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  • Alberto Fernández Díaz of the right-wing PP sarcastically speculated that the CUP’s next move might be to petition to have the Columbus statue replaced by one of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

    Alberto Fernández Díaz of the right-wing PP sarcastically speculated that the CUP’s next move might be to petition to have the Columbus statue replaced by one of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. | Photo: Barcelona’s Born Center for Culture and Memory/Reuters

Published 5 October 2016
Opinion
There is a war on historical memory in Spain when it comes to the dead, disappeared and tortured by the dictatorship and by Francoist death squads.

On Oct. 14, a temporary exhibition will be inaugurated at Barcelona’s Born Center for Culture and Memory, itself the centerpiece of a neighborhood prominently associated with Catalan nationalism. The exhibition is titled “Franco, Victory, Republic. Impunity and Urban Space.”

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Among its features are two statues from the era of fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who ascended to power via the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 and reigned until his death in 1975. One of the statues is of a horse-mounted Franco who happens to be lacking a head, having been inexplicably decapitated while in storage in 2013. The head was never found.

The statues will be displayed in the wide pedestrian area in front of the cultural center, apparently as a means of encouraging discussion about impunity and other legacies of the dictatorship as well as the uses of political artwork in public space.

And there are plenty of things to discuss indeed. On top of the estimated half a million civil war dead, more than 100,000 persons were disappeared during the war and ensuing dictatorship, many of them executed by Francoist death squads and deposited in mass graves that have yet to be excavated.

The state’s top-notch foot-dragging on the exhumation front has to do with a variety of factors, among them the reality that Francoism itself is far from dead and buried. There are lingering ties to the dictatorship among certain members of the political class, and select sectors of the population continue to view Franco in a positive light. Acting right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party (PP) has railed against the idea that “even a single euro” of public funds be used to promote historical memory and “recuperate the past.”

The refusal to engage in a reckoning with history has also been aided considerably by a post-Franco amnesty law pardoning crimes of the previous era—hence, perhaps, the utility of discussions about impunity.

During a visit to Barcelona in August, I asked an employee of a dried fruits and nuts shop across from the Born Center for his thoughts about the impending exhibition of the Franco statue. He looked at me incredulously, and predicted the following public reaction: “They will burn it down.”

Speaking of fire, Barcelona’s left-wing mayor Ada Colau has come under plenty of it for backing the event at the Born, and her government has been accused of everything from normalizing Francoism to insulting the victims of the dictatorship to endeavoring to thwart the Catalan independence movement by permitting the exhibition to take place in such a symbolic location.

To be sure, Franco was guilty of particularly fierce repression of Catalan identity; in addition to more lethal maneuvers, he banned Catalonia’s National Day, which commemorates the Catalan defeat, in 1714, at the end of the siege of Barcelona. The Born Center encompasses an archaeological site, complete with a permanent exhibition about the siege.

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But it should be fairly obvious from the inclusion of the word “impunity” in the title of the new temporary exhibition — not to mention the whole decapitated aspect — that this is not an attempt at “normalization.” In her response to criticism, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE, Colau acknowledged the significance of the space around the Born in terms of the destruction of 1714 while adding that the space can also accommodate other Barcelona memories, “especially those tied in with repression and destruction.”

Spain’s El País newspaper meanwhile quoted the city’s First Deputy Mayor Gerardo Pisarello as specifying that a display about Francoist torture practices will accompany the statues.

A typical Spanish argument against revisiting the atrocities of the civil war and dictatorship is that such activity will reopen old wounds—but it’s difficult to reopen wounds that never closed in the first place. And it’s difficult to close wounds when proper discussion of atrocities is rendered taboo.

In a recent example of local politicians’ impressive capacity for tangents, several parties voted for a reconsideration of the Colau government’s decision to support the Born exhibition. The vote didn’t pass thanks in part to the abstention of the left-wing separatist CUP group, but CUP councilwoman Maria Rovira took the opportunity to suggest moving the Franco statue to the end of Barcelona’s famous street La Rambla, where a statue of Christopher Columbus presently resides. According to Rovira, both dictator and colonizer could then be done away with at once.

The El Periódico paper took the new ball and ran with it, assuring readers that Columbus would not be budging despite the antics of the “anticapitalistas.” The article quoted Alberto Fernández Díaz of the right-wing PP as sarcastically speculating that the CUP’s next move might be to petition to have the Columbus statue replaced by one of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

So much for discussions of Franco.

An August opinion piece in the same newspaper by Catalan writer Jordi Puntí offers a more lucid assessment of the local landscape, starting with his description of waking up one morning in his apartment near the Born to the sound of what he imagines to be a helicopter flying over Barcelona with the equestrian Franco statue in tow — as in the opening scene of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” which features an airborne statue of Christ.

Declaring his Fellini-esque awakening most appropriate to the bizarre controversy at hand, Puntí goes on to detect in this case “naive” and “contradictory” criticisms of Colau’s government from demagogic sectors of the nationalist movement in Catalonia. In the end, he suggests, the combative approach simply works to the benefit of conservative political forces—whose members look on from their summer retreats, “stroke their Siamese cats and smile.”
Wherever it is, Franco’s head might just be smiling, too.

Belén Fernández is the author of “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.

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