Vox accuses the PP of deceiving them with the memory law: "They are not fulfilling any of the agreements"

PalmThree days after repealing the Democratic Memory Law with Vox, the People's Party (PP) maintains that everything will remain the same. Second Vice President and Minister of the Presidency, Antònia Estarellas, stated at a press conference this Friday that the Catalan Government will continue with the memory policies it has implemented thus far and, in any case, the national Memory Law will fill the gaps left by the elimination of the regional law. When asked about these statements, the deputy spokesperson for the Vox parliamentary group, Sergio Rodríguez, reacted with indignation. "They are not fulfilling any of the agreements," he criticized: "The repeal should have had consequences."

"Every time we complain that the PP is trying to pull the wool over our eyes and that we can't trust them, they act offended, and that's how it's been in Extremadura, Aragon, and Castile and León," he continued, referring to the difficulties the PP's regional leaders are having in reaching agreements with Vox. "We can't trust them," he concluded. This was especially true after Estarellas avoided clarifying whether the Government supports repealing the national Historical Memory Law, despite the fact that the PP's national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has promised to eliminate it. "I don't think it's my place, as spokesperson for the Government of the Canary Islands, to speculate about the future," Estarellas said. "The current situation is that the law has been repealed here; we had a roadmap that we planned to follow, and there is a national law in place now."

"Feijóo has repeatedly promised to repeal this law because he considers it sectarian, partisan, and manipulative," Rodríguez insists. "Now it turns out that, for the second vice president, what the president of her party, and according to them, the future president of Spain, says has no value and is just wishful thinking." Be that as it may, the deputy assures that Vox "has nothing against the Law on Mass Graves" that allows the exhumation of the dead from roadside ditches. "We are not opposed to the search for missing relatives nor to honoring their memory," he affirms.

Estarellas defends the Government's "route".

"From the very beginning, the Government has had a well-defined path with its memory policies," Estarellas asserted. "It has an investment project with a series of dedicated actions, and this will continue." "With the memory service and its assigned staff, with the Fifth Plan for mass graves, with the columbariums—including the one in Palma, which has been excessively delayed—and with the spaces we have in Ibiza; and with the memorial stones—those already commissioned at the request of families and municipalities, and the one hundred more that reflect the ongoing demands for justice and whose remains were buried in mass graves," he argued. According to him, "at the level of political action, the aspect most affected by the repeal of the Balearic Islands' memory law is covered by the national law; this is the part concerning sanctions or the prosecution of certain types of crimes." "As for the rest, we have attended all the committees and sectoral conferences on memory issues, and one of the main topics discussed is the recovery of missing persons through the Law on Mass Graves," he insisted. "The catalog compiled by the previous government is in Madrid, and the work of memory associations is protected."

Memory of Mallorca: "Even with the law in force, they haven't done anything."

However, memorial organizations havedenounced shortcomingsin the application of the regulations during the two-plus years that the PP has governed. The president of Memoria de Mallorca, Maria Antònia Oliver, agrees with Estarellas that "the elimination of the law will not affect the public policies that are being implemented, because with the law in force they have not done anything, or very little, and have done so secretly, so that their partners do not notice."

In statements to ARA Baleares, Oliver denies that the national law covers all the provisions of the regional law. "It's complementary to the regional law; however, of course some things will be lost," he explains. However, he denounces that the government had already relegated the application of the law to a secondary priority before eliminating it. "With the Fourth Plan for Mass Graves, some twenty studies were submitted that haven't been published, and the exhibitions linked to this study haven't been held either, nor have the plays that were supposed to be performed, nor the actions to remove Francoist symbols," he said. "What have they done? Some intervention in some mass graves that hasn't yielded results: there are very few left to exhume in the Balearic Islands," he said. Along the same lines, he insists that "the Historical Memory Law complemented the Law on Mass Graves, because it's not just about burying a person, but also about remembering them, paying them tribute." Nor were any official events held on October 29th, the day the Memory Law established as the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Francoism in the Balearic Islands, Oliver points out. "The memory commissions met 70 times in the previous legislature, and only twice in this one," he laments.