Span is finally going to honor the victims of Francisco Franco.
Spanish lawmakers today gave the first stamp of approval to a bill which seeks to rehabilitate the memory of leftwing victims of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.
The proposed law threatens to fuel tensions in a nation where public opinion is still divided over the legacy of the dictatorship that ended with Franco’s death in 1975.
Franco assumed power after the civil war in which his Nationalists defeated Republicans, leaving the country in ruins and mourning hundreds of thousands of dead.
While his regime honoured its own dead, it left its opponents buried in unmarked graves across the country.
The “Democratic Memory” bill, passed in the first reading by the lower house of parliament, will for the first time make unearthing the mass graves a “state responsibility”.
Up until now the search for the Franco-era disappeared has been carried out by voluntary associations, as was featured in Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s most recent film “Parallel Mothers”.
The bill makes Spain “a better country and definitively turns the page on the darkest period of our history,” the minister in charge of the bill, Felix Bolanos, told parliament ahead of the vote.
It was approved with 173 votes in favour and 159 against.
Who were the votes against?
………
The main opposition Popular Party (PP) accuses his government of opening the wounds of the past.
It has vowed to repeal the law if returns to power after the next general election expected at the end of 2023.
Mariano Rajoy, a former PP prime minister, once bragged that he did not spend a euro in public money to enforce an earlier “Historical Memory” law passed by a previous socialist government in 2007 to tackle Franco’s legacy.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday “there are still 114,000 disappeared” in Spain, mostly Republicans. Only Cambodia has more forcibly disappeared people, he added.
That would be the PP, which is the direct descendant of Franco's Fascist party.
Franco died of natural causes. He should have ended up hanging by heels like Mussolini, and so should have his Fascist blue shirt minions.
Telling the truth about him now, and identifying and honoring his victims is literally the least that the Spaniards can do.
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