A Madrid court has annulled the agreement of the City Council of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Madrid) granting the building permit for the work necessary to carry out the exhumations of the basilica in the Valley of the Fallen, called “Valle de Cuelgamuros”. were 2022. In a judgment to which EFE had access, the Administrative Court No. 10 of Madrid annulled this agreement of the Municipal Council of the City Council, as requested by the plaintiffs, which include the Francisco Franco Foundation. The same court had already provisionally suspended the license in November 2021, a decision that was later overturned by the Supreme Court of Madrid in an order that the Supreme Court confirmed in March this year.
The State Secretariat for Democratic Memory will appeal the verdict, said presidential ministry sources, who reiterated the government’s commitment to locate and recover the remains of the victims “as their families wish.”
The lifting came after forensic work began this summer to exhume 128 victims from the Cuelgamuros Valley. This represents a new obstacle to compliance with the court order that in 2016 granted the relatives of the Lapeña brothers the right to recover their bodies.
The forensic work to exhume 128 victims of the ancient Valley of the Fallen began on June 12 with the search for 18 bodies claimed by their relatives in the crypt of the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, including the Lapeña brothers, who come from Villarroya. de la Sierra (Zaragoza) and shot by the Francoists in 1936.
The lawyer for the families of 128 victims of the Cuelgamuros Valley, Eduardo Ranz, has regretted the renewed delay in the exhumations, which will lead to the judicial cancellation of the construction permit that allowed the bodies to be recovered. “It is an abuse that ideologically defines who dictates the resolution,” the lawyer told EFE, recalling that the same court had already provisionally suspended the municipal license in November 2021. Ranz admitted that he did not yet know the exact scope of the second sentence, since the lawsuit was not directed against the families, but against the national heritage. But it affects them directly because it means a delay in the process of recovering the bodies and “we don’t have time,” warned Ranz, who regretted this new obstacle in complying with the resolution that recognized the rights of the brothers’ relatives in 2016. Manuel and Antonio Ramiro Lapeña are supposed to recover their bodies. Of them, only one is still alive and he is very old, explained the lawyer, who insisted that “this does not help him to see the sentence fulfilled” that requires the remains to be exhumed.
Following a request to the government, the construction permit was approved in June 2021 by the Governing Council of the City Council of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (managed by the PP) and the exhumation work was approved to subsequently identify the remains of the victims of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship are in buried in the crypts of the Basilica of Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos.
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Last Wednesday, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court rejected the paralysis of the exhumation work carried out since last June in the Cuelgamuros Valley, the name given to the Valley of the Fallen after the adoption of the Democratic Remembrance Law. The Public Ministry responded to the attempt by the Association for the Defense of the Valley of the Fallen to stop this work, which aims to recover the remains of relatives of more than a hundred victims of the Civil War; the majority, retaliation by the Franco dictatorship.
In a document submitted to the regional court, the public prosecutor’s office emphasizes that the suspension of the exhumations “would in itself mean obvious damage to the victims’ right to truth and reparation”: “And in particular to the fulfillment of the duty of the public administration, with the localization , exhumation and identification of missing persons.” Article 16 of the Democratic Memory Law, which came into force in October last year, stipulates that “the general administration of the state is responsible for the search for people who disappeared during the war and dictatorship.”