MADRID — The exhumation of Spain’s former dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, expected in the coming week, will be “a great victory for Spanish democracy,” argues Pedro Sánchez, the caretaker Socialist prime minister.

Other Spanish politicians have denounced the decision to remove Franco as an attempt to reopen old wounds in Spanish society, 44 years after Franco’s death and 80 years after he won the Spanish Civil War — and to bolster Mr. Sánchez’s campaign ahead of elections on Nov. 10.

And then there is the issue of the thousands of people whom Franco buried in his memorial, known as the Valley of the Fallen, a huge monument carved into a mountain outside Madrid. Several of their relatives are now hoping that Franco’s exhumation will help their own quest to rebury their loved ones.

Among them is Fausto Canales, 85, who painstakingly researched the history of his lost father and uncle, to discover that the brothers both ended up in the Valley of the Fallen, for very different reasons.