Solomonic and open decision on the National Police station on Via Laietana. The headquarters of the Superior Headquarters will be designated a “memory space” in compliance with the state Democratic Memory law. This was announced today by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, after meeting with the mayor of Barcelona, ??Jaume Collboni. Soon, the different public administrations will have to define the specific uses of this equipment and see how its new function fits with the maintenance of police uses, which the owner of the building, the Ministry of the Interior, is not willing to give up.
In February 2023, the Congress of Deputies rejected the Via Laietana headquarters becoming a memorial to Franco’s repression. Among other formations, the PSOE opposed this demand by the formations located to the left of the socialists and the independence parties, arguing that the “dark” era of this building is now over.
The mayor of Barcelona has taken advantage of his meeting with the Minister of Territorial Policy to ask him to make progress in the processes of annulment of the courts martial against prominent figures of the Second Republic and the anti-Franco struggle that are still in force, such as that of the president of the republican Generalitat Lluís Companys or that of the anarchist activist Salvador Puig Antich.
The Council of Ministers next week will constitute, precisely, three reparation commissions within the framework of the development of the content of the Democratic Memory law. The mayor and the minister have agreed on the willingness of the City Council and the central government to collaborate on a series of projects relevant to democratic memory. Both consider that this line of action is now more necessary than ever in the face of “the extreme right’s offensive to whitewash the dictatorship and falsify history.”
For next year, when it will be 50 years since Franco’s death, Barcelona is preparing a program of activities and exhibitions around this anniversary to “address the lack of rights and the repression of freedoms associated with the dictatorship and to vindicate the role that social movements had in the anti-Franco struggle”.
