The Politics of a Long-Dead Dictator Still Haunt Spain

MADRID—At General Francisco Franco’s graveside, discussion is lively. Around the tombstone of the Spanish dictator, laden with floral offerings and gazing up into the granite arches of the Valley of the Fallen’s vast basilica, visitors hold forth over the fate of the man who has been buried there for more than 40 years.

“They should not remove him,” one middle-aged woman protested to me recently, puncturing the air with a sharp finger, referring to the government’s recent decision to exhume Franco from the monument he himself dedicated and rebury him in a less exalted location. “He was good and he was bad. But he was our history, and I am Spanish,” another insisted.

A businessman in his 70s was visiting with his grandson, the first time he had been to the site in more than four decades. Proudly declaring “Our family is Franquista, and we don’t hide it,” he said he wanted the child to see Franco’s resting place before what he