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Day of remembrance and tribute to the victims of the military coup, the Civil War and the Dictatorship.

Today, December 10, 2024, the event was held on the occasion of the Day of remembrance and tribute to the victims of the military coup, the Civil War and the Dictatorship, included in the Law of Democratic Memory 20/2022 to be held on October 31 of each year, but has been postponed due to what happened in Valencia.

It is no coincidence that this event was held on December 10, International Human Rights Day. In Spain, democratic memory continues to be a phenomenon that has to do with the present but is still anchored in the past, without a symbolic closure that would allow us to continue working towards the future.

Under the framework of Human Rights, the right to justice, the right to know the truth, the right to reparation, and the right to memory, both individual and collective, are included. Thus, this event of homage to the victims and survivors of the most tragic period of our recent history has become a solemn act of reparation and memory.

This event, organized by the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, was held at the National Auditorium in Madrid, with the presence of Iñaki Gabilondo as presenter, Miguel Ríos, who closed the event, and the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, together with the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, who granted Declarations of Reparation to 20 victims and/or survivors of the Civil War and Francoism.

These persons are:

• Miguel Hernández Gilabert: poet and playwright originally from Orihuela, sentenced to death penalty commuted to thirty years, leaving him to die of tuberculosis in prison in April 1942.

• María Zambrano Alarcón: assistant professor of the Chair of Metaphysics at the Central University, exiled in different countries, later being awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1981 and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for Literature in 1988.

• Blas Infante Pérez de Vargas: Andalusian politician, writer and intellectual, he was arrested by a group of Falangists and imprisoned in Seville, on the road to Carmona, where he was finally shot.

• María Egea Muñoz de Zafra: she lived in exile from the age of five, when her family had to embark on the Stanbrook bound for Oran, where they were interned in a prison while her father was sent to several Algerian concentration camps. He remained living in Algeria until he moved to Paris, where he lives today.

• Alexandre Bóveda Iglesias: Republican and Galician politician, secretary of organization of the Galician Party, member of the commission that drafted the Statute of Galicia in 1932. He was imprisoned by the rebels in July 1936 and finally executed on August 17 of the same year.

• Pino Sosa Sosa: fighter for democratic memory, in the search to find the remains of her father, who was arrested after the coup d’état in July 1936. In 2017, her father’s remains were found in the Tenoya well along with 14 other victims.

• Julián Zugazagoitia Mendieta: deputy for Badajoz in 1931 and in 1936 for Bilbao, at the end of the War he had to go into exile in France where he was arrested by the Gestapo and handed over to the Spanish authorities in 1940. He was condemned to death and shot on November 9 of that same year.

• Carmen Hombre Ponzoa and Juan Máximo Salazar: Carmen was a teacher and trade unionist affiliated to the UGT and Juan was a councilman in El Puerto de Santa María and secretary of the Socialist Association of Jerez de la Frontera. During the dictatorship, both were imprisoned and executed, Carmen being 8 months pregnant.

• Enrique Ruano Casanova: student in 1969, arrested with his girlfriend Dolores González Ruiz by the Political Social Brigade of the dictatorship. Tortured and thrown out of a window, he was a symbol of student resistance and repression by the regime.

• Ángeles Flórez Peón, “Maricuela”: known as “the last militia member”, affiliated to the Socialist Youth in 1936, she was arrested and sentenced to 9 years in prison after the fall of Asturias. In 1948, she left with her husband Graciano Rozana for France, from where she returned in 2004 until her death last May.

• Francisco Javier Elola y Díaz Varela: Magistrate of the Supreme Court, member of the Legal Commission in charge of drafting the preliminary draft of the 1931 Constitution and deputy for Lugo in the elections to the Constituent Courts during the Second Republic, when he served as attorney general. He was executed on May 12, 1939 in Barcelona.

• Basilio Blasco Lahoz: exiled with his family after the outbreak of the war due to his left-wing Republican militancy. In 1939, he was interned in several concentration camps in France and transferred to Mauthausen with the number 3479. He finally died in the Gusen concentration camp in 1939.

• Vicente Aleixandre y Merlo: poet of the generation of 27, he remained in Spain after the war, very affected by the deaths of Lorca and Miguel Hernandez. In 1949 he was named Académico de la Lengua and in 1977 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• Joaquín Amigo Aguado: writer, professor and philosopher from Granada, friend of Federico García Lorca and disciple of Ortega y Gasset. Catholic and conservative, he was assassinated by militiamen when he was thrown down the Tajo de Ronda at the end of August 1936.

• Conchita Viera Nevado: her life has been marked by the murder of her father, Amado Viera, mayor of Valencia de Alcántara, at the hands of the Falangists in 1936, when she was only three years old. Another 48 people were thrown into the Terría mine along with her father, who 81 years later have been exhumed thanks to Conchita’s struggle to recover their memories.

• Xosé Fortes Bouzán: career military officer and founding member of the Democratic Military Union, sentenced to four years in prison and expulsion from the Armed Forces for defending the democratization of the army and freedoms in Spain. Ten years later he was able to rejoin the army after being amnestied.

• Consuelo Berges Rábado: translator, journalist, writer and biographer, she defended her libertarian ideas and the women’s vote advocated by Clara Campoamor in the Congress of Deputies. She was a member of the Masonic Lodge of Adoption Amor de Madrid, where she focused on equal Masonic rights for men and women.

• Luis Pérez Lara: fighter for the establishment of democracy and freedoms in Spain, he was sentenced to 13 years and one day, of which he served seven in various prisons, and was also the driving force behind the first association of political prisoners in Spain.

• Miguel de Molina: artist, singer and dancer, was kidnapped in his dressing room, beaten, had his head shaved and was forced to drink castor oil before being abandoned. He went into exile in Argentina in 1942 where he died in 1993, and whose remains lie in the Actors’ Pantheon in the Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires.

• Justa Freire Méndez: teacher and pedagogue, at the end of the war she was sentenced to six years in prison, two of which she was incarcerated in the Women’s Prison of Las Ventas.

Now more than ever, a time in which there are revisionist and whitewashing tendencies of history, their testimonies and the stories of their lives are more necessary than ever. These people and their families have today received a small part of what each of them has meant and means for the democratic memory of Spain.