Descendants of fascist dictator Franco stripped of titles as his regime is ruled illegal
Reading time: 2 minutes
Picasso's Guernica. Prominent in the painting are a screaming women, a dead baby, a gored horse and a bull. He painted it in Paris after the bombing of Guernica, a town in the Basque Country, on 26 April 1937. The attack was carried out by the Nazis and Fascist Italy at the behest of the Spanish Nationalists. The town was populated mostly by women and children.
Spain has abolished the titles of the grandchildren of the fascist dictator General Francisco Franco as well as 30 others linked to him.
The Democratic Memory Law, passed earlier this year, came into effect yesterday and removes the amnesty for the atrocities committed under Franco’s 40-year rule, which has been declared illegal.
General Franco ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975 after a military coup against the Second Republic’s democratically elected leftist Popular Front government. The ensuing civil war resulted in 500,000 deaths.
The new law bans the glorification of Franco and his dictatorship. Thirty-three of the abolished titles “exalt the coup, the war and the dictatorship, and its instigators, leaders or participants in the repressive system … those whose basis is constituted by a series of behaviours that violate human dignity and other fundamental rights committed in pre-constitutional times.”
Women pleading with Nationalists for the lives of prisoners, Constantina, 1936
Francisco Franco Martinez-Bordiú, grandson of the dictator, inherited the lordship of Meiras from Franco’s widow, Carmen Polo.
He said the abolition of the title was “nonsense without any practical effects”. “I will continue to be Lord of Meiras even if the government doesn’t recognise it,” he said.
Carmen Martinez-Bordiú, the autocrat’s granddaughter, will be stripped of the dukedom of Franco. It was given to Polo in 1975 by King Juan Carlos.
Share this article:
Subscribe to our newsletter to not miss articles like this one:
SUBSCRIBE
