The City Council of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, governed by the Canarian Coalition and the PP, with the support of a councilor expelled from Ciudadanos for supporting a motion of censure against her own party and the PSOE, has announced its intention to rehabilitate the source of the controversial monument to Franco located in the city. The Councilor for Public Services, Guillermo Díaz Guerra (PP), was in charge of publicizing this project.
The monument to Franco that still survives the demolition in Tenerife
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After being made public, the Yes We Can Canary Islands and United We Can parties have warned the consistory that this “attempts against the Law of Historical Memory of the Canary Islands.” In a joint statement, both parties have expressed this Friday their “resounding rejection” of the announcement.
Already in 2019, this same PP councilor presented a motion to “resignify the fountain”, with the aim of leaving the monument where it is and simply changing its name. that proposal was rejected in the municipal plenarythen chaired by Patricia Hernández (PSOE), with the abstention of CC.
Yes We Can Canary Islands and United We Can reject any measure that involves the recovery of a space that honors “the atrocities committed by the Franco dictatorship, which violates the Law of Historical Memory of the Canary Islands and, therefore, against all the people who were murdered or reprisals during the same”.
The island group of Sí Podemos Canarias defends that “the councilor is not the one” to decide to launch this fountain unilaterally “according to a purely personal criterion under which it considers this element as part of the Santa Cruz heritage”.
In this regard, they recall that the monument “is not even considered, nor does it deserve consideration” as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC), as has been confirmed by the Cabildo de Tenerife and by a report from the University of La Lagunawhich concluded that the work violates the Law of Historical Memory.
Sí Podemos Canarias affirms that as a result of the request for its protection, promoted by an association sympathetic to the totalitarian Franco regime “which ironically and inconceivably forms part of the Insular Historical Heritage Commission of the Cabildo”, it has once again been confirmed “that the sculpture exalts the figure of the dictator” and does not gather artistic or patrimonial values that deserve its protection.
In his opinion, all this makes it clear that compliance with the Canary Islands Historical Memory Law must be respected “and proceed to the definitive withdrawal of this element, since it exalts anti-democratic historical values and facts that caused suffering and backwardness to this land” , they add.
In addition, Sí Podemos Canarias recalls that in a plenary session held last November, all the political groups present in the Cabildo adopted an institutional agreement for the withdrawal of all the distinctions and honors that Franco received on the island, something that does not mean ” but to comply with the law, which is why it is even more intolerable that the City Council of the capital continues to allow the presence of Francoist vestiges in public spaces”.
