The researcher Floren Dimas, the magistrate Joaquim Bosch and the relatives of victims of Franco’s repression, Guillermo Libendinsky, Michel Llompart, Manuel Blanco and Magdalena Nebot, inaugurate the first talks on Democratic Memory promoted by the Government.
This Saturday, in the assembly hall of the Vice-Presidency and Regional Ministry of Energy Transition, Productive Sectors and Democratic Memory, the Government held the first of thirty talks that make up the second cycle of conferences on democratic memory “Tardor de Memòria” (Evening of Memory).

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They were inaugurated by Guillermo Libendinsky, Michel Llompart, Manuel Blanco and Magdalena Nebot, all of them relatives of victims of the civil war or Franco’s repression, who all agreed that the people who fled Mallorca were fleeing out of necessity, in a talk entitled Les veus de la memòria sense fronteres (The views of memory without borders). The relatives explained their personal stories and addressed the need for “time to continue healing wounds”. “We will never stop fighting to achieve social justice with peace above all else”, they stressed.

Next, the magistrate Joaquim Bosch analysed corruption during the Franco regime, based on the most prominent cases, in the paper La corrupció del franquisme i els seus efectes en el sistema democràtic des de la perspectiva de la memòria (Corruption during the Franco regime and its effects on the democratic system from the perspective of memory). Bosch assessed the connections of corrupt practices as a form of economic repression, from the plundering of the defeated in the war and the most diverse dynamics of rent extraction; he examined the different variants of corruption in the dictatorship, such as that linked to urban and tourist development, that developed in public contracts and the most diverse forms of clientelism.

“Corruption that was so widespread for almost four decades necessarily had to leave significant after-effects”, he stressed. For this reason, he analysed its subsequent effects, from the point of view that the Transition was not capable of breaking with the corruption stemming from Franco’s regime, due to the particularities of the transitional period, which explains many of our current institutional pathologies.

Floren Dimas, a researcher into the military and social history of the Civil War and Franco’s repression, closed the conference with a talk on the Balearic Islands: clichés and myths of Franco’s navy. “The public’s knowledge of the civil war at sea is practically non-existent. The image of a navy loyal to the Republic, chaotic and undisciplined, as opposed to the rebel navy, with fewer ships but better commanded and prepared, has remained in the popular imagination”, said the former Air Force officer, who tried to place the role that both played on the Balearic Islands, and particularly from the Francoist fleet’s base in Palma de Mallorca, in its right historical value, thus dismantling the clichés and myths that have been coined for more than eighty years.

The Vice-President of the Government and Minister for Energy Transition, Productive Sectors and Democratic Memory, Juan Pedro Yllanes, opened the conference early in the morning with a welcome to the speakers in which he stressed “that the interest of this government in the recovery of memory is clear. During this conference, we will have the privilege of hearing the testimonies of victims’ relatives. This second cycle of ‘Tardor de la Memoria’ will not only be held in Mallorca, but will travel around the different islands of the Balearic Islands, where a total of 31 speakers will gather. Thus, we will be able to listen to different points of view from different professional fields that enrich and broaden the recovery of Memory”.

You can see the full list of talks at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzDciN3fx88