16 September 2018

Can exhumation kill Franco once and for all?

Al Jazeera English

In August, the Spanish government issued a decree paving the way to exhume the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco from their current place of honour in the Valley of the Fallen, a massively creepy monument north of Madrid.
The dictator's family members have been given until September 15 to select a new resting place for him; otherwise, the state will decide. The transfer will, theoretically, take place later this year. 
The English-language edition of Spain's El Pais newspaper quotes Franco's grandchildren as complaining that the decree constitutes an "act of retrospective revenge without precedent in the civilised world".
Indeed, it would be most uncivilised to disturb the embalmed body of the man responsible for terrorising Spain for much of the last century. 
After all, only half a million people are estimated to have perished in the civil war of 1936-39 that brought Franco to power, where he remained until his death in 1975. 
On top of that, a mere 114,000 or so were disappeared during the war and ensuing dictatorship, many of them executed by Francoist death squads and deposited in mass graves that have yet to be excavated.
The Valley of the Fallen, incidentally, was itself built by the forced labour of political prisoners held by the fascist regime. It also houses the bones of more than 33,000 unidentified victims of the civil war. 
Other perks of Franco's enlightened rule included the practice of trafficking in newborns, which continued after the dictator's death and - according to some observers - resulted inhundreds of thousands of stolen Spanish babies.
But just how much progress does the forcible migration of Franco's remains signify? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.