Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE).- The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has issued a new order of precautionary suspension of the catalog of Francoist vestiges of the autonomous community at the request of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council, this time for substantive reasons that question its content.
The previous time, the Administrative Litigation Chamber of the TSJC agreed to the same request by the Raíces Historical Memory Claims Association, arguing that the catalog had not been published in its entirety in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands, an omission that the regional Executive remedied nine days ago.
On this occasion, and at the request of the Santa Cruz City Council, the precautionary suspension is motivated by the lack of audience in the preparation of the catalog and because, despite being of an autonomous nature, it is “exclusively designed” for the capital of Tenerife.
In addition to these two formal aspects, the TSJC indicates that the motivation for the inclusion of monuments, names of streets, squares and others, and the honorary titles that would have to be withdrawn, “has to be founded and at least discussed”.
Because for the Chamber “any relationship with the Franco regime” of the people honored or who give their name to the street name is not enough, but “an active and relevant participation in the uprising” or the occupation of positions of “maximum importance” in the regime .
“This apparently has not been considered in a tempered way by the developers of the catalogue”, maintains the order of the TSJC, and refers to the fact that the first of the statements in the chapter on soldiers, volunteers and civilians who died in the civil war is José Calvo Sotelo, “who neither died in the Civil War nor was he a soldier or a volunteer because he was a parliamentarian elected democratically by the people and was assassinated by the State police (…) before the military uprising and the war”.
The same criteria applies in the case of the bust and the roundabout of the Architect Marrero, the street dedicated to the painter José Aguiar and his declaration of adoptive son, which is “based on purely artistic reasons”, or the bust of Joaquín Amigó de Lara, ” elevated for his status as founder of the Association of Quantity Surveyors”.
All of them “people recognized for their professional or artistic training and not for their active participation in the uprising or holding positions of the highest importance with the previous regime or at least the right to disagree that this is so and that honorable people can be stained with the dishonor of appearing as repressors of victims of Francoism”.
On this point, one of the three signatory magistrates of the order disagrees, Evaristo González, who has issued a dissenting opinion in which he questions the “historical” statements about these people included in the catalog of Francoist vestiges.
He also disagrees with the fact that the order states that the catalog is sent to an external report from the University of La Laguna and that “potentially interested parties are deprived of the defense of their specific cases.”
Likewise, he disagrees with his colleagues that the order of approval of this catalog is considered one of “the most susceptible and in need of interpretation”.
In any case, it supports its precautionary suspension.