Arrests as Spain exhumes fascist movement’s founder

Police struggle to hold back a crowd of about 150 Falange supporters

Supporters of the founder of Spanish fascist Falange party, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, scuffle with police officers outside the San Isidro cemetery (Juan Medina/Reuters)

There have been a number of arrests after police clashed with sympathisers of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of Spain's fascist Falange movement that supported the Francoist regime, as his body was exhumed from a mausoleum near Madrid.

Police struggled to hold back a crowd of about 150 Falange supporters gathered outside the San Isidro cemetery in southern Madrid, where he was taken to be reburied. They gave the fascist salute and sang the Falangist hymn "Facing the sun". There were three arrests for public disorder, according to a police source.

Earlier, a smaller crowd outside the gates of the complex formerly known as the Valley of the Fallen also made the fascist salute and held up banners saying "Jose Antonio is present" or shouted "Long live Spain" as his hearse drove past.

His exhumation, which follows the 2019 removal of the remains of dictator Francisco Franco, is part of a plan to convert the complex built by Franco, which last year was renamed the Valley of Cuelgamuros, into a memorial to the 500,000 people killed during Spain's 1936 to 1939 civil war.

Spain's Minister for the Treasury and Public Function, Maria Jesus Montero, said on the eve of the exhumation that it was important to deliver "justice" for the victims of fascism in Spain. "It's very important that definitive steps are being taken to comply with a law that wants to give reparations and memory to the victims of the coup d'etat," she said.

The son of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, who governed Spain from 1923 to 1930, Jose Antonio was shot by firing squad in November 1936 by left-wing Republican forces in Alicante.

It is the fifth time his body has been buried and the fourth time it has been exhumed.

In 1939, after having lain in two different mass graves in Alicante, his coffin was paraded 300 miles (500km) from the eastern coastal city to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a town near Madrid where Spain's royals are buried. His remains were moved again on the completion of the Valley of the Fallen monument 20 years later and buried under the altar of the basilica, where Franco would join him on his death in 1975.

Franco, a conservative general, and Primo de Rivera, a flamboyant playboy, had little love for each other, according to Franco's biographer Paul Preston. Franco sabotaged several efforts to organise a rescue or a prisoner swap that would have saved Primo de Rivera's life, Preston wrote in his biography.

His death allowed Franco to eliminate a rival and take control of the Falangists, subsuming them to a broader far-right movement that supported his dictatorship.

The government is carrying out works in the mausoleum to permit access to the crypts where 34,000 people's remains, many of them victims of Franco's regime, are buried anonymously, allowing families to identify their relatives.

Last year, Spain approved a new law on historical memory that nullified 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.

Reuters