With 47 votes in favor and 3 against (of the right-wing Popular Party) the Basque Parliament approved that the regional government make all the necessary steps before the Executive of Madrid to transfer to the Basque Country the remains of all “the republicans, militias, gudaris -soldiers- and citizens of Basque origin buried unjustly in the place known as Fallen Valley”.



An amendment was also added to the initially proposed resolution, requesting "an exhaustive investigation to determine the number of Basque fallen fighters and proceed to their identification, when and why they were transferred and if they had family authorization to do so.”



According to an investigation carried out in 2008 on the Fallen Valley by historians Iñaki Egaña and Jimi Jiménez, the presence of at least 1,195 Basques was detected.

Their remains were buried in the dictator Franco monument, despite them being nationalists, socialists, communists and Basque anarchists, who were transferred between 1959 and 1963, to complete the filling of the huge ossuaries that make up the monument.

According to Egaña more than half of these people are still to be identified, "but in any case they were republicans”, he affirms.



The request of the autonomous Parliament comes at a time when Spanish society relives the ghosts of its past in regard to the long and bloody dictatorship of General Franco and the Civil War that preceded it.



The recent decision of the current Socialist Government to exhumate the remains of the Dictator and transfer them out of the Fallen Valley, has provoked a strong and bitter social, media and political debate, where the nostalgic and defenders of the dictatorship have emerged among high military ranks, sectors of the Catholic Church, and a political right that is the direct daughter of the Franco regime.


The Basque Parliament was the first of its kind to have taken that initiative, which is not a coincidence given that this region suffered with special cruelty not only the war but also an intense repression during the forty years of dictatorship, in an attempt to extirpate all kinds of Basque national sentiment.



The memory of persecution and repression is still very present in Basque society, which for twenty years has regularly known the location and exhumation of mass graves hidden for decades, where the remains of thousands of people were thrown, exposing terrible cases that were never judged or condemned.

One example is the shocking revelation, less than two years ago, in the neighbouring and sister province of Navarra, of the finding of the remains of a woman and her six young children, who were thrown alive into a deep well where they finally died.

But the Basque Country is not the only area that has yet to quantify the horrors of the Franco regime. For example, the regional chamber of the Aragon region is also currently taking steps in the same direction.



Beyond the search for historical truth, recognition and justice, the fierce debate around Franco and his regime maintains current projections because during the post-Franco transition none of the state apparatuses (police, judicial, military and political) were purged, nor were responsibilities demanded.

The same applies to the Catholic Church, the financial oligarchy that actively supported the dictatorship and above all the current Monarchy, which was designated by Franco himself as his legitimate successor, as far back as the 1960s.



Thus the pending accounts with the last dictatorship are projected in a society where the population under 60 "discover" with some surprise what was concealed and carefully disguised for forty years, because of political interests of which were also part the leading socialist and communist leaders who constituted the main nucleus of the opposition at the time.