While Spain embraces the fascist past, it seeks to identify the victims of the civil war

Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, who assumed the first fascist past in Spain, still remembers the first time she saw the monumental complex built by dictator Francisco Franco.

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

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

The Socialist minister is defending the legislation, among other reforms, to improve the tens of thousands of corpses thrown by Francoist troops into pits across the country, to establish an authoritarian register of victims and to change the Valley itself. The center of the site, 50 km north of Madrid, is a huge basilica carved into the mountain under a 150-meter cross with a mosaic dome with the interpretation of the fascist flag Falange.

Spain’s moves will come as countries around the world clash with their history, as the UK discusses how to deal with them slave trade the past and the US have been linked to racial injustice for centuries.

Critics say the Spanish left-wing administration is also making further divisions in a polarized society, although Calvo, who sees the civil war as part of a broader fight against fascism, stressed that the plans are only what 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 a duty to remember. . . We have disappeared more than Chile and Argentina together. ”

According to historians, government officials killed 140,000-150,000 people in military tribunals and extrajudicial killings between 1936 and 1947. They say 20,000-25,000 can still be recovered from mass graves in the next four to five years.

Although the defeated Republican side in the end was also guilty of war crimes, they were not on the same level. “Repression [Franco’s] he was a rebel [in terms of deaths] three times larger than what happened in the Republican zone, ”historian Sir Paul Preston wrote in his book Spanish Holocaust.

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

But this week Spain’s top judges have expressed concern about some of them proposals, particularly the impact on the right of assembly and freedom of expression, the government’s intention to close the foundation dedicated to Franco’s memory. Judges were also concerned that the measures could be “asymmetrical,” in favor of Republican victims.

In a recent FT interview, Pablo Casado, the leader of the center-right opposition People’s Party, explained the government’s concerns in sync with current concerns.

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

The draft law is the third major move by a socialist-led government to challenge Franco’s legacy in this century. A 2007 law allowed state funding to bury mass burials and ordered the removal of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez Franco’s body From the Valley in 2019.

But the latter measure goes far beyond the previous ones.

In particular, the recovery of corpses from mass graves is not only the right of families, but also the duty of the state.

The government has already stepped up the pace of disruptions, which was largely interrupted in 2013, when the then Spanish PP administration repealed the 2007 law, calling it divisive.

This year, the government is funding the removal of 114 sites from wells across Spain. Overall, officials estimate that they maintain 600 mass graves.

Some sites are small, others huge. Excavators have found the bodies of more than 450 people shot by Franco’s troops at a site in Seville; He can give 1,000 in the end. Officials say another site in the province of Córdoba could hold 5,000 bodies.

The law also establishes a national DNA database for victims and intends to update Civil War teaching in schools.

Officials have acknowledged that this is one of the most explosive issues. “The state has a duty to involve these truths in the education of the people,” Calvo said. “How can someone make a political case that people don’t know about?”

The government, for the time being, has no intention of removing all 12 of the dead of the 12,000 Republicans who were exhumed from the mass graves by the Franco regime and re-buried in the valley along with their former enemies. But the law recognizes the right of families to retrieve bodies from the site. There are already about 60 requests.

The 33,000 tombs behind the chapels of the basilica would be converted into a civil cemetery and the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the fascist phalanx, would be relocated from a privileged place in front of the altar.

On the last day of June, several visitors to the valley denounced the government’s intentions. “It’s better to leave things as they are than to reopen the wounds,” said Diego, a security guard who refused to give his last name.

Others felt that Spain was facing the worst period in its history. “Our grandparents suffered a civil war. . . they thought then that there was real peace, but now things look different, ”said Professor Sol De Mosteyrín Hernández.

“We need a deep reconciliation process in this country – and that’s just getting started.”