Companys, Catalan victim number 2,761 of Franco-era executions

Thursday will mark the 75th anniversary of the execution by firing squad --after a farce of a summary trial whose script had been written beforehand-- of the democratically elected president of Catalonia by the Franco dictatorship, at the Montjuïc Castle. Forty years after the reestablishment of freedom in Spain, it is time for the State to accept blame, ask for forgiveness, and annul that infamous sentence.

This democratic anomaly is a huge burden. It is probably the clearest and most symbolic evidence of the inability of Spanish society to admit to its past, to come clean with the dictatorship. November 20 will be the 40th anniversary of the death of the dictator, the legacy of which persists insidiously in many corners --names of squares and streets, monuments-- and attitudes --a political inability to provide justice to the victims, to recover their memory, to dig up the bodies in the ditches, to open archives, to rewrite history without whitewashing the facts.

Many of the most profound shortcomings that plague democratic Spain have to do with this impunity, with the shameful complicit silence that surrounds everything that has to do with the dictatorship. The inability to handle the Catalan national process has its roots in the inability of Franco-ism to tolerate the diversity of languages and cultures that make up the reality of Spain, an intolerance that still persists and, as Josep Benet wrote, became an attempt at cultural genocide.

Companys was captured by the Nazis in France and sent to Franco-era Spain, ignoring all rules of extradition. The dictator wanted him dead. He represented what was most hated: support for the Republic, for Catalonia, and for all the victims of repression. To remember his death is to pay tribute to the thousands executed by the Franco regime after the end of the civil war, in an unending act of massive revenge. The president of Catalonia was the Catalan victim number 2,761.

Later, for years, there would be many more. It is not surprising that historian Paul Preston has spoken of the Spanish Holocaust, a barbaric war, and a false peace, based on terror, injustice, fear, and death.

The passionate and often controversial political trajectory of Companys, his tragic idealism and his death that gave him, and us, dignity, and his conversion into a popular myth, are today the subject of analysis in this ARA tribute. A newspaper with which we wish, via this man as criticized in life as he is revered in death, to assert our collective past in all its complexity. To build a future it is necessary to know, understand, and remember history, with all its pages both bitter and glorious.