As proposed when in 2019 he managed to exhume the dictator Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, the government of Pedro Sánchez advanced this Monday in his intention to "evict" José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, from there as
well
. Spanish.
Primo de Rivera has been buried for 64 years in that monstrous funeral monument that Franco inaugurated in 1959 on the outskirts of Madrid, and that the law of democratic memory approved six months ago tries to strip of all
patina of cult to Francoism.
Among the priorities of the coalition government led by the PSOE was always the will to, beyond moving Franco and Primo de Rivera from the Valley, facilitate the exhumation of the bodies of the 34,000 fallen during the Spanish Civil War whose relatives have never been
able
to to recover and give new meaning to that immense space from which rises, according to what they say,
the largest stone cross in the world
.
The Valley of the Fallen where, according to what they say, stands the largest stone cross in the world.
Photo: AP
The law of democratic memory establishes, in addition, that the place becomes a secular cemetery in which no name can prevail over the others.
Primo de Rivera left the Valley this Monday, just when it is 120 years since his birth.
It was at the request of his family.
A handful of Falangists waited for the hearse that left the main gate at one in the afternoon.
They carried Spanish flags and, when they saw the coffin pass by, they said goodbye with the fascist salute with their right arms raised.
A handful of Falangists waited for the hearse that left the main gate at one in the afternoon.
Photo: Thomas Coex / AFP
Total secrecy
The security operation had begun at five in the morning.
In
total secrecy , only a few relatives were present when the
3,500-kilo
tombstone was raised
that covered the grave in which Primo de Rivera was buried for more than half a century.
This will be
his third exhumation
since he was shot by Republicans and buried in a common grave in Alicante, in 1936.
The 3,500-kilo tombstone that covered the grave of Primo de Rivera.
Photo: archive
With aspirations to become a representative of fascism in Spain, José Antonio - thus, Spaniards usually refer to him only by his first name -
defended a totalitarian and interventionist State
that, over time, the Franco dictatorship adopted as an ideology.
The Primo de Rivera embodied one of the
most aristocratic
military lineages in Spain.
Shot at 33 years old
José Antonio was the son of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera -who ruled between 1923 and 1930- and he himself, as a lawyer and politician, was, according to the Royal Academy of Spanish History, "one of the most contradictory and controversial figures in Spain of the 20th century”.
When they shot him,
he was 33 years old.
In 1939, three years after his death, Franco transferred his remains, with honors, from the Alicante prison to El Escorial: his coffin was carried
500 kilometers on foot
, on the shoulders of fervent Falangists.
There he was buried in the Chapel of the Kings, to the discomfort of the monarchists.
But when the Valley of the Fallen was ready for its premiere, Franco, who for almost four decades imposed his dictatorship in Spain, wanted Primo de Rivera to
rest next to the main altar
, where he remained until this Monday.
"José Antonio is the last of
a great migration of corpses
to the Valley, the most macabre affair of the Franco regime that has been carried out since the year '58, when Camilo Alonso Vega, then Minister of the Interior, gave the order to the civil governments
that send dead
to fill the Valley that was empty", explains Yayo Aznar, dean of the Faculty of Geography and History of the National University of Distance Education.
Initially, the government had offered the family that the remains of Primo de Rivera remain in the Valley but
without highlighting his name in any way
on any plaque.
The family did not accept this possibility and further argued that Primo de Rivera had specified, in his will, that he wanted to be buried in a religious cemetery.
And the Valley is, since the publication of the law of democratic memory in the Official State Gazette,
a secular cemetery.
A woman poses with portraits of Franco and Primo de Rivera.
Photo: AP
His nephews will take him to the San Isidro Cemetery, the oldest in Madrid, where his brothers are buried.
José Antonio will have a place next to the remains of his sister Pilar, founder of the female branch of the Falange.
Pilar died in 1991, at the age of 81, and after having led the Women's Section for 43 years, a record for holding political office in Spain.
By the law of democratic memory, the Valley of the Fallen is today Valle de Cuelgamuros, a simple geographical allusion to the name of the area to the southwest of the Sierra de Guadarrama where the mausoleum is located.
Primo de Rivera's nephews will transfer it to the San Isidro Cemetery, the oldest in Madrid.
Photo: AP
It is a monumental construction that the government tries to give new meaning to the complexity involved in "resetting" the collective imagination of a society for which the Valley was never a tomb for those who fell on both sides during the Spanish Civil War, but rather a self-tribute
.
that Franco gave himself.
“It is one more step in the redefinition of the Valley.
That no
person
, no ideology that evokes the dictatorship be glorified there,” said Félix Bolaños, Minister of the Presidency.
For historian Aznar, however, "the Valley is a very difficult place to give new meaning to."
“Removing Franco, changing his name, removing José Antonio, even removing the remains of all those people who never wanted to be there, is
not going to end up giving new meaning to what is the largest monument to national-Catholicism
in Spain and which also It is part of the National Heritage”, he says.
Since Franco's coffin no longer rests there, the only flowers -always red- were those that accompanied, at ground level, the tomb of José Antonio.
The remains of Primo de Rivera were longer than Franco himself in the Valley that this Monday he buried, with
six black tiles,
any vestige of his passage there.
Madrid. Correspondent
PA
look too
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Marta Sanz and a novel about the crimes of Francoism