Spanish authorities exhumed the body of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera from a mountainside mausoleum near Madrid on Monday, and moved the remains of the fascist leader to a city cemetery.

A group of his supporters gathered outside the gates, giving the fascist salutes and held up banners, including the ones reading "Jose Antonio is present" as the hearse drove past.

Another group was gathered at Madrid's San Isidro cemetery, where some of them broke through a police line to perform fascist salutes and sing the anthem of Primo de Rivera's fascist Falange movement.

This marks the fourth exhumation and the fifth burial for the founder of the Falange party.

The move reflects the efforts by Spain's current government, led by left-leaning Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, to come to terms with the country's fascist movements and Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

Son of a military ruler

Franco was not the first military dictator in Spain. In 1923, military officer Miguel Primo de Rivera led a coup to become prime minister, and remained in power until resigning in 1930. He died shortly afterwards. His son Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera founded the fascist Falange Espanola party in 1933, when he was 30 years old.

He was arrested, and his party outlawed in March 1936. A few months later, a group of military officers including Francisco Franco launched a coup against the democratic government which grew into the Spanish Civil War. Republican forces aligned with the government executed Primo de Rivera in November 1936.

Franco and Primo de Rivera were not particularly close. However, the future dictator used Primo de Rivera's death to take control of his party and has publicly lionized the young fascist for propaganda purposes in the years to come.

Sharing the grave site with Franco

Primo de Rivera's body was initially laid into a mass grave in the coastal town of Alicante. Then it was moved to another mass grave in the same city. After Franco seized full power in 1939, however, he was exhumed and his coffin paraded to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where members of the Spanish royal family are buried.

In the late 1950s, the body was moved again to the mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, a massive Franco-era project to commemorate his regime's victory in the war. Franco himself was buried next Primo de Rivera following his death in 1975.

But Spain's current government has been pushing for a new approach to Franco's legacy. In 2019, they moved Franco's body to a more modest location. Last year, they passed a new Democratic Memory Law and renamed the Valley of the Fallen back to its pre-war name, Valley of Cuelgamuros, part of the effort to transform the site into a monument to war victims.

On Friday, Presidency Minister Felix Bolanos told reporters in Barcelona that moving Primo de Rivera's body was "another step in the resignification of the valley."

"No person or ideology that evokes the dictatorship should be honored or extolled there," he said.

dj/jcg (Reuters, AP, AFP)