Plans are under way to exhume the remains of one of Spain’s most prominent far-right figures, as the country implements new legislation to tackle the legacy of its violent past.
José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the Falange fascist party who died in 1936, is buried near the altar of a basilica in the Valley of the Fallen, a huge mausoleum in the mountains north of Madrid. In 2019, the dictator Francisco Franco was exhumed from the same site and reburied in a cemetery.
In a statement, the family of Primo de Rivera said it was in favour of “carrying out the exhumation and subsequent burial of his mortal remains in a sacred cemetery according to Catholic rites”.
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The family’s decision has been prompted by the parliamentary approval of a new Democratic Memory law which seeks to strip the mausoleum of its status as a symbol of Francoism and far-right ideology and convert it into a civil cemetery.
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A Benedictine community at the Valley of the Fallen manages the basilica and a 150m-tall stone cross sits above the monument. Around 34,000 victims of both sides of the 1936-39 civil war are also buried at the site, which was built by political prisoners and completed in 1959.
Primo de Rivera was executed in the early stages of the civil war after being found guilty of conspiring against the elected republican government. His ally, Franco, went on to lead the right-wing nationalists to victory, becoming dictator until his death in 1975.
No date has yet been set for the exhumation, although the members of the leftist coalition government welcomed the family’s willingness to comply with the Democratic Memory law.
“We feel that the wishes of José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his family should be respected,” said Jaume Asens, spokesman for Podemos, the junior partner in the coalition. “Therefore the remains of Primo de Rivera should be moved to wherever the family wants.”
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This contrasts with the controversy that surrounded the exhumation of Franco three years ago. The dictator’s family initially opposed that process and said that if it did happen he should be reburied in the crypt beneath the Almudena Cathedral in central Madrid. Concerned that the cathedral would become a pilgrimage site for admirers of Franco, the government fought and won a legal battle ensuring that the reburial took place in a private cemetery.
The exhumation of Franco was also delayed due to the resistance of the prior of the Benedictine monastery, Santiago Cantera, who was a candidate for the Falange party in the early 1990s.
The Democratic Memory law, which was approved by the senate earlier this month, declares the Franco dictatorship illegal and deems court sentences against political enemies of the regime illegitimate. It also ensures that the state takes on the responsibility of identifying and exhuming the bodies of more than 100,000 victims of Franco who are still believed to be buried in unmarked graves across the country. In addition, it opens the door to the possibility of investigating human rights abuses committed by the regime.
However, the law is politically divisive and parties on the right have criticised the legislation, claiming it needlessly dredges up the past.
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At a political rally in Madrid last weekend, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, focused on the planned exhumation of Primo de Rivera, with language that invoked the civil war.
“They want to desecrate tombs again; they want to dig up hatred once again,” he said, of the government. “They want to remove the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who they shot.”
