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“The mayor came to learn regarding the experience of Argentina, to learn first-hand how our society faced this tragedy,” said De Pedro.
“We understand that for some societies it can be traumatic, but our experience indicates that it always helps to know the truth,” said the Minister of the Interior, Eduardo “Wado” De Pedro, during a visit to the ESMA Memory and Human Rights Space together with the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau.
The visit was part of the agenda of Colau’s tour of Argentina and coincided with a vote in the Spanish Parliament that closed the possibility of investigating the crimes of Francoism.
During the visit to the former Esma, De Pedro –son of the militants assassinated by the military dictatorship Enrique de Pedro and Lucía Révora– and Colau agreed on the importance of building consensus on memory “to defend the right to future, the right to life, and the right of our boys and girls to grow up happy”.
Colau’s visit came two weeks following the Minister of the Interior visited the mayor at Barcelona City Hall. “The mayor came to learn regarding the experience of Argentina, to learn first-hand how our society faced this tragedy,” said De Pedro.
The visit to the space of memory of the former Esma coincided with the vote in the Spanish Parliament, in which the ruling PSOE opposed, together with the right-wing parties PP, Vox and Ciudadanos, to modify the Penal Code to promote the investigation of the crimes of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco as crimes once morest humanity. The affirmative votes were from United We Can and the pro-independence parties, among them, the Catalan CUP that promoted the proposal.
“As a Spaniard it is especially painful, and I appreciate that Argentina is so advanced. It has a memory center like this, while in Spain we suffered a criminal coup and dictatorship, with a systematic violation of human rights, with more than one hundred thousand disappeared , assassinated, tortured, thousands of people who remain in mass graves, and we have no memory center that can be compared” with the former Esma, indicated the mayor of Barcelona.
“For us, the presence of Ada also has to do with reaffirming that the new generations of Spaniards will go down the path of memory, truth and justice,” said De Pedro, as demonstrated by the relatives of the victims who managed to incorporate the crimes of Francoism into the agenda of the Spanish Parliament thanks to the investigation opened by the Argentine Judiciary.
The head of the Interior stressed that in Argentina “social consensus might be generated thanks to the struggle of human rights organizations and the accompaniment of the entire society, which said never once more to the dictatorship, and yes to Memory, Truth.” and Justice”.
“We understand that for some societies it can be traumatic, but our experience indicates that knowing the truth is always useful. Knowing the truth is useful in our personal lives: it can be painful to find out some things, but it is important to grow and have a solid democracy. “De Pedro completed.
Along with the national official and the Catalan mayor were the Undersecretary for International Human Rights Protection and Liaison, Andrea Pochak, and the former ESMA Director of Museum Production and Content, Graciela Dobal, who acted as guides for the former Officers’ Casino and the Memory Site Museum.
Also present during the tour were the Spanish deputy Gerardo Pisarello, the coordinator of Catalunya en Comú, Candela López Taglifico, and the museum’s director of Institutional Relations, Salomé Grunblatt.
At the end of the tour, a video was shown regarding the historical context and the current state of the trials for crimes once morest humanity of the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina.
Lastly, the museum officials informed the minister and the mayor regarding the negotiations with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) so that the Memory and Human Rights Space is recognized as a World Heritage Site.
