Franco tomb decision delayed

A committee of experts appointed by the government to decide on the future of the Valley of the Fallen, a massive monument to Franco's Civil War victory, will not have its report ready until after the November 20 general elections.

The group was supposed to have completed the document by this month, but it has requested a deadline extension for two reasons: first, no consensus has yet been reached on the best way to turn a monument that immortalizes the Nationalist victory into a place of reconciliation and a museum of historical memory focusing on the 1936-1939 war and subsequent dictatorship.

Second, the committee does not want its decision to be turned into a political weapon in the middle of the election campaign. The ruling Socialists were behind the initiative to remodel the famous mausoleum where Franco is buried, whereas the center-right Popular Party, which is expected to win the elections, opposes any changes to the Valle de los Caídos, located north of Madrid and easily identified by the enormous cross that presides it.

Ever since the cabinet approved the creation of the committee last May, experts have been consulting all available information on the legal, historical and cultural aspects of the monument, debating whether it is convenient to disinter Franco's remains and, if so, how. Other issues still up in the air include whether to modify the role played by the Benedictine monks who run the basilica there, whether it is possible to transfer the remains of Republican fighters who were buried there without family consent (government forensic experts were against it for technical reasons) and what sculptural and architectural designs might best turn the site into a place "that dignifies the memory of the victims of the Civil War and subsequent repression who lie there."

A total of 33,833 bodies were brought here from cemeteries and mass graves between 1959 and 1983. Of these, 21,423 have been identified.

In all these months, the experts have not reached a single conclusion nor produced a single document. Nor have they voted on any proposal, leading to their request for an extension to the report deadline. At the time of their appointment, nobody foresaw that the general elections of 2012 would be pushed to November of this year, making it impossible for the current government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to implement the committee's recommendations in any case.

Cabinet secretary Ramón Jáuregui set two red lines at the committee's first meeting: the 150-meter cross could not be touched, and the Benedictine monks must remain. The 12-member committee is chaired by Virgilio Zapatero, who was an official in Felipe González's earlier Socialist government. Members include historians, philosophers, jurists and even a monk.

The government said at one point that if the committee decided the only way to turn the Valley of the Fallen into a democratic monument was to exhume Franco's remains, it would do so regardless of what his family said. The most likely spot for burial, said a few committee experts, would be the cemetery of Mingorrubio, where Franco's wife Carmen Polo lies buried. The decision will now depend on the next executive, but Jáuregui said he trusts that "no government can put this report by experts with scientific and ideological plurality into a back drawer."