Spain seeks to identify the victims of the civil war as it takes on the fascist past

Carmen Calvo, the deputy prime minister who took over the Spanish fascist past, still remembers the first time she saw the monumental complex erected by the late dictator Francisco Franco.

“I saw a place built with forced labor for the glory of a dictator,” he said of that visit four decades ago to the Valley of the Fallen, the dividing site that holds the remains of at least 33,000 of the dead in the 1930s. civil war that brought Franco to power. “It gave me a sense of helplessness,” he recalled.

Now Calvo wants more action, four and a half decades after Franco died in office.

The Socialist Minister defends legislation that, among other reforms, would intensify the exhumation of tens of thousands of bodies that Franco’s troops threw into graves across the country, establish an authorized register of casualties and change the Valley. The centerpiece of the site, located 50 km north of Madrid, is a huge basilica excavated in the mountains under a 150 m cross with a dome mosaic with an interpretation of the fascist flag of Falange.

Spanish movements occur as countries around the world face their stories and the UK debates how to deal with it. slave trade past and the United States faced centuries of racial injustice.

Critics say Spain’s left-wing administration is sowing more division in a polarized society, although Calvo, who sees the civil war as part of the broader struggle against fascism, insisted that plans do not they are more than the country owes.

“What do we tell families?” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “We have no right to forget, we have an obligation to remember. . . We have disappeared more than Chile and Argentina together. “

Government officials highlight historians’ estimates that the Franco regime killed between 140,000 and 150,000 people in military courts and extrajudicial killings between 1936 and around 1947. They say between 20,000 and 25,000 could still be recovered from mass graves over the next four or five years.

While the defeated Republican side was ultimately also guilty of war crimes, they were not on the same scale. “Repression by [Franco’s] rebels era [in terms of deaths] about three times larger than the one that took place in the Republican zone, ”wrote historian Sir Paul Preston in his book The Spanish Holocaust.

The Spanish government hopes to finalize a bill in the coming weeks, after which it will be sent to Parliament for approval.

But this week the best Spanish judges registered concern for some of them proposals, particularly the impact on the right to assembly and freedom of expression, as the government plans to close a foundation dedicated to Franco’s memory. Judges also worried that the measures could be “asymmetrical” in favor of Republican victims.

In a recent FT interview, Pablo Casado, leader of the popular center-right opposition party, described the government’s concerns as disconnected from contemporary concerns.

“Am I going to talk about Franco?” he asked. “I’m going to talk about the cultural war here and now, and the cultural war now is not what happened 80 years ago.”

The bill is the third major step in a century led by a socialist government to address Franco’s legacy. A 2007 law authorized state funding for the exhumation of mass burial sites and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez ordered the removal Franco’s body of the Valley in 2019.

But the latter measure goes far beyond its predecessors.

In particular, it makes the recovery of bodies from mass graves not only the right of families, but the obligation of the state.

The government has already increased the pace of disinterests, which came to a halt in 2013, when the then Spanish PP administration repealed the 2007 law, which it considered divisive.

This year, the government is funding the exhumation of 114 sites across Spain. In general, officials estimate that up to 600 mass graves remain.

Some places are small, others huge. Excavators have discovered the bodies of more than 450 people shot by Franco’s troops at a site in Seville; ultimately, it could produce 1,000. Officials say another site in the province of Córdoba may contain up to 5,000 bodies.

The law also establishes a national DNA database on the victims and plans to update the teaching of the Civil War period in schools.

Officials acknowledge that this is one of the most explosive issues of all. “The state has an obligation for these truths to be part of the education of the people,” Calvo said. “How can anyone defend the political case so that people don’t know?”

The government, for now, has no plans to dismantle all 12,000 dead Republicans taken from the Franco regime’s mass graves and reburied in the valley along with their former enemies. But the legislation recognizes the right of families to recover bodies from the place. There are already about 60 applications.

The more than 33,000 graves behind the chapels of the basilica would become a civil cemetery and the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the fascist Falange, would be moved from its privileged place in front of the altar.

Last June, several visitors to the valley complained about the government’s plans. “It’s better to leave things as they are than to reopen wounds,” said Diego, a security guard who refused to give his last name.

Others believed that Spain was facing the most scarring period in its history. “Our grandparents suffered the civil war. . . they thought there was real peace then, but now things seem different, “said Sol De Mosteyrín Hernández, a teacher.

“We need a deep process of reconciliation in this country, and that is just beginning now.”