The family Frank has gone to the Supreme Court to come to a halt the exhumation of the dictator of the Valley of the Fallen, that the Government intends to make before the end of the year. “Nothing would serve my constituents that the justice end up giving them the reason, years after they have had to go through the bitter treatment of exhumation as humiliating as painful for them and against their will. There is No compensation that can compensate the moral damage they would inflict,” says in the appeal the lawyer of the family, Luis Felipe Utrera-Molina, son of the minister franco José Utrera-Molina.
The resource, advance for The Spanish, was presented last November 29, before the third chamber of administrative litigation of the Supreme. The family alleges that failure to take precautionary measures to them would cause “irreparable harm”; it ensures the agreement of the Council of Ministers to follow through with the paperwork causes them “helplessness” and complaint the non-compliance of the term of the allegations have not taken into account in the procedure, “the existence of many other families whose family members are also buried in the Valley of the Fallen, without having been victims of the Civil War and not yet have been neither notified nor heard.” The royal decree law last August approved the modification of article 16 of the law of historical memory 2007, to establish that in the Valley of the Fallen “will only be able to lie the mortal remains of persons deceased as a result of the Spanish Civil War, as a place of commemoration, remembrance and tribute to the Betorder victims of the conflict”.
The resource the Franco recalls that the prior administrator of the benedictine Abbey of the Valley of the Fallen, James Quarry, presented on the 27th of September, a written statement giving account of the existence of 19 benedictine monks who died after the Civil War and were buried in the mausoleum, as well as other 30 people killed between 1940 and 1959 inhumadas in the interior of the basilica. The Association for the Defence of the Valley of the Fallen presented, in turn, a list of 165 names buried in the mausoleum after the 1 of April of 1939, at the conclusion of the Civil War. The family of the dictator understands that the families of all of them should be heard before starting the process.
The family is trying to win time with the appeal to the Supreme, in which he denounced a “media spectacle unprecedented” and remember how, once expressed his desire to move the remains to the cathedral of The Almudena —if finally carried out the exhumation, the Government also refused, something that, according to the attorney fails to comply with the own rules that the Executive had been given. “The hurry and the promises of a Government can’t trample the rights of some individuals”, adds the paper. Franco also recalled that the tomb of his grandfather has already been “defiled” -in allusion to a painted – recently.
The Valley of the Fallen contains the remains of at least 33.847 people, the equivalent of the city of Teruel. Know the identity of 21.317 of them and ignores the remaining 12.530. In recent years, representatives of human rights organizations, such as the then UN rapporteur Pablo de Greiff, have called attention to the “anomaly”, which assumes that more than four decades after his death, the Valley of the Fallen to continue to be what Franco wanted it to be: a monument to himself and his victory in the Civil War. Mussolini was buried initially in an anonymous tomb, but the body was stolen by his supporters and buried it again in his village in a place which today is a centre of pilgrimage for the nostalgic of fascism. The remains of Hitler were burnt.
