Leciñena.- The Government Delegation in Aragón has commemorated in Leciñena the ‘Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the men and women who suffered exile as a result of War and Dictatorship’, as established by Law 20/2022 of Democratic Memory. The event, chaired by the government delegate in Aragon, Fernando Beltrán, paid tribute, on the 80th anniversary of European liberation, to the eleven residents of the Monegrina town deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
The Democratic Memory Act establishes the date of May 8 for the memory of exile, since this is the date on which in 1945 there was the European victory over fascism and Nazism, a historical fact to which the men and women of Spanish exile contributed decisively. Among them are the eleven Leciñenans who were deported to Mauthausen: Francisco Bailo Mata, Francisco Franco Escanero, Carlos Maza Albero, Joaquín Maza Letosa, brothers Pascual and Juan Orús Murillo, Pedro Sancho Marcén, Félix Sieso Pisa, Antonio Solanas Franco and brothers Antonio and Pablo Solanas Escartín.
The event had a historical contextualization of Alberto Sabio, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza, and a floral offering in which the subdelegates of Huesca, Carlos Campo, Zaragoza, Noelia Herrero, and Teruel, Enrique Gómez, participated.
In his speech, Beltrán thanked the City Council of Leciñena “for its firm commitment to democratic memory, as demonstrated by the recent placement of the monument that recalls its eleven deported neighbors, also in a place as symbolic as Plaza Europa”.
“Remembering the victims and doing so in accordance with proven historical facts is ‘a fundamental ethical imperative’, as established by the Democratic Memory Act,” said the government delegate. For this reason, Beltrán has placed Leciñena “as a civic example against those who insist on denying the historical reality and the proven facts, the same ones that repeal the laws that cover a fair reparation and in accordance with human rights.”
About the history of the Spanish exiles, Beltrán recalled that “totalitarianism forced them to resist, to flee, to survive… Some, the least, entered victorious in Paris; for others, unfortunately, liberation arrived too late, when after months or years in the concentration camps they were already dead or their health had been diminished forever.” However, “neither Francoism nor Nazism were able to eradicate their dignity,” said the delegate, for whom “their memory today prevents us from the hate speeches of the extreme right.”
For all these reasons, Beltrán regretted that “at a time when Europe and the world are facing the challenge of historical revisionism, associated with extremism, Aragón does not have, after its incomprehensible repeal, its own Democratic Memory Law that provides an adequate framework for a firm institutional response to these discourses”.
Faced with this, Beltrán has made the commitment of the Government of Spain to historical memory through initiatives such as the María Domínguez Chair of Democratic Memory, in collaboration with the University of Zaragoza, or the program ‘Spain in freedom’, which celebrates the important advances achieved in the last five decades, pays tribute to the many social groups and institutions that have made them possible and transmits the value of democracy to the new generations.