The councilor of the Popular Party (PP) in Santa Cruz de Tenerife Guillermo Díaz Guerra has reacted this Thursday to the publication in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands of the Catalog of Francoist Vestiges in the city, a document of more than 2,000 pages that contains the almost 80 remains (names of streets and squares, monuments, tributes, titles, neighborhoods, sculptures, etc.) that survive in the city despite contravening the law Historical Memory Law, both regional and national.
Canary Islands approves the Catalog of Francoist Vestiges of the entire Archipelago
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Despite the fact that the report, already official, concludes that these remains must be removed because they break the law, Díaz Guerra has entrenched himself in an alleged “tolerance” of the chicharreros towards the tributes to the dictator Francisco Franco. The Government of the Canary Islands, said the councilor of the PP, “ignores the value of tolerance that the people of Santa Cruz have, ignores forgiveness and forgetfulness, and the desire to look forward in a peaceful society.”
This same councilor already proposed in his day that one of those vestiges, the most controversial (the so-called Monument to Franco) be converted into a tourist attraction. Now, when the law requires the removal of all tributes and memories of the Civil War, the coup plotters, their defenders and the dictator, Díaz Guerra affirms in a statement that the Canarian government wants to “put an end to Santa Cruz”, a city that for wanting to enforce the law, in his opinion, the regional executive has “in its sights.” For this reason, he has asked the Canary Islands Coalition for support to use the catalog. The mayor of the city, José Manuel Bermúdez, of the Canary Islands Coalition, has also used various excuses on numerous occasions for not proceeding to remove the memorabilia of the fascist dictatorship, such as the fact that the catalog for the entire Canary Islands has not been completed.
The catalog of Francoist vestiges in the Canary Islands, which for now is limited to Santa Cruz de Tenerife and in which the reports relating to the rest of the Canary Islands municipalities will be incorporated, has been prepared by a research team from the University of La Laguna (ULL ) made up of doctors María Isabel Navarro Segura and Yolanda Peralta Sierra, and doctor Ricardo Guerra Palmero, commissioned by the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands. However, despite the fact that it has been drawn up by a group of experts, this PP councilor accuses the Canarian executive of being “radical and not very open to dialogue” for “imposing” the document that, in his opinion, “should be drawn up through dialogue, the consensus” and “consulting experts such as historians, architects or art experts”, ignoring that it has been carried out by experts. In addition, he resorts to the argument that complying with the Historical Memory Law is opening wounds “that were closed and inventing problems where there are none.”
The Government has “antagonism” to Santa Cruz, repeats the PP councilor, who insists on pointing to the Government to excuse that the municipality does not take measures to comply with the Historical Memory Law and remove the monuments and memories that extol the dictator and the side that carried out a coup.
