The Ministry of Culture has announced this Thursday that it has initiated the necessary procedures for the illegalization of the Franco Foundation to comply with the Democratic Memory Law, which establishes as a cause for the extinction of a foundation, for being “contrary” to the general interest, “ “the apology for Francoism that praises the coup d’état and the dictatorship or praises its leaders, with contempt and humiliation of the dignity of the victims.” In an interview with this newspaper, the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, had already anticipated last May that the start of the procedure was imminent. As a first step, the Ministry of Culture will request reports from the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory and the Registry of Foundations to collect the necessary data to motivate the opening of the extinction file. The Foundation will then have a period in which it can present allegations. The final decision will be up to the judges.
Created in 1976, the Franco Foundation presents itself as a “cultural institution, without political affiliation.” Various articles on his website describe the dictator like this: “during his tenure he managed to build the foundations on which it was possible to build the democracy that we enjoy”; “His outstanding figure has many more positive than negative dimensions and his successes are considerably greater than his mistakes”; “He has always sought direct and cordial contact with the Spanish people, who, in turn, have reciprocated with unconditional support, granting him full and seamless authority, in a phenomenon unparalleled by any other politician in our contemporary history. ”. In the article Guernica: tragedy, lie and farcesigned by Miguel Plato and originally published on the web Digital Freedom, is presented as a kind of achievement that only 126 people died and is presumed to be “the exemplary reconstruction of the town carried out by Devastated Regions” after the Franco bombing, supported by Nazi aviation. The brutal attack, one of the first indiscriminate bombings against the civilian population, inspired Picasso’s most famous work.
Interviewed by this newspaper in 2020, when the possibility of illegalization began to be talked about, the president of the Franco Foundation, Juan Chicharro, declared: “We had overcome the war, but they lead us to the same thing.” In the interview, he promised to fight the illegalization in court and move the country’s headquarters if necessary. The foundation has an archive of 30,000 original documents – “letters from Hitler, Mussolini, the Duke of Alba… Franco was very meticulous, he kept everything” – but it is not willing to hand them over to a public center, which has criticized historians like Julián Casanova.
Pablo de Greiff, former United Nations special rapporteur for the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition and current UN commissioner for Ukraine, has denounced on several occasions that the existence of the Franco Foundation “is an anomaly in Europe, where there is nothing similar and there is legislation that prevents the advocacy of hatred and criminalizes denialism.” For this reason, he celebrated that the Democratic Memory Law, approved in October 2022, brought Spain “closer to the European context, where there is no room for a Hitler Foundation or a Mussolini Foundation.”
Precisely this Thursday, the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, reported that the ministry will report to the Prosecutor’s Office what happened last Tuesday in the Balearic Parliament, where its president, Gabriel Le Senne, of Vox, broke the photograph of a victim of Francoism, Aurora Picornell, during a plenary session in which, with the votes of the extreme right party and those of the PP, the consideration of a proposal to repeal the autonomous memory law was approved. After consulting the ministry’s legal services, Torres explained that Le Senne’s attitude may constitute “a hate crime” and that they will also study the possibility of applying “sanctions provided for in the state’s Democratic Memory Law.” Furthermore, he added, the socialist parliamentary group can present a disapproval to the president of the Balearic Parliament or request that the board be sanctioned. Trade unionist and feminist, Picornell was the promoter of Working Women’s Day in Mallorca. Her father, Gabriel Picornell, a carpenter, was murdered in Porreres that same year. He was a member of the PSOE and in the 1920s he had been one of the promoters of the Palma Communist Group. Two of Aurora’s other brothers, Gabriel and Ignasi, were also killed. The youngest, Joan, managed to flee to France, but ended up in the Nazi Dachau concentration camp and died shortly after his release from the aftermath.
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