The deputies of the Commons Gerardo Pisarello and Aina Vidal have endorsed on Tuesday an old claim of victims associations and memorialist movements to transform the Superior Police Headquarters of Catalonia in Barcelona in a center of and against Franco’s repression. In a letter addressed to the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the two parliamentarians ask for the assignment of the facilities “immediately and definitively” and remember that different organizations and institutions have insisted for decades on the need to “resignify” this space , “Symbol of horror and political persecution” in Spain. Last year, both Pisarello, first secretary of the Congress table, and Vidal, an attached spokesman for adding, registered a battery of questions to the Executive in this regard. ERC has also often claimed this conversion through multiple parliamentary initiatives.
The number 43 of the Via Laietana de Barcelona was, during, a detention and torture center used by the political-social brigade, recalls the letter. “Numerous outstanding figures of our democratic history have denounced the torture suffered in this building: Miguel Núñez, leader of the PSUC; Carles Vallejo, trade unionist of workers’ commissions; the Ferrándiz brothers, arrested and tortured in 1971; Julio Pacheco, whose complaint for torture in 1975 was the first to reach a judge in democracy; either [el escritor] Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, ”he says.
Pisarello and Vidal expose that this type of conversions have been carried out in other parts of the world with “positive results”, such as the ESMA (Mechanical School of the Navy) of Argentina, transformed into a Museum of Memory that honors the victims of the military dictatorship; the National Stadium of Santiago in Chile, today a place of tribute to political prisoners; the old Dachau concentration camp (Germany) turned into a memorial to remember the horror of Nazism; or the building of the former headquarters of the fascist police in Rome, now a museum dedicated to the victims of the Mussolini regime.
“Spain cannot be left behind in the construction of a democratic memory that looks facing its past and honors the dignity of those who suffered persecution. The company does not understand the half inks, or the warm positions before barbarism, as with the Valley of the Fallen or Valley of Co -gamuros (…) It is incomprehensible that in 2024 the foundation of the Holy Cruz del Valle de los Fallen received subsidies Direct worth 1,150,224.44, while Via Layetana victims ask for justice at their doors, ”denounces the common ones.
“There is no operational justification for the National Police to maintain their presence in this building. There are other fully operational police units in the city, such as the Verneda complex, with 9,000 square meters, ”demands deputies, for whom this“ struggle is not only institutional, but also moral and political ”. Along these lines, they affirm that the – a government initiative that has caused enormous controversy between the parties of the right and the extreme right – “cannot be diluted in condescending symbolic gestures with milestones of the transition; You must mark a turning point in our democratic memory policy. ” The law of the then ministry directed by Félix Bolaños was approved in 2022.
“Today more than ever, in the face of the infiltration of the extreme right among young people, it is time to consolidate central spaces for memory, recognition of our victims and to ensure that future generations understand the suffering caused by the dictatorship and totalitarianism ”They sentence.
