THE Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has called on the Junta to ‘stop whitewashing’ Francoism.
The criticism revolves around an explanatory panel in the Picasso Museum of Malaga which appears to downplay the start of the civil war and the group is demanding that it be modified.
In the permanent exhibition 1928-1938. The minotaur and other monsters, a bilingual panel begins with the phrase “as the political tensions of the 1920s escalated into the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s …” and goes on to discuss Picasso’s works of the time, disregarding the coup d’etat of 1936 which resulted in the overturning of a democratic election through violent and brutal means.
The ARMH has filed a complaint to the Junta in which it stresses that ‘4,800 bodies were buried in common graves for decades in the Malaga cemetery of San Rafael, these people were not assassinated by the political tensions of the 1920s, but by groups of fascists who illegally detained, tortured and murdered them with total impunity’.
According to the President of the ARMH, Emilio Silva, ‘language is crucial and it is not innocent. Putting the war down to political tensions is to lie, deny and whitewash a coup that used terrible violence to seize power and build a forty-year dictatorship.’
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