. In the same month, the Government also resumed work to exhume the remains of 118 victims of the Civil War at the request of their relatives, at the end of the stoppage imposed by precautionary measures imposed by a court in Madrid.
Nearly 34,000 bodies lie in what is the largest mass grave in Spain. They are guarded by a Benedictine community headed by a monk, Santiago Quarry, who before wearing the habit was a Falange candidate in local elections. The congregation will also be evicted from the premises when the Government’s resignification plans advance.