Ramón Trujillo, spokesperson for United We Can (Izquierda Unida, Podemos, Equo) in the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council, rejects that public money is going to be spent on improving the monument to Franco on Anaga Avenue in Santa Cruz de Tenerife when it would have to be removed to comply with the Historical Memory Law. “One of the objectives of this law is not to pay tribute on public roads to the Spaniard who has killed the most compatriots in our history,” the party said in a press release.
Cultural Heritage concludes the catalog of Francoist vestiges in Tenerife for their “immediate removal”
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United We Can considers that “the City Council has run out of excuses for not removing from public roads that monument that honors fascism and the massive violation of human rights.”
Trujillo affirms that, when the Councilor for Public Services, Guillermo Díaz Guerra, declared that “the Monument to Franco only has political significance for 1% of the population,” he said, “what it did was to slip away from a normalized democratic consensus in Europe. and advocate for historical amnesia,” criticized Trujillo. “The PP councilor came to say that, if people have forgotten about Franco, then it is as if the monument were not Franco’s. In reality, such a cynical argument had never been used to defend the permanence of a monument to the dictator,” he asserted emphatically.
For the progressive spokesman, it is “inconceivable to imagine a municipal official in Germany defending the repair of a public monument dedicated to Hitler, adducing its supposed aesthetic values, its potential as a supposed tourist attraction and pretending that 99% of the population does not see him political meaning”.
In the statement, United We Can add that the Councilor for Public Services “reinsisted on the possibility of resignifying the Monument despite the study, commissioned by the City Council itself, which ruled that it cannot be resignified, given its abundant fascist symbology.” “Furthermore, the study itself recalls that its construction was financed by resorting to extortionary practices such as forcing public employees to register on donation lists and consign the amounts contributed. Something that, in the repressive climate of the time, was far from what would have been truly voluntary contributions,” they continued.
