Murcia airport cannot be called Juan de la Cierva. This has been decided by the Superior Court of Justice, which in a ruling dated October 25 resolves the appeal presented by the central government against the name chosen by the Murcian government in 2022. The Administrative Litigation Chamber of the TSJMU considers that the decision was made by a “manifestly incompetent body” and thus annuls the name that Moncloa opposed, considering that it violates the Historical Memory Law of 2007 – at that time the current one had not come into force.
Although for the Murcian Executive Juan de la Civera, the Murcian engineer who invented the autogyro, was a man “without political attributes” and who did not cause “confrontation,” the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory issued at the time a negative report against the new name. adopted by agreement in May 2022, which led the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda to appeal the decision.
According to the State Attorney’s Office, there is “a lack of consensus” on the figure of Juan de la Cierva and his role in the 1936 coup d’état and during the first months of the Civil War, which “for reasons of prudence it is advisable to suspend ” the denomination. The TSJ already provisionally paralyzed the name in September 2022 following the central government’s appeal and shortly after, in October, it maintained this suspension by dismissing the autonomous government’s appeal.
The Government’s position, which points out that the name violates the Historical Memory Law, is based on a report by historian Ángel Viñas who recounts how the Murcian engineer advised the rebel side on the rental of the ‘Dragon Rapide’, the plane that carried Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to the Protectorate of Morocco to later carry out the coup d’état and, after the end of the war, become dictator for four decades. Furthermore, the biography of Juan de la Cierva that appears in the Royal Academy of History states that on December 9, 1936, when he died in a plane accident, he was heading to Germany “to complete an order for weapons” for the rebels. .
However, the TSJ of Murcia does not consider political issues and upholds the appeal of the State Attorney’s Office for a question of competence. Thus, the judges assure in their ruling, against which an appeal can be filed, that it is the central State that has jurisdiction over airports of general interest “without any exception regarding the name” of the airports.
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