Purging Franco

[Peikko 1,575]

Most statues of General Franco have been removed from public display. Photograph: Inaki Gomez/Corbis

For almost four decades General Francisco Franco was someone Spaniards could not escape. He was there in school books, church prayers, statues, plaques, street names and thousands of other reminders of a violent insurrection that led to a vicious civil war.

Now his face and name are being erased from public view. Even the army, where nostalgia for the dictator survived long after his death in 1975, has pledged to remove all plaques, statues and monuments to the regime of a man it once revered as the saviour of the nation. A full list of the Francoist paraphernalia still lurking inside the country's barracks will be ready by the end of the year. Then the cull will start.

"There are more than 300 of them," admitted Constantino Méndez, the defence secretary.

Apart from a single statue of Franco that overlooks the port in the Spanish north African enclave of Melilla, military installations have become the last hiding place of the old dictator. He still presides over a patio in the regional military headquarters in Valencia, for example, and peeks over the walls of a barracks in Melilla which has become home to one of the equestrian statues that have been removed from Spain's streets.

"In the last few years the military has become the final guardian of his memory," said Jesús de Andrés, a political science lecturer at Madrid's UNED university. "A good number of statues have ended up in military installations."

Old Francoists have all but given up the fight to conserve the symbols that the caudillo left behind, especially since the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero passed a 2007 law calling for them to be removed. The final decision on what needed removing was left in the hands of town and city halls, however, with some rightwing mayors still refusing to change streets named after Franco or remove plaques.

Now campaigners want Franco himself moved. His corpse lies in the biggest of all the monuments to Francoism – the underground basilica at the Valley of the Fallen, built by Franco with the help of forced labour drawn from the prisoners of the Republican side of the civil war. It now belongs to the state. "I'm paying for his grave to be looked after with my taxes," said Emilio Silva, of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. "He stole enough money when he was alive. They should take his body and give it to his family so that they can do whatever they want with it."

Franco and the leader of the far-right Falangist party, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, are the only two people buried inside the basilica. The dictator, however, ordered that some 40,000 corpses of civil war victims be buried in the crypts and tunnels around it. Now some of their relatives also want to remove their dead. Last week parliament told the government to prepare a list of all the Republicans buried there.

"I was two when the Falange gunmen came to our village, took my father away and shot him," said Fausto Canales, of Pajares de Adaja, near Avila, central Spain. "They threw his body and that of nine others into a well and then came back 23 years later to get them and take them to the Valley of the Fallen."

Canales, now 72, knows exactly where, in the labyrinth surrounding the basilica, his father's remains are. "My father was a labourer and a Republican but now he is with Franco," he said. "We won't rest until we get him back."

Link

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Well raking up that whole era is going to put people's backs up, but its still within the living memory I guess.

As symbolic gestures go I'm not sure what its supposed to accomplish.

Incidentally, I think Spain has been better able than say Italy of purging its fascist past.

There was a story on German TV last week about members of the Italian police openly making Nazi salutes.

[Chica Yeyé 41]

If my grandfathers were alive, they would rejoice

Thanks for the post Cleo.