The candidates of United Sí Podemos to the Cabildo de Tenerife, Manuel Marrero, and to the City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Ramón Trujillo, have urged this Thursday the local corporation to remove the monument to Franco, which constitutes “a democratic anomaly and a affront” to the capital of Tenerife.
A 16-year fight to remove the monument to Franco from Santa Cruz de Tenerife (which is not BIC) and comply with the laws
Further
In statements to the media in front of the monument located at the confluence of Francisco La Roche avenue and Rambla de Santa Cruz, Marrero and Trujillo have emphasized that the mayor, the nationalist José Manuel Bermúdez (Canary Islands Coalition), “has no more excuses to comply with the law.
Ramón Trujillo has promised that after “the change of government” that will take place after the 28M elections, this monument will be removed, “as any party of the right or left in Germany would do with something equivalent.”
“To be a democrat is to be an anti-fascist”, Manuel Marrero has intervened, who has stressed that the removal of the monument to Franco “could have been done before the law of historical memory. The City Council has powers to do so. It is democratic culture, simply”.
Marrero believes that in the Canary Islands Coalition in Santa Cruz “some people lack high doses of democracy” and on the other hand “they are competing in these electoral times with the right and the ultra-right.”
The candidate for mayor of the capital of Tenerife for United Sí Podemos, Ramón Trujillo, has stressed that “the entry solution” would be the removal of the monument from the public thoroughfare, and then hold a popular consultation to determine what use is given to it later to this space.
Asked about the number of Francoist vestiges in the capital of Tenerife (more than 70), apart from the monument to Franco, Trujillo has indicated that “the logical thing is to prioritize the most serious, the most hurtful, those of people whose hands are stained of blood”, which would have to be removed first.
But the idea, he continued, is “to have a street map that does not pay homage to anything that signifies a dictatorship, the exaltation of the violation of human rights. This is not from the right or the left, it is from the Democrats ”, she concluded.
The City Council, against its withdrawal
There are multiple excuses that the City Council, governed by the Canary Islands Coalition with the support of the Popular Party and a defecting councilor, have given for not abiding by the law and proceeding to remove the Francoist vestiges in the city. The most recurring is that it will not be done until the Catalog of Francoist Vestiges in the Canary Islands is published, which covers all those existing in the Archipelago. The Government of the Canary Islands, given the large number of tributes, monuments, plaques and other honors to the dictator and his supporters in the capital of Tenerife, opted to first publish a specific catalog for this municipality. And the City Council has clung to that, arguing that the Government was stigmatizing the city, pointing it out and other arguments to defend its decision not to comply with the Historical Memory law. However, as reminded who prepared the Catalog, it is not necessary to have the document of all the Canary Islands to proceed to comply with the law in a specific municipality. That is, the City Council could withdraw it if it had the will to do so.
On the other hand, this same month of May the complete Catalog of the entire Canary Islands was published, with which the excuse of the City Council falls. However, from Santa Cruz the mayor is silent on the subject.
