MADRID (Reuters) – Three people were arrested on Monday after police clashed with sympathizers of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish fascist Falange movement that supported Franco’s regime, whose body was exhumed from a mausoleum near Madrid.
Police struggled to hold back a crowd of about 150 Falange supporters gathered outside the San Isidro cemetery in southern Madrid, where he had been taken for reburial. They gave the fascist salute and sang the battalion hymn “Facing the Sun”. A police source stated that the three arrests were due to disturbing public order.
Earlier, a smaller crowd outside the gates of the compound formerly known as the Valley of the Fallen gave the fascist salute and held up signs saying “José Antonio is here” or shouted “Long live Spain” as his body passed.
His exhumation, which followed the removal of the remains of dictator Francisco Franco in 2019, is part of a plan to turn the complex that Franco built on a mountain near the capital into a memorial to the 500,000 people killed during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.
The remains of some 34,000 people, many of them victims of the Franco regime, are buried in the unidentified complex.
On Friday, Presidential Secretary Felix Bolanos welcomed the exhumation. He said at the time: “No person or ideology that stirs up dictatorship there should be honored or glorified.”
The Phalange Party still exists but does not have any seats in parliament. In 2019, the anti-immigrant Vox party became the first far-right party to win representation in the Spanish Parliament since the restoration of democracy in 1977.
José Antonio, son of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, who ruled Spain from 1923 to 1930, was shot and killed in November 1936 by leftist Republican forces in Alicante.
This is the fifth time his body has been buried and the fourth time it has been exhumed.
In 1939, after lying in two different mass graves in Alicante, his coffin was shown 500 km (300 mi) from the eastern port city to San Lorenzo de Escorial, a town near Madrid where members of Spain’s royal family were buried.
His remains were moved back to the Valley of the Martyrs monument 20 years later and buried under the altar of the cathedral.
Franco, a conservative general, and Primo de Rivera, a brilliant boy, had little love for each other, according to Franco biographer Paul Preston.
In his autobiography, Preston wrote that Franco sabotaged many efforts to organize a rescue or prisoner exchange that would have saved Primo de Rivera’s life.
His death allowed Franco to eliminate a rival and take control of the Falangists, and grouped them into a broader far-right movement that supported his dictatorship.
On Monday, the government said work was underway at the mausoleum at the site, now called Quilgamurus Valley, to give access to the crypts to carry out the exhumations of 121 people, as requested by their families.
Additional reporting by Charlie Devereux and Emma Pinedo; Editing by David Latona
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