MADRID (Reuters) – Spain abolished 33 aristocratic titles handed out by dictator Francisco Franco and his successor to loyal lieutenants and family on Friday as a new “Democratic Memory” law took effect.
The measure affects two of Franco’s grandchildren, as well as the descendants of several of his top generals, ministers and other high-ranking officials.
Franco ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975 after leading a military coup against the Second Republic’s elected leftist Popular Front government, which resulted in a three-year civil war that cost 500,000 lives.
The law, which recently cleared its final parliamentary hurdle in the upper house, equates “glorifying perpetrators of crimes against humanity” with humiliating the Franco regime’s victims and strikes out titles that exalt the civil war and military dictatorship.
While most titles were granted by Franco himself as a reward for loyalty, five people affected by the law were ennobled by his successor as head of state, former King Juan Carlos I, in the first months of his reign following Franco’s death.
Francisco Franco Martinez-Bordiu, the autocrat’s eldest male grandchild who inherited the lordship of Meiras from Franco’s widow, Carmen Polo, described abolition of the title as “nonsense without any practical effects” in a July interview with newspaper El Independiente.
“I will continue to be Lord of Meiras even if the government doesn’t recognise it,” he said.
His sister, Carmen Martinez-Bordiu, will be stripped of the Duchy of Franco, bestowed by Juan Carlos I on Franco’s only daughter shortly after the strongman died in late 1975.
Others affected by the bill include relatives of the fascist Falange party’s founder, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, and descendants of generals Gonzalo Queipo de Llano and Juan Yagüe, who ordered massacres of civilians in the cities of Seville and Badajoz, respectively.
Fourteen years after Spain passed its first “Historic Memory” law, the new legislation pushed through by the centre-left government aims to eliminate loopholes and cover a wider range of victims and crimes related to Franco.
It also promotes the search and exhumations of victims buried in over 3,000 documented mass graves. At least 114,000 civilians were forcibly disappeared during the war and subsequent repression, according to a 2008 court ruling.
(Reporting by David Latona; Editing by Aislinn Laing)
