OVIEDO, Spain

Spanish authorities began the exhumation of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, a prominent figure in Spain’s fascist history, from a basilica near Madrid on Monday.

The son of Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, Jose Antonio founded the fascist Falange party and supported Francisco Franco’s military coup, which ignited the Spanish Civil War.

In 1936, republicans executed him by firing squad. The Franco regime later glorified him as one of the main fascist martyrs.

Upon completing The Valley of the Fallen, a grand monument to the Spanish Civil War housing thousands of unidentified victims, Spain’s fascist regime interred Primo de Rivera’s remains near the church altar.

When Franco died in 1975, he was buried nearby.

Even in Spain’s modern democracy, sympathizers frequently laid flowers at their tombs.

However, in 2019, Spain’s progressive government exhumed Franco from the Valley of the Fallen to a graveyard in Madrid to stop such a public form of glorification.

The government passed the Historical Memory Law last year, mandating “justice, reparation, and dignity” for victims of the civil war and 36-year dictatorship.

This law necessitated Primo de Rivera’s removal from his prestigious position, and his family requested a private exhumation and transfer to a family plot in a Madrid cemetery.

The law also restored the original name of Valley of the Fallen to Valley of Cuelgamuros.

Meanwhile, family members of some of the other 33,833 people buried in the monument continue their fight to recover the remains of their relatives, most of whom battled fascism.

Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) criticized the government for coordinating with Primo de Rivera’s family while victims’ families await the chance to remove their relatives from Spain’s largest mass grave.

The ARMH also condemned the government for retaining offensive elements in the crypt, including an inscription that reads: “Fallen for God and for Spain.”