TIME FOR CHANGE

Spain to Exhume Fascist Leader’s Remains

It’s part of the left-wing government’s goal to stop honoring the Franco dictatorship.

The body of fascist leader Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera will be dug up on Monday and removed from a huge mausoleum built by the former far-right dictator Francisco Franco. The remains of Primo de Rivera, who founded the Falange movement that supported the Franco regime, will be taken from the so-called Valley of the Fallen complex and reburied in Madrid’s San Isidro cemetery. The Valley of the Fallen was built by Franco to memorialize the 500,000 people killed in the Spanish civil war between 1936 and 1939, but was returned to the site’s original name—Valley of Cuelgamuros—last year. Franco’s own remains were removed from the complex in 2019. “It’s another step in the resignification of the valley,” Presidency Minister Felix Bolanos said of Primo de Rivera’s exhumation. “No person or ideology that evokes the dictatorship should be honored or extolled there.”