Spain seeks its great national museum on the dictatorship like Germany, Latvia, Chile or Portugal have

The military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet In Chile it was especially bloodthirsty. The direct deaths due to political repression are measured in thousands, those tortured in tens of thousands and those exiled in hundreds of thousands, according to the ruling of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2010, then-president Michelle Bachelet inaugurated in Santiago de Chile he National Museum of Memory and Human Rights“a space intended to give visibility to the human rights violations committed by the State of Chile between 1973 and 1990, to dignify the victims and their families and to stimulate reflection and debate on the importance of respect and tolerance so that these events are never repeated.”

The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasunvisited it last April and gave it as an example of the “commitment and obligation” of the Government of Spain to create a similar memory project. The project would be framed within the Historical Memory Law (2007) and the Democratic Memory Law (2022). In the latter, a “Democratic Memory Center” state “whose purpose will be to safeguard the dignity of the victims of serious human rights violations and promote democratic memory, human rights and democratic values.”

The official announcement was made by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Angel Victor Torres. It would be one more step after the resignification of the Cuelgamuros Valleyformer Valley of the Fallen, from which the Government of Pedro Sánchez removed the body of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, in 2019. There it has been proposed to create an interpretation center on the Civil War and the dictatorship.

Torres himself, whose department is in charge of promoting the project, assured last year that Madrid would be the chosen city. However, there is nothing to suggest that there is a great national museum about Francoism and the dictatorship is underway. Yes, there are substantial projects that move in that direction.

“It is planned to have a Memory center in Madrid, the ‘Memory Box’, as the headquarters of the Democratic Memory Exhibition Center, in the 41 Argumosa Street, behind the Reina Sofia Museum“, they inform EL PERIÓDICO from the Ministry of Democratic Memory. “It has already been put out to a public competition for ideas and has been awarded to an architectural team. The process of awarding the works is being carried out. It would be there by 2027“.

But this is not the great museum provided for in the law, for which there are no known dates or location. “This is the first Democratic Memory center promoted by the Government. With the necessary timeanother large center will be launched in Madrid“, add the same sources. “With The Memory Box we will have a large space for permanent and temporary exhibitions and meeting center, in the center of Madrid. And the other space will fulfill the most common functions of a museum. In any case, both are complementary.”

Culture has preferred not to comment on that center because it is the responsibility of Torres.

In which countries do museums of dictatorships exist?

Chile’s is not the exception, but the norm in countries that have left dictatorships behind. In Berlin there is the “Topography of Terror” museum, a memorial to the rise of Nazism, the World War II launched by Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust Jew. Photographs, documentaries, period objects. They built it on the land where the headquarters of the Gestapo and SS repressive police forces were located during the Nazi regime (1933-1945). It is a must-see place pilgrimage for the country’s schoolchildren and one of the most visited places by foreigners traveling to the capital of Germany. The guided tour offers an idea of ​​what the internal structure of the National Socialist terror apparatus was like and what its effects were between 1933 and 1945. It shows how members of the National Socialist security apparatus Tercer Reich carried out the persecution and murder of millions of people throughout Germany and Europe. It also shows the Nuremberg trials, as a point and following the reconciliation of the Germans with their bloody past.

Argentina He also chose a place of disgrace to raise his center against the oblivion of the dictatorship. The Memory and Human Rights Space is located in the former headquarters of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) of Buenos Aires, a clandestine center for detention, torture and extermination of political dissidents during the military dictatorship (1976–83). What was once the place where the “militaries” applied the “electric prod” and other torments to more than 5,000 women and men of all ages that the regime considered enemies of the military coup. It is estimated that a few hundred survived. The place is now part of the UNESCO World Heritage List. Now, the Government of Javier Milei has put it in the spotlight. It has closed the cultural center that operated within the site and cut its funding.

In Montevideo, Uruguaythere is the Museum of Memory-MUME about the civil-military dictatorship (1973–85), located in the former country house of the nineteenth-century dictator Máximo Santos.

In Portugal A museum about repression and resistance against the dictatorship was opened in Lisboa (Aljube Museum). The other major place of memory, the Centro Interpretativo do Estado Novo/Museo Salazar in Santa Comba Dão, has been criticized for being a possible focus of fascist nostalgia.

Museums about communist dictatorships

Countries that experienced communist dictatorships have also created memory centers throughout Europe. In Budapest (Hungary) is the call Chandle of Terror of Dictatorships, a museum installed in the former headquarters of the fascist secret police (Arrowed Cross Party, Nazi collaborator) and later of the communist secret police. It was inaugurated by the current prime minister, Viktor Orbán, before taking his turn to the extreme right. The main controversy of that museum ignores or minimizes the responsibility of the Hungarian authorities in the persecution of the Jews before the German occupation of 1944 and in the Holocaust itself.

In Lithuaniathe Museum of Occupations and the Fight for Freedom Vilna It is located in the former headquarters of the KGB, the secret service of the Soviet Union. It is dedicated to the totalitarian dictatorship under the USSR and the partisans who resisted it.

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