Miguel Hernández’s family will not be the only ones who will receive a declaration of recognition and reparation on October 31. The anti-Franco militant Enrique Ruano and Ángeles Flórez Peón, known as Maricuela and considered the last living militia member, will be two of the names that will accompany her in the event that the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory is organizing on the occasion of the day in tribute to the victims of the dictatorship, according to sources from the Secretary of State. of Democratic Memory.
In practice, this declaration, which will also be delivered to Vicente Aleixandre, as EFE has announced, is a document signed by Minister Ángel Víctor Torres on behalf of the Government and is a figure contained in the Democratic Memory Law, which ends after two years, to which the victims of the Civil War and Francoism are entitled. In them, the State itself admits that they were and, in some way, it is made official that the sentences that were imposed on them are not valid because the law itself annuls them “due to defects of form and substance” and declares the courts illegitimate and illegal. who issued them.
So far, 572 of these types of declarations have been granted, according to figures from the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory. The last one to the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, executed by garrote on March 2, 1974, but also Lluis Companys, María Teresa León, Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz or those imprisoned by CCOO in case 1,001 have received them, in addition to anonymous people who They were subjected to persecution, violence and repression for political reasons.
“Enrique Ruano has been murdered”
The story of Enrique Ruano, which is the first chapter of the TVE series Las Abogadas, illustrates like few others how long the tentacles of the Franco regime were at a time of growing worker and student opposition to the dictatorship. The young law student, a member of the Popular Liberation Front, was arrested in Madrid at 11 pm on January 17, 1969 along with labor lawyer Lola González, then his girlfriend, and other militants. They were transferred to the General Directorate of Security, in Puerta del Sol – today the headquarters of the regional Government –, where they were tortured and interrogated.
Around 12:20 p.m. on Monday, January 20, Enrique was handcuffed and led by three members of the Political-Social Brigade to search an apartment whose keys they had found in Lola’s bag. In the house, located on what was then called General Mola Street, the current Príncipe de Vergara Street, two Basque anti-Franco militants were supposedly hiding. And there, in that house, Enrique would die at the age of 21.
According to what the police officers wrote in the report, when they removed his handcuffs so that he could sign the registration document, the young man “attacked” one of them, reaching the corridor that connected the interior floors with the main staircase and from that seventh floor “he “he was thrown into the void, falling into the interior patio of the building” despite the “efforts” of the agents “to avoid the incident,” the police defended, beginning to support the official version disseminated by the regime. The family would be prevented from seeing Enrique’s body, which would be guarded and buried almost clandestinely.
Soon the Francoist propaganda machine would begin to operate under the command of the Ministry of Information and Tourism, then in the hands of Manuel Fraga. From the beginning, the newspaper ABC maintained that Enrique had committed suicide and to try to support the theory, the newspaper directed by Torcuato Luca de Tena even published some notes leaked by the police from an alleged diary of the young man to justify “his state of anguish.” mental” and support the regime’s campaign. However, the handwritten phrases were fragments written to his psychiatrist and not a diary that, his family would later claim, were manipulated.
Enrique’s friends and family never shared the official version and his death sparked a huge wave of student protests throughout the country to the point that Franco decided to declare a state of emergency. “Enrique Ruano has been murdered,” cried the student movement.
20 years later, in 1989, just one day before the crime expired, Enrique’s mother authorized the lawyer and professor of Criminal Law José Manuel Gómez Benítez to request the reopening of summary 6/69 that had been followed for his death. . Thus, the family got the Justice Department to investigate the facts again, the young man’s body was exhumed and analyzed in January 1991 and the three accused police officers sat in the dock.
The sentence acquitted them of the crime of murder due to lack of evidence, but questions the thesis of suicide. The judges considered it proven that the victim suffered a previous injury “not compatible” with his fall into the vacuum caused by “a conical cylinder object” that could be a bullet, but the experts could not prove it because a third of the bone of the leg was missing. clavicle, precisely that of the wound in question. However, María José de la Vega Llanes signed a private vote when she considered it proven that he was indeed shot dead, but since she was unable to establish which police officer shot, she decided to opt for general acquittal.
The last militiawoman
Ángeles Flórez Peón will be another of the victims of Franco’s regime who will receive reparation 49 years after Franco’s death. Born on November 17, 1918, she was 17 years old when the rebel forces carried out the coup d’état in 1936 that would lead to the Civil War. At that precise moment I was performing with the Socialist Youth of Asturias, to which I was affiliated, a play called Up with the poor of the world and the role he played, that of Maricuelawould stay with her forever.
Sister of one of the victims of the October Revolution of 1934, those known as “the martyrs of Carbayín”, Maricuela She enlisted as a Republican militiaman in Colloto, where she would be in charge of kitchen tasks on the Oviedo front, and later she would serve as a nurse in Gijón. “I signed up to defend democracy and freedom. Besides, I was not Catholic at all. “I couldn’t believe in a god who would allow that life: some so rich that they have plenty and others so poor that they have nothing,” he recalled in an interview with this medium eight years ago.
Shortly after leaving the front after the republican government decided to withdraw the women, Maricuela She was arrested at her home on November 7, 1937 and was transferred to Oviedo prison. She was subjected to a Court Martial on February 2, 1938, which sentenced her to 15 years in prison, a sentence that would later be reduced to nine, of which she would serve four in the Saturrarán prison (Guipúzcoa). She entered prison, which she would define with the words “hunger and humiliation,” at the age of 18 and left at the age of 22. After spending time living with a sister, she went into exile with her husband in 1948 to France.
They settled in the town of Saint-Éloy-les-Mines, where Maricuela would represent the PSOE in the VII Congress in exile held in 1958. They both lived there for more than half a century until her husband died in 2004 and Ángeles returned to Asturias. He settled in Gijón, where he died last May, aged 105. Considered one of the last living Republican militiawomen, Maricuela He died as a member of the PSOE giving a lesson in coherence and incorruptible optimism and with the same longing as always in his voice: “May Spain stop being a country without memory.”
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