The body of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange—a broadly fascist political party and one of the combatant factions during the country’s civil war, who died at thirty-three before a communist firing squad—is scheduled to be exhumed from Spain’s Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid, on the 24th of April, coinciding with his birthday.
This follows his family’s decision, which was communicated to the media last October. They are reportedly anticipating the government’s intention to have the remains moved, preferring to carry this out privately. It follows a previous exhumation of Dictator Francisco Franco’s remains from the same complex in 2019.
The body will likely be reburied in a plot next to Primo de Rivera’s sister in the San Isidro cemetery, the oldest in Madrid.
A controversial figure, Primo de Rivera earned the admiration of prominent people on the (nominal, cultural) Left, such as the poet Federico García Lorca, with whom he was friends, and the anarcho-syndicalist luminary Buenaventura Durruti. Durruti apparently considered the arrest of Primo de Rivera the result of Soviet dominance in the (leftist) Popular Front, an attack on the only healthy elements on the (rightist) Nationalist side, and a deathblow to the possibility of reconciling the two factions. The convergence with Durruti isn’t difficult to identify, given that the Falange’s founder advocated for worker ownership of industry, and told his followers not to retaliate for political assassinations.
Referring to the possibility of exhumation, Santiago Abascal, leader of VOX, cited Primo de Rivera’s testament in a speech during the party’s VIVA22 event last year, to the effect that he wished his “would be the last Spanish blood spilt in our civil conflicts.” A similar sentiment was expressed in Primo de Rivera’s last words before his death in 1936, directed at his executioners:
Whoever told you I am your enemy was wrong. My dream is for a fatherland, bread, and justice for all Spaniards, but firstly for those who cannot love their fatherland because they lack bread and justice. When one is about to die, one has no reason to lie. So before you break my chest with bullets, I tell you truly: I was never your enemy.
The government’s emphasis on civil war era disputes and figures, which it has pursued by way of the Historical Memory law, leading to gross restrictions to freedom of speech, is intended as a means to mobilize voters through spurious pseudo-historical narratives while its disastrous policies continue to impoverish the working class and capitulate Spanish geopolitical interests and energy security. This game of constant polarization on the basis of invented grievances or long-past conflict, however, seems to be failing, as indicated by the emergence of anti-establishment working class-centered political discourse.
