Spain`s Franco Stripped Of Honorary Mayor Title

Many Spaniards are still divided about the rights and wrongs of the country`s 1936-1939 civil war.

Former dictator General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, was posthumously stripped of title as honorary mayor on Thursday by the town where he was born.

The town council of Ferrol, in the northwest Spanish region of Galicia, took the vote after a motion by left-wing Galician party, the Galician Nationalist Block (BNG), a council spokeswoman said.

Many Spaniards are still divided about the rights and wrongs of the country's 1936-1939 civil war and the subsequent Franco dictatorship.

Statues of Franco and street names commemorating him have gradually disappeared from Spanish towns during three decades of democracy.

A judge last week dropped attempts to probe the disappearance of 130,000 people during and after the civil war, many of them shot by Franco's forces and buried in mass graves.

Prosecutors said the investigation defied a 1977 amnesty law covering the war.

Judge Baltasar Garzon said he now expected local courts to open 19 mass graves he had identified and exhume remains including those of poet Federico Garcia Lorca.