Open letter to the President of the USA
Dear President of the USA, this
open letter is aimed to bring into
your notice that in your next visit to
Spain to have talks with Mr. Rajoy
(1, 2) you are going to meet with
the leader of a Franco-fascist party
called Partido Popular (PP). This
party is the continuation of another
one called Alianza Popular (AP),
which was founded in February
1976. Almost all the members of
both parties (AP & PP) belonged to
the ranks of the Franco's regime.
Manuel Fraga Iribarne (1, 2, 3, 4,),
one of the main founders of both
political formations, was Interior
Minister (Ministro del Interior) who
hunted down democrats and
people against the dictator. We
must bear in mind that Franco was
a war criminal who killed more
than half a million people during the
civil war, a war triggered after a
coup d'état
promoted by the
Spanish Army, the Church, the
monarchs, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, the newspaper ABC, and the "good people"
of the those days. It must not be neglected that after the civil war more than 100,000
people died in executions, concentration camps, and in overambitious megaconstructions aimed at becoming Franco's inheritance (Monumento de los Caídos,
hydroelectric dams, etc.). Also, more than 114,000 people are still missing, which
makes of Spain "the second country in the world after Cambodia, with the largest
number of victims of enforced disappearances whose remains have not been
recovered or identified."
Franco was also an ally of both Hitler and Mussolini (1, 2) and Spain became the
testing ground for the new war machinery that Germany had devised and which would
be used in the 2ond World War . You may be thinking that this happened a long time ago
as Franco died in November 1975, and that a democratic Constitution was accepted by
the Spaniards in 1978, but today the PP still has this francoist ideology in its DNA, and
ideology that is put into practice through "democratic means", I will explain:
(1) There are, at least, 165 streets in Madrid that bear francoist and fascist names, and
more than 8,000 in the rest of Spain (except for Catalonia and the Bask Country); they
represent a homage to those who helped Franco and his national allies during and
after the war (you can ask the American Ambassador in Madrid about this), but the PP
leaders say these streets represent pieces of the Spanish history. And on top of that,
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