“The Socialists have always opted to strengthen our democracy and today we take another step for justice, reparation and dignity for all victims,” Pedro Sánchez valued after the approval, in a message on Twitter.
“History cannot be built from oblivion and the silencing of the vanquished”, affirms the preamble of this text, which was adopted by 128 votes against 113 and 18 abstentions in the Senate, after approval in the first reading in the Congress of Deputies in mid-July.
But this law is not unanimous in Spain, where the wounds of the past have not healed and where the right, which has promised to repeal it if he returns to power next year, he accuses the left of reviving them.
What does compensation entail?
With the adoption of this law, the search for the disappeared victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship will for the first time become a “responsibility of Condition“, which will directly finance the excavations and exhumations.
It will create a DNA bank of the victims to facilitate their identification, and a map of all mass graves from Spain.
“There are still 114,000 missing in Spain”, that is, people whose fate was deliberately concealed, Pedro Sánchez told deputies in July.
The disappeared of the Civil War are mostly republicanssince the Franco regime exhumed numerous victims of his side from mass graves to bury them.
Until now, the search for the bodies of the victims’ relatives was carried out mainly by associations, as Pedro Almodóvar shows in his latest film “Parallel Mothers”, and by the regions, something that the UN Human Rights Council criticized in a report, lamenting “the indifference” of state institutions.
Sánchez’s predecessor, last president of the government of the Game Popular (PP), Marian Rajoy (2011-2018), boasted of not having spent a single euro of public money in the application of a first law of “memory historical“, approved in 2007 under a previous socialist government and intended to recognize the victims of Francoism.
In addition to the search for the disappeared, the law approved on Wednesday provides for the annulment of the summary sentences handed down by Franco’s justice system and recognizes for the first time the you drink appropriate their families by the regime as victims of Francoism.
The amnesty is maintained
However, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) felt that it did not go far enough.
The law “perpetuates impunity for the Franco supporters” because it leaves in force the law of amnesty“is not going to judge anyone,” nor “is it going to compensate the families of the disappeared,” the ARMH said in a statement.
The law is the second big step in Sánchez’s work on the subject of the Civil War and the dictatorship after the exhumation of Frank, in 2019, of his monumental mausoleum near Madrid.
Source: Ambito
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