Ricard Vinyes (Barcelona, 1952), professor of Contemporary History, and commissioner of Programs, Memory of the city Council of Barcelona, has an agenda especially busy in the 80 years of the fall of the city of barcelona during the civil war, which is commemorated next January. Half of the interview with THE COUNTRY, Vineyards are an excuse for a moment, as should appear next to the deputy mayor Gerardo Pisarello to announce that the City will withdraw medals to Francisco Franco and other seven names franco. “We will make the life impossible to the Fundación Francisco Franco,” said Pisarello. Vinyes be added after that to erase the legacy of a dictatorship requires more than laws.
Question. There are several legislative processes in place to update the laws of memory. What should be the priorities?
Response. To the state law of Memory, 2007, will agree to major changes, such as relating to the annulment of judgments. You should be more clear in the removal of symbols, because it generates many problems to the local councils at the time you remove plates, because you have to ask permission to the neighbouring communities. The law has to develop a regulation to know how to apply it. You must have a positioning much more active with regard to the exhumation of mass graves. The costs of the exhumations can’t stay in the hands of private individuals, local councils and administrations, the State and the judges should have more responsibility.
Q. are There families that are paying for the exhumation of their dead?
A. There are families, or associations that, when they have a permit to exhume a mass grave, they only have the possibility to search for their own resources. I don’t know if it is happening, but the law encourages this to happen.
Q. how Is acting well to the Government in regard to the exhumation of Franco?
A. Has had a great courage, no one had dared to take this step, but it seems like a fast decision, and poorly planned, taken with an attitude that is innocent. It is impossible for an administration to prevent citizens carry flowers to the grave of a person who is admired by most wicked. What is needed is to create an ethical framework that makes citizenship reject what this person represents. In the tomb of Mussolini in Predappio, each year there are pilgrimages. It is important to outlaw the Fundación Francisco Franco, but how is it that we have arrived until here?
Q. Numerous academics have shown to be sceptical of the proposal to create commissions of truth on the part of the Government, but also on the part of the government, to review the Civil War, the dictatorship and the Transition.
A. I Agree all in this skepticism. Historically, truth commissions are linked to the processes of democratization in a time of transition. Even the made in Germany on the GDR, it did just after the reunification. In our case, there is no element of re-foundation, neither national nor democratic. And if one of the functions of truth commissions is to know and to learn, we already know and we know so much which were the war and the dictatorship. We have handicaps, such as the archives act, which is infamous: it leaves a legal vacuum if there is no willingness on the part of an administration determined, as can be the Delegations of the Government. With the Delegation in Barcelona, for example, has always been a problem.
Q. what Problems should govern who governs?
A. Governs those who govern. For example, it is a problem to access to the documents of the police of the decade of the sixties, when it starts to grow the opposition. The documents that I have consulted have been Asyabahis thanks to the files of lawyers. If we could do a systematic consultation of reports, we would have a wealth of information, extraordinary.
Q. The proposed truth commission, the Government argues that its members have limitless access to the files of the administration. Can be a way to correct the problem?
A. The experts of the commission will be excellent experts, but the bulk of the trade, that generates the knowledge, will or will not have access to? In addition, the transparency points to the citizenship, not to a few experts. I know the difficulties that I had to make the book up irredentist, on the political imprisonment of women. I passed through seventeen prisons, in some had disappeared all of the information. The documentation of the prison of la Trinitat (Barcelona) threw in the nineties when it made the transfer to the prison of Wad-Ras. In others, thanks to poor officials, as well as in Soria, had saved many things. On the commissions of the truth, we already know what the truth is, there has already been a lot of work. What would be interesting is a white paper of the repression in Spain, to build what kind of repression has been and how it has worked structurally. In 2014, the Swedish government produced a white paper on the violation of the rights of gypsies in the NINETEENTH and TWENTIETH centuries. Are books that break through the impunity and say: “We, as a State, we have done this”.
Q. And the Transition, maybe muted more police abuses, what makes the most sense as the goal of a truth commission?
A. The transition is real that begins in the sixties, with the demographic changes, cultural, social movements and new leadership is young in the working world and professional, that make you get the seventy with the franco regime losing cultural hegemony in the big cities. Between 1975 and 1977, when still maintaining the dictatorship, the Transition occurs institutionally, and in those years it produces a brutal violence, with tics and standards of the past. But that would have elections and a parliament, is a major break. What in that parliament had franco notorious? Yes, but in the municipal elections, there will also be mayors nationalists prominent in democratic political parties, as is the case of Convergence. The doctrine that appears in the last few years, which considers the Transition as the francoist regime, in my opinion is false. Those who claim all these misfortunes of the Transition will not resist the test of the comparative history: what happens in Spain after the Transition, and what pasa in the main european countries after the Second World War is the same. In France, with the liberation by the allies, to the great lords of Vichy not touched much. In 1946, De Gaulle already proclaims an amnesty, more or less like our own. The penetration, particularly from the fifties, of the former leaders of Vichy in the French administration was impressive. If we look to Germany, the scandal is extraordinary: Kiesinger was a young nazi; how can it be that in 1969 came to be chancellor? Willy Brandt was a chancellor [Walter Scheel] that had served as a liaison between Goebbels and Himmler. The culture of the previous regime ever lasts, the tears are a fiction: you don’t have a knife and cut paper in two. This does not happen.
Q. why do you think that the PSOE proposes to this committee the truth?
A. I Think the proposed as a remedy bureaucratic. Bureaucracy is always an outlet for the problems that you do not know to solve. What you are doing is not to engage deeply in the issues briefs of the country and give formal replies.
