(24 Aug 2018) LEADIN:
Spain's government has approved legal changes to exhume dictator General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen mausoleum.
The Spanish parliament is expected to ratify the controversial plan next month.
Lawmakers want the Franco-era symbol turned into a monument of reconciliation and they say the dictators remains should lie elsewhere.
The amendments to Spain's Historical Memory Law of 2007 grant the government power to exhume Franco's body. That change aims to thwart legal efforts by Franco's descendants and supporters to block the exhumation.
Removing Franco's remains from the Valley of the Fallen, a mausoleum he ordered built 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Madrid, would be a momentous event in Spain which still bears social and political scars from the 1936-39 civil war.
STORYLINE:
It's one of Spain's most chilling and controversial attractions, housing the remains of more than 30-thousand soldiers.
The Valley of the Fallen in the outskirts of Madrid was built by dictator Francisco Franco as a tribute for those fallen during his so-called "glorious crusade" in overthrowing Spain's democratic republican government during the Civil War (1936-1939).
It was planned during the war and built from 1940 to the middle of the 1950's by anti-Franco activists and republicans working under forced labour.
In the beginning, only Franco supporters were buried at the site. But Professor of history at Complutense University in Madrid, Gutmaro Gómez Bravo, says Franco later wanted his opponents buried there.
"In its original design, It intended to pay homage only to those (Francoist) heroes. Then they went around the different villages in Spain unearthing the dead republicans from the common graves and moving them there, without checking with or asking the relatives, you know relatives need to be asked for permission in order to bury the people. It wasn't done in all villages, but in a big majority of them. It is calculated that some (30,000 corpses were moved) without consent."
Some 34,000 people from both sides rest in the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen. Most of them remain unidentified.
Franco himself was buried at the site after his death in 1975. The founder of Spain's fascist movement Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, is also buried there.
In May 2017, Spanish lawmakers voted in favour of a motion urging the government to remove the remains of Franco.
The bill, which lacks executive force, plans to transform the Valley of the Fallen into a monument for reconciliation between both sides of the civil war, including the creation of a museum, and follows the recommendations contained in a report from an experts' committee issued in 2011.
"When the tomb of Franco is taken away from the Valley of the Fallen, the site would lose the partisan character that it has, it wouldn't be any more a Francoist monument, or in honour of one part of the victims of the Civil War. It would then really symbolize reconciliation in relation to a conflict that we had 80 years ago in Spain and it would… like many other things in Europe, a museum could be built, it would be useful to explain what happened to future generations and become a place that we don't need to destroy or abhor of it. It is our past and we need to integrate it in our democratic present," says Gómez Bravo.
Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz is a survivor of the forced labour who helped build the Valley of the Fallen.
He was sent there as a prisoner in 1948 after taking part in anti-Franco activities in his college. He managed to escape after four months.
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