Spain faces its past in mass graves bill. Will it be enough?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

GUADALAJARA, Spain (AP) — Carnations in hand, 94-year-old Julio López del Campo has come decade after decade to mark the spot where he believes the body of his brother, Mariano, was tossed into a pit along with other victims of the brutal regime of Francisco Franco in Spain.

“They took him to the prison in Guadalajara and in 1940 he was shot,” Julio said at the site next to a cemetery chapel. “I have come here every year since. I bring carnations and leave a few. I will keep coming until my strength gives out.”

More than 70 years on, the mass grave in Guadalajara, a small city just east of Spain’s capital, Madrid, has finally been dug up, and 26 bodies were recovered. Julio now hopes that a genetic test will confirm that Mariano’s remains are among them.

The Guadalajara exhumation was carried out by volunteer associations who, along with some of Spain’s regional authorities, have led the fight to recover the missing and return them a shred of the dignity they have been denied for over half a century.

https://apnews.com/article/europe-spain-franco-guadalajara-6df5eb517e65cd605ed7ef7f35a5f562

[Goonch]

1. The remains of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco were exhumed from his mausoleum

The Valley of the Fallen (Spanish: Valle de los Caídos (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈbaʎe ðe los kaˈiðos])), is a Catholic basilica and a monumental memorial in the municipality of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, erected at Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid.[1][2] Dictator Francisco Franco claimed that the monument was meant to be a "national act of atonement" and reconciliation.[3] It served as the burial place of Franco's remains from his death in November 1975 until his exhumation on 24 October 2019, as a result of efforts to remove all public veneration of his dictatorship, and following a long and controversial legal process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Fallen

[regnaD kciN]

2. I've been to that hideous place as a child...

It was an enormous monument to twentieth-century fascism – cold, cavernous, and evil. If there were any justice, the token remains of the Franco opponents buried there would be exhumed and returned to their original graves (from which the police state removed them without permission from their families) and the rest of the Godforsaken place would be walled-off and abandoned, never to be approached again.

[Ghost Dog]

3. The Franco dictatorship enjoyed US support

through all the years of its existence. The USA now supports the dictatorship in neighboring Morocco.