Anyone of a certain age can remember images of Primo de Rivera on the walls of a not-so-remote Barcelona, when the Gran Via bore his name. It was usually the foreshortening of a face with a soft chin, a straight nose, and a glittery hairdo next to the yoke and arrows emblem and the word “¡Presente!”.
It was part of the iconography of Francoism since 1938 - when the rebel government of Burgos proclaimed November 20 as a day of mourning for his death and decreed the inscription on the walls of the names of those who fell in the "crusade" or as victims of the Marxist revolution – and survived for decades the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler. Even Franco himself.
Those portraits of the absent always inspired me with fear, as if they were an indelible vestige of tyranny, of a smell of death that rose like an animal and invaded us with violence. It was a feeling similar to the one I experienced years later in front of the remnants of fascism. In the monuments of Munich that survived the war and still cast their shadow on the present. The Führer building, or the ruins of the “temples of honor” that kept the bodies of the National Socialist martyrs; Leni Riefenstahl's powerful images of party congresses in Nuremberg; the anti-aircraft spotlights projected as columns of light according to the taste of Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer. So many years later they continued to inspire the same fear, and suggest an insult to the memory of their victims.
The Valley of the Fallen was another of these places. A megalomaniac and excessive funeral complex loaded with symbolic force that invoked the ghosts of a cruel past. It was impossible to walk around the compound, in the imposing setting of the Sierra del Guadarrama, without imagining legions of blue shirts saluting with raised arms and chanting the slogans of the regime.
Until four days ago, in the basilica and flanked by the chilling statues of Juan de Ávalos, there were the remains of the dictator, finally exhumed. All that remained, next to the high altar, were those of the founder of Falange Española, finally transferred to the family tomb where they should always have been.
Inevitably, this has sparked a new controversy in this country, where scores against the past have not been settled. Where democratically resignifying places of memory is tantamount to stoking the embers of civil war and, as recently as 2019, the mayor of Madrid returned the name to several streets dedicated to prominent Francoists and removed the memorial from the cemetery of It is dedicated to the Thirteen Roses, the socialist militants shot in August 1939.
It is true that, as those who criticize this latest exhumation say, José Antonio, shot by the Popular Front government in Alicante prison in 1936, did not participate in war crimes or those committed after 1939. Also that his burial in the Valley in 1959 was a maneuver by Franco to endow the regime with ideological legitimacy. In reality, both he and Carrero Blanco were booed as traitors by some Falangists who even tried to make the corpse disappear from the mausoleum. And there is little doubt that the execution decreed by the Republican government was unjust (although it seems quite documented that José Antonio worked in favor of the army rebellion in collusion with foreign powers) and a serious mistake. But this does not make him a character that needs to be vindicated from the perspective of a democratic culture, nor a symbol of reconciliation.
José Antonio was the founder of a proudly fascist organization when fascism had already stained its hands with blood in Italy and Germany and, together with Ramiro Ledesma and Onésimo Redondo, one of the glossators of Mein Kampf. He always criticized the racial component of Nazism, but he admired Hitler and Mussolini and radicalized the discourse to match their achievements. It is not necessary to resort to the well-worn cliché of "the dialectic of fists and guns" to remember that he encouraged his comrades to throw themselves into the streets "to fire shots so that things do not remain as they are" against the government of the Republic . He was the son of a dark age and paid dearly for his mistakes, but he deserves little more than an objective analysis and a discreet grave. It is well exhumed.
