People stand around the tomb of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco inside the basilica at the the Valley of the Fallen monument near El Escorial, outside Madrid.

MADRID — Even in his grave, the 20th-century dictator who ruled Spain with an iron fist keeps dividing the country.

Spain’s new center-left government says removing the embalmed body of Gen. Francisco Franco from a glorifying mausoleum will be the first among many symbolic moves aimed at coming to terms with the country’s troubled history.

Critics of the government and Franco’s descendants are pushing back, vowing to preserve the memory of a regime they claim should be credited for “modernizing Spain.”

Banning the foundation that preserves the legacy of Franco is precisely what should be done instead, says Fernando Martinez, the official appointed to oversee the government’s efforts to unearth and identify the 114,000-or-so victims of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and the four decades of dictatorship that followed under Franco, who died in 1975.

“Exhuming the body of the dictator will begin healing the wounds of this country. But that task will only be completed when the last ditch with a mass grave in this country has been opened,” Martinez told The Associated Press, speaking at the Ministry of Justice in Madrid, where his new Directorate General for Historic Memory is being formed.

Martinez says creating an up-to-date census of anonymous burials in ditches across the country will be among the most pressing tasks for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s new government. Other moves include re-opening an office to help victims’ relatives — an office closed under Spain’s previous conservative government — setting up a new system for reparation payments and turning Franco’s current burial place into a museum against fascism.

“We are going to accelerate and make up for lost time, it’s a question of democratic dignity,” says Martinez, who was appointed in July after Sanchez ousted conservative Mariano Rajoy with a no-confidence vote in June.

Three U.N-sponsored missions to Spain since 2013 had criticized authorities for lacking a national plan to search for missing people, for poor coordination on exhumations and for outdated maps of graves. They also raised concerns about the inaction of Spanish courts in prosecuting some of the period’s darkest crimes.

But a panel of U.N. rights experts just recently praised the authorities’ move for “placing the right to truth at the top of the political agenda” by leading the efforts to search for those disappeared as well as for vowing to create a Truth Commission to investigate crimes that occurred under Franco up until his death.

“This decision represents a fundamental step toward the realization of the right to truth for all victims of serious human rights violations,” the rapporteurs wrote.

The government wants to adopt the changes by amending the 2007 Historic Memory Law, which fell short of addressing the demands of survivors and victims’ relatives when Rajoy’s conservative government eliminated its budgets for exhumations and reparations.

Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory, or ARMH, says the new government should use its executive powers to remove Franco from the Valley of the Fallen — a macabre mausoleum 31 miles northwest of Madrid. He also wants the government to dig up all the graves of Franco’s victims, rather than kicking off a grand political showdown between conservative and progressive voices in parliament.

“They fear a legal backlash,” Silva said of the government. But he called digging up unmarked graves and compensating the relatives of identified victims “very basic, human things. There shouldn’t be any need to discuss them.”

With a towering 500-foot tall cross that can be seen from miles away, the somber neoclassic-style mausoleum and basilica of the Valley of the Fallen were built by Franco as a tribute to the dead during his so-called “glorious crusade” in overthrowing Spain’s democratic government.

Some 34,000 people from both sides of the fratricidal war are buried at the site, most of them never identified, along with the remains of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the fascist Spanish Falange party. Franco’s tomb, a simple granite slate with only his name engraved, presides over the altar of the basilica. Fresh flowers are always on display.

Public events supporting the Franco regime were outlawed in 2007, but the grandiose site remains a popular pilgrimage destination for those nostalgic for the dictatorship.