Anyone over a certain age can remember images of José Antonio Primo de Rivera on the walls of a not-so-remote Barcelona, ​​when the Gran Via bore his name. Normally it was a foreshortening of a face with a soft chin, straight nose, and glitter hairdo next to the one that wore the emblem of the yoke and arrows and the word “Present!”

It had been 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 the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler for decades. Even Franco’s own.

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 up like an animal and invaded us with violence. It was a feeling similar to the one I experienced years later in front of the remains of fascism. On the monuments in 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 the 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 those places. A megalomaniac and excessive funerary complex loaded with symbolic force that invoked the ghosts of a cruel past. It was impossible to walk through the compound, in the imposing setting of the Sierra del Guadarrama, without imagining legions of blue shirts waving their arms raised and chanting the slogans of the regime.

Until four days ago, in his basilica and flanked by the shocking statues of Juan de Ávalos, were the remains of the dictator, finally exhumed. Only those of the founder of the Spanish Falange remained, next to the main altar, finally transferred to the family sepulcher where they should always have been.

Inevitably, this has given rise to a new controversy in this country, where the reckoning with the past has not ended. Where democratically redefining the places of memory is equated with fanning 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 Eastern cemetery 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 the Alicante prison in 1936, did not participate in war crimes or in those perpetrated after 1939. Also that his burial in the Valle in 1959 was a maneuver by Franco to give his regime 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 ordered by the republican government was unjust (although it seems quite documented that José Antonio worked in favor of the rebellion of the army in collusion with foreign powers) and a serious mistake. But that does not make him a character to claim 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 commentators of Mein Kampf. He always criticized the racial component of Nazism, but he admired Hitler and Mussolini and radicalized his speech to the beat of their successes. It is not necessary to resort to the hackneyed cliché of “the dialectic of fists and pistols” to remember that he encouraged his comrades to take to the streets “to shoot so that things do not stay as they are” against the government of the Republic. He was the son of a dark age and paid dearly for it, but he deserves little more than objective analysis and a discreet grave. It is well exhumed.