Work begins in Spain to exhume bodies of 128 Franco victims buried anonymously at mausoleum

Initial forensic work has begun to try to exhume the bodies of 128 victims of late dictator Francisco Franco’s forces who are among tens of thousands of people buried anonymously in the Valle de Cuelgamuros mausoleum, formerly known as the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen

Spain Civil War Exhumations (Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Initial forensic work was to begin Monday to try to exhume the bodies of 128 victims of late dictator Francisco Franco’s forces who are among tens of thousands of people buried anonymously in wooden boxes underground in a mausoleum.

The team of some 15 forensic experts, archeologists, scientific police and odontologists will work on extracting samples of the remains at the Valle de Cuelgamuros mausoleum, formerly known as the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen, and try to match them with DNA of surviving relatives. A special laboratory has been set up within the mausoleum.

More than 30,000 Franco victims are buried without identification in the mausoleum. The 128 the experts are looking for are the ones whose families have so far asked for their bodies to be identified and returned. The experts do have some indications of where the boxes are that they are looking for.

The exhumations, if successful, will be the first for victims under Spain's historical memory laws that are aimed at making reparations to Franco's victims and changing the way the dictatorship is viewed in Spain.

“Finally, and perhaps too long overdue, Spanish democracy is providing an answer to these victims,” Government spokeswoman Isabel Rodríguez said on Spanish National Television TVE.

The grandiose mausoleum — with a towering cross that is visible from kilometers (miles) away — was Franco’s burial place and has always been a revered shrine for his extreme right-wing followers. It was built with forced prison labor to commemorate the fascist victory in the civil war.

In 2019, the Socialist government ordered the removal of Franco’s remains under an amended historical memory law that banned exaltation of the dictator at the site.

In April of this year, the body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spain’s fascist Falange movement, was exhumed from the site and transferred to a Madrid cemetery.

The exhumation work is expected to take weeks, if not months. It will almost certainly not be finished before July 23 elections which could see the right-wing Popular Party, or PP, ousting the Socialist-led leftist coalition government.

The PP has long opposed the historical memory law and has said it will scrap it if elected.

Many of the Franco victims were initially buried in mass graves, which were dug up at Franco’s request. The bodies were moved to the mausoleum to fill the site with victims from both sides.

Last year, Spain revamped the historical memory legislation to nullify legal decisions made during the dictatorship. It makes the central government responsible for the recovery of the still-missing bodies of tens of thousands of people forcibly disappeared by the regime.

There are an estimated 100,000 victims buried in unmarked graves or roadside ditches across the country.

Franco and other rebel officers led an uprising in 1936 that brought down Spain’s democratically elected government. The ensuing civil war ended in 1939 with hundreds of thousands dead and the country left in ruins.

After Franco won the war, he ruled the country with an iron fist until his death in 1975.