The mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, and the councilor who wanted make the monument to Franco a tourist attraction, Guillermo Díaz (PP) They have abstained this Wednesday before the proposal of the Technical Commission of Historical Memory of the Canary Islands to study the catalog of Francoist vestiges prepared by the General Directorate of Heritage of the regional government. The idea is that after this period a special committee will be formed to “analyze its content and prepare a paper”. In a statement sent by the City Council it is insisted that “it does not seem logical that the Government approve a catalog that only refers to a municipality, applying the Law only in Santa Cruz” and it is underlined that the lack of a strategy of historical memory and of a catalog of the entire Canary Islands generates “legal insecurity”. Thus, José Manuel Bermúdez assures that “Santa Cruz will apply the Law in the terms in which it is expressed, but administrations need legal certainty for the development of administrative acts derived from it.”
From the Monument to the Fallen to the African Market: Francoist traces that Santa Cruz de Tenerife must remove and why
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The Canary Islands Historical Memory Technical Commission A month has been given to study this catalogue. This is a study that evidenced dozens of vestiges, names of Francoist streets as well as honors and distinctions of the regime. A 3,000-page report prepared by a technical team led by one of the greatest experts on the subject in the Canary Islands, Professor of Art History María Isabel Navarro, who has been studying since 1979 the works of the Canary Islands Economic Command. The work also incorporated the research already known by the mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez (CC), after another study commissioned by himself and led by the same expert.
Guillermo Díaz also speaks of “doubts” in that statement and that refers to “the nature of the commission’s commission for a monographic study of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and, in addition, regarding the criteria that are being used to prioritize the mandates of the Historical Memory Law, because in addition to the regional catalogue, it also includes the development of a defined Strategy and other matters related to said regulations”.
What does the law say about it?
Since 2007 there has been a Law on Historical Memory at the national level that urges that “public administrations, in the exercise of their powers, will take the appropriate measures for the removal of shields, insignia, plaques and other objects or commemorative mentions of exaltation, personal or collective, of the military uprising, the Civil War and the repression of the Dictatorship. These measures may include the withdrawal of subsidies or public aid.
Since then, most of the municipalities of the Canary Islands have been catching up by eliminating exaltations of the regime, although vestiges still remain. In 2019, the Parliament of the Canary Islands approved a Canary Law on Historical Memory in order to speed up the withdrawal of Francoist elements, to have its map of graves, a DNA bank and to guarantee items in this matter after the Government of Mariano Rajoy will leave this area without budgets.
It is true that the Canarian Historical Memory Law states that “a catalog of existing Francoist symbols, streets, monuments and references in the Canary Islands will be drawn up and approved”. However, it does not point out that said catalog cannot be approved in phases, as is being done, in order to speed up the removal of urgently needed monuments and vestiges such as the so-called monument to Franco. A sculptural complex that was denounced in 2017 by the lawyer Eduardo Ranz, from the Ranz Orosas memorial association, an expert who was key in the exhumation of Franco from the Valley of the Fallen.
It is also true that the Law of Historical Memory of the Canary Islands adds that “The Government of the Canary Islands, at the proposal of the competent ministries in matters of historical memory, education and cultural heritage, will approve the Strategy for the Historical Memory of the Canary Islands, on a biennial basis, in which the objectives, priorities and financing that must govern the actions related to historical memory to be carried out by the Public Administration of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands will be collected. Since the approval of this law in 2019, a pandemic in between, the law has had to develop all the elements that make it up: the Historical Memory Technical Commission (constituted in 2020), the approval of an exhumation protocol (approved in 2021) and is working on this strategy, as well as on the catalog that includes the entire Canary Islands.
The mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife now alludes to the need for this strategy to be approved, as well as the catalog for the entire Canary Islands, “to avoid legal insecurity in the administrative acts that derive from the application of said regulations.”
Other cities are already up to date
Meanwhile, few are the traces that are left in other Canarian capitals. In Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, since the beginning of the 1980s, General Franco’s street was changed to Primero de Mayo. Although no great monuments such as Franco’s or Los Caídos’ in Santa Cruz de Tenerife were built in this city, little by little the traces of memory have been erased. Also in Arrecife or in Santa Cruz de La Palma all the exaltations of the regime were eliminated.
Within a year, the General Directorate of Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands hopes to have a complete catalog of vestiges of the entire Archipelago. The one in Santa Cruz de Tenerife was urgent due to the number of them that had not yet been removed from public roads and because there was rigorous work commissioned from the University of La Laguna in this regard. However, the majority of the municipalities of the Canary Islands have been gradually adapting to the laws of historical memory, first to that of Zapatero in 2007 and then to the regional one in 2019. It should be noted as a striking fact that in the year 2020, the municipality of Moya (governed by the PP) eliminated a plaque exalting Franco that he accidentally discovered at the foot of a Cross.
