The Franco Foundation, which the government wants to outlaw, has, according to its president, Juan Chicharro, about 1,500 partners and “benefactors”.
“A man has just donated us a house.
Last year another donated us 75,000 euros, ”he says.
He promises to fight the illegalization in court and to change the country headquarters if necessary.
It holds an archive of 30,000 documents - "letters from Hitler, Mussolini, the Duke of Alba ... Franco was very meticulous, he kept everything" - but he is not willing to give it to a public center.
"Any researcher with a card can consult them here.
Since I have presided over it, we have never set any impediment ”.
Question.
Says its foundation: "The so-called Francoist repression is something as fallacious as its falsehood has been well demonstrated."
Who shot the victims who are recovered from mass graves with bullet holes in the skull?
Reply.
In every war there is repression.
But it was repressed very soon by Franco himself.
I'm not going to deny that there were those who took justice into their own hands.
There were reckoning at the beginning of the war.
One another.
What happened to the Czech women was tremendously cruel.
This law is sectarian because it forgets one side.
There are lots of graves, like the one in Camuñas.
P.
That one was opened.
Francisco Etxeberria, the same coroner who has exhumed hundreds of graves of victims of the Franco regime, did it.
R.
It was opened and closed because they were all nationals.
[The remains of several priests were recovered, who the Church wanted to propose for their beatification and their murderers were tried and executed during the Franco regime].
Q.
What relationship did the Falangists who were killing then have with the Franco regime?
A.
None.
They were particular murders that occurred especially at the beginning of the war in certain towns.
Franco never allowed them.
They were Falangists but not only.
It happened on both sides.
Q.
Do you agree that the graves are exhumed so that the relatives can recover the remains?
A.
Yes, of course, but all of them.
Q.
Your foundation says: "The old regime was not, in any case, a dictatorship."
What was it
R.
An authoritarian regime.
Beginning in 1959, Spain changed, people were not being shot in the street.
Q.
There were no elections.
A.
Yes, there were, but they were private.
The regime based its organic democracy on the family, the municipality and the union, and there they did occur.
In some respects it was a much more advanced democracy.
The mayors were not elected by the people, but by the Ministry of the Interior based on the population, but what the councilors are, no.
P.
They say: "Political parties are artificial constructions that only serve to divide."
A.
Right.
They respond to interests, manipulate the population and ultimately divide and confront.
Q.
Are you related to any of them?
R.
With Vox.
Santiago Abascal, Javier Ortega Smith, some military deputies have guaranteed me that they will oppose this law.
I asked to see José Luis Martínez Almeida and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, from the PP, but they did not want to.
Q. You say
that the law is sectarian because it only talks about one side and some victims, but the crimes of the Republican side were tried in the General Cause, the regime made a protocol of exhumations of the national side.
There were some crimes that were punished and others that were not.
A.
That is not entirely true.
Half of my family was murdered by the popular side and we don't know where they are.
There was, indeed, a General Cause, because in a war there are winners and losers, but the ultimate reality is that of more than 55,000 death sentences, only 24,000 were executed and those were serial killers.
P. "
Franco was very clear that since freedom was a supreme good it would never be possible to acquire it where misery and ignorance reigned, and as a good military man he knew that the final objective can never be reached without the prior taking of other intermediates" .
You have said that the military coup of 1936 was justified.
A.
Totally.
The situation was untenable.
The 1936 elections were a fraud.
They were killing each other in the streets.
That led us to a civil war, a terrible misfortune that we had already overcome and now their grandchildren are leading us to the same thing again.
Because Spanish is like a cat: if you put it against the wall, in the end it jumps in the face and pulls out its nails.
This Government is throwing the Spanish against the wall.
Restrain our freedom.
That's too much.
Q. You
speak of freedom but you defend the Franco dictatorship, where it did not exist.
R.
I am not in the year 60, it is 2020. I do not spread violence.
Those who defend that path of freedom at all costs have never been hungry.
The first human right is to be able to eat, to have a house, to have stability.
What happened in the Franco regime is that when it reached that level of well-being, it began to open freedoms.
Franco was much smarter than you think.
Q. You
speak of the economic well-being that Franco brought, but many people were exiled, plundered and purged in their jobs.
A.
That is a legend.
Specific cases cannot be generalized.
Q.
If everything was so idyllic under Franco, why did thousands of people go into exile in other countries?
R.
Quite a few went into exile.
Those who had crimes of blood did not return.
Not so the leaders and culprits who went to live like a king in Mexico after looting boxes.
Q.
Do you think that those Francoist trials that will be annulled and that in many cases ended up in execution, for example against mayors, members of unions or political parties, were carried out with guarantees?
R.
The guarantees of the time.
So shooting was the most common thing in the world.
Today the world has changed completely.
P.
But your foundation defends Francoism today.
A.
Yes. Franco took a poor and illiterate Spain and left a prosperous country.
Now there are queues of hunger, 50,000 dead in the epidemic, double that in the battle of the Ebro.