A president for the fascists

We've known from the first minute of her term in office that Margalida Prohens is not the president of all the people who live on the islands. She is not the president of those who have trouble finding or paying rent for decent housing, nor of the immigrants who arrive precariously to work in jobs that people here no longer want to do. She is not the president of those who love the language here, the Catalan of Mallorca, nor the president of those who defend the territory and nature from the virulent attacks of their promoting friends. But, above all, she is not the president of the victims of Franco's regime, whom she first ignored, then betrayed, and finally spat in the face of.

There are few groups as hard hit as the victims of the Franco regime in our country. No one can imagine discovering a group of people dead, shot in the head, buried in a hole, and not even the police, the Civil Guard, or a single judge appearing, unless the victims were murdered by the dictatorship. More than 300 people murdered in more than twenty mass graves across the four islands, and I haven't seen a single member of the security forces or the judiciary fulfilling their duties. The work of two legislative terms by public institutions has served to somewhat compensate for all the damage done to the enormous group of people battered first by fascist barbarism, then by the dictatorship, and finally, to our shame, by the "democratic" regime of '78. Two legislative terms in which laws were passed, laws are being passed, and laws are being passed alongside the associations.

Now, however, we have a government politically allied with the heirs of the executioners who murdered the men and women who have been recovered from the graves, the protagonists of the fascist terror that carried out brutal repression for decades. These are the ones who now dictate the rules. As a good politician of the Popular Party caste, Margalida Prohens lies fluently, waving the Graves Law that she proclaims (with the indulgence of tyrants) she will not repeal, when it is a law already written off because almost all the graves were opened years ago. Meanwhile, she is preparing to repeal a law, the Democratic Memory Law, which for now guarantees that we will not forget what it meant for this land when a gang of fascists imposed a totalitarian regime that lasted forty years by force of arms.

These sweeps claim to work for the "equality" of all victims, and say that the Memory Law does not treat the families of those murdered in the Republican zone (in Ibiza and Menorca) equally to those of Franco's repression, as if the former had not received reparation for more than eighty years in the form of honors and distinctions, aid, streets. A simple attempt to compensate the other victims, those hidden in the graves, or behind the silence forced by fear, has provoked the reaction of a Francoism still very present: this one that breaks images of the Rojas del Molinar, or that recites the Facing the sun in parliamentary headquarters.

They may repeal the law, because they have the deputies to do so, but none of them will be able to avoid the indignity resulting from attacking the rights of many people and from trying, once again, to erase the collective memory of our society. They will not succeed. The dictatorship did not succeed, nor will a group of liars more concerned with saving budgets to keep their seats than guaranteeing fundamental rights, nor will the president of the fascists succeed.