The Council of Ministers has agreed on Tuesday to take the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, before the Constitutional Court for refusing to place a plaque in the Royal Post Office of the Puerta del Sol that remembers her Francoist past. Thus, the Executive of Pedro Sánchez makes effective the measure that announced a month ago, after the Madrid government declined the negotiation instance proposed by the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory as a previous step.
The clash between administrations is lengthened since last October, when the central government began the procedures to declare to the building, which is the headquarters of the Madrid Executive, place of memory. This would imply the placement of a plaque in which it is mentioned that the property hosted the General Directorate of Security during Franco, but Ayuso refuses by appealing to issues such as “neutrality, respect for history or the institutional image”, as its spokesman Miguel Ángel García Martín has put on several occasions.
Despite the frontal opposition of the Community of Madrid, the Government insists on the declaration, which is one of the figures contained in the Democratic Memory Law and something that they have been claiming the memorial associations for years. At the same time, the popular Madrid ones have used “all legal springs” at their disposal to avoid it, since they consider that it is “a barbarity” to link the property with Francoism despite the fact that it was the epicenter of the police torture of the regime and through it thousands of reprisals passed.
Thus, the regional government filed a requirement by asking for the file of the file already initiated and thanks to the absolute majority of the PP in the assembly, it approved at the end of the year an amendment to a Bus Law that in practice forces the installation of any plate or distinctive in the building to require “the prior authorization” of the community and establishes that no “that can harm or generate confusion about the real house of the real house will be authorized as the headquarters of the Presidency ”.
It is precisely this law that challenges before the Constitutional Court the department led by Ángel Víctor Torres, who considers it “incompatible with the constitutional distribution of powers”, in accordance with the report prepared by the Ministry. “The exercise of state powers in memory is not incompatible with the ordinary development of autonomous institutional functions or the use of real estate intended for it,” adds the text.
For its part, the Madrid PP has been displaying its argument against the measure reaching the point of making a video in which former presidents Esperanza Aguirre, Cristina Cifuentes, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón and Joaquín Leguina brings together to justify their opposition. Production reviews the story of the Royal Post House, but is plagued by omissions and half truths. The speech of the different voices involved is repeated: they appeal to the reconciliation between Spaniards of the transition and resort to republican violence during the Civil War and ETA in addition to accusing those who want to place a “guerracivilism” plaque.
The DGS coordinated the police services throughout the State, not only in Madrid. And in their dungeons all kinds of physical and psychological torture were practiced. Victims and memorialist associations have been claiming for years that a plaque is installed that also tells this part of its past as with other events. And it is that the Royal Correos house already has three commemorative plates: one that commemorates the lifting of May 2, 1808, another in tribute to the victims of 11M and one last to the dead by the Covid pandemic.
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