Do Not Disturb

To the man who dreamed it up as a reminder to posterity of the glories of his reign, the $12 million war memorial in the Valley of the Fallen (TIME COLOR, Jan. 26) was becoming more embarrassing by the minute. A year and a half ago, Generalissimo Franco grandly announced that the dead on both sides of the 1936-39 Civil War would share the honor of being buried in the Valley. But his own followers were so repelled by the idea that Francisco Franco appeared to be the only sure candidate for the vast crypt. Last week he went at the problem again.

Lacking applicants from the families of the million who died in the war, the government turned to Spain's mass graves, where the dead are united in anonymity. "In the near future . . . the remains of those who fell gloriously or were sacrificed during the Crusade for Liberation" would be dug up in all common graves, makeshift cemeteries or provisional cemeteries. Relations of identified dead could rebury them in private cemeteries if they wished, but all Civil War dead, except those in single, private, identified graves in parochial cemeteries, would have to be moved. No appeal existed for those families who knew only in which cemetery or in which common grave their relatives lay.

In Madrid the Association of Martyrs hastily formed a committee among those who had relatives in the great Paracuellos de Jarama graveyard (near the new U.S. airbase of Torrejon de Ardoz), where lie 12,800 Franco supporters, most of whom were shot by Republican firing squads in 1936 and dumped into open pits. "It is not that we don't want our dead buried in the Valley of the Fallen," they explained. "It is just that we do not want their remains disturbed--not by anybody."

They protested to the Bishop of the Madrid-Alcala diocese, who replied that it should be an honor to lie in the Valley. The committee thereupon dispatched a 50-man delegation to Franco's right-hand man, Rear Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. The delegation did not get beyond his waiting room.

As tempers flared across the country, an angry member of the Paracuellos committee complained: "Common criminals can appeal their convictions, but we who have always backed Franco cannot." But at a time when Franco is having more troubles than usual, their protests were suddenly heard. The committee had already won its point. The government discreetly let it be known that the Paracuellos bodies would not be moved. At week's end there was still only one known candidate for the Valley of the Fallen.

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