The Town Hall will commission a sculpture to commemorate the people repressed by Franco and other totalitarian regimes. The proposal, presented by the Socialist Municipal Group, generated some debate among the groups, although all stressed that “history cannot be made from the forgetting and silencing of the defeated”. The motion initially referred “to the part of the history of the post-civil war period that has been hidden for many years”, described councillor Hipólito Zapico (PSOE), “because even the Council of Europe of March 2006 points out that during the war in Spain very serious crimes were committed and that, during the subsequent Franco dictatorship, an authoritarian political system was established that massively repressed any hint of political opposition in a systematic and generalised manner”.

For all these reasons, the socialists proposed to commission the creation of a monument to remember these people “as a right of the victims to the restoration of the memory of the public authorities and to avoid the repetition of any form of political violence or totalitarianism”. The spokesman for the PP Municipal Group, Ángel Nozal, was not in favour of dedicating this sculpture exclusively to those who suffered reprisals during Franco’s dictatorship. “We want to vote in favour of criticism and memory, both of Franco’s repression and of previous repressions, because they made all of us suffer who had to understand life as it was dictated to us and not as we wanted to understand it”, he argued.

The spokesman for the Ciudadanos Municipal Group, José Carlos Martín, added that “they are a reflection of the society we have and how polarised the issue of historical memory is. We are in favour of an institutional motion that includes the contributions of PSOE, PP and all the groups. In the end, the motion included the contribution of the PP, and was passed with the favourable vote of the entire corporation, except for PP councillor Silvia Marín, who preferred to abstain. Regarding the proposal, the non-attached councillor Esperanza Jiménez pointed out that “as niece and granddaughter of people who were repressed and murdered, I am grateful for this motion”.

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