Franco

No name looms larger over Spain than that of the dictator, Francisco Franco.   A man forged by the atrocities he committed in Spain's North Africa  - which included savage beheadings - and from where he launched his uprising against the democratically-elected Spanish Republic in July 1936.

He spun the civil war out for three years when he could have easily swept to power in Madrid within a few months.  Why?   To ensure that he killed as many opponents as possible.   Blood notoriously flowed in Malaga following a massacre beyond any seen in Siria.  Villages, all over the country and too many to name, were emptied of their men and boy-folk overnight  for them to summarily executed and their bodies dumped in mass graves, many hidden to this day. An estimated 500,000 people were killed in the war.

Franco ruled with an iron fist for nearly forty years depriving a country on the very edge of the emerging European Community any of the benefits that democracy, the rule of law and neighbourly sharing brings.

His own resting place, shown above diagrammatically curtesy of yesterday’s El Peridoco newspaper, is a sunken tomb in front of an altar in the depths of facist-styled shrine deep in a mountain below a 150 metre-tall cross - we won't enter here into the role that the Roman Catholic Church played during and after the civil war to help Franco's cause.

The complex, known as the Valley of the Fallen, is situated just outside Madrid and a stone's throw from Philip the 5th's palace at El Escorial from where he ran the vast, sprawling Spanish Empire.

The valley monument was built by slave labour (defeated Republicans) over a nineteen-year period from 1940 to 1959 . . . very Dachau-like. Many died in the process. Only soldiers who died in the civil war can be buried there. The known fascist ones are nicely laid out and named.   To balance things up later on, Franco decreed that many of the mass graves holding the bodies of republican soldiers be opened and the unidentified remains transfered to the valley. 33,000 (yes, 33,000) were brought and dumped into one single mass grave (yes, one single mass grave).

The new-to-power socialist government has decided that enough is enough and that Franco must be finally ousted from his self-glorifying and self-constructed resting place and the site made into a museum of horrors, following the example of Auschwitz, or a place of reconciliation.  

The exhumation is about to be voted on and has stirred up a national controversy. The right wing parties who are rivals but equal heirs of Franco will oppose or abstain.  They have always claimed to be truly democratic parties but, in resisting the transfer of their godfather's remains, have shown their true colours.

And where will the remains go?  That is still to be decided.   Franco's home town don't want them.  His grandchildren, who still defend his legacy, will probably get them. My vote would be for them to be dumped at sea somewhere in the North Atlantic. Yes, dumped without any ceremony off the back of a boat.