The operation comes six months after Spain passed the so-called democratic memory law which is designed to tackle the legacy of the 1936-39 civil war and the decades of dictatorship that followed. Executed in November 1936 at the start of the war for conspiring against the elected Republican government, Primo de Rivera was in 1959 buried inside the basilica in the Valley of the Fallen, 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Madrid.