Barcelona expects Via Laietana police station to be converted to museum
Building was used to torture Franco opponents and has been a heated point of contention for pro-independence supporters
The Spanish police station on Barcelona’s Via Laietana avenue could become a remembrance museum in the near future. Indeed, even the city council takes this impending conversion process for granted.
The history of the building would serve to convert the station into a museum, but the change will not be imminent as the Spanish government is "not fully ready, but they will," according to Barcelona councilor for Democratic Memory, Jordi Rabassa, speaking to the Catalan News Agency (ACN).
The new 'Democratic Memory' law passed in June 2021 states that those places related to repression should become remembrance stations, as explained by the councilor.
The change could happen sooner rather than later, as Rabassa claims some members of the Socialist party, the senior coalition party in Spain’s government, are in favor of the museum conversion.
Without the approval of the executive, the council cannot go ahead as the station is currently in use by Spanish police forces. However, Rabassa does not believe the project will be abandoned.
"The Via Laietana police station was the epicenter of political repression in Barcelona, it has a huge memorial significance for the city and the country," the councilor said, adding it will happen "for sure," just as it is happening in other places in Europe and in South America.
Socialists split on the subject
The Barcelona city council is still waiting for the Spanish interior minister's response to their request on the transformation of the station to a museum.
But, the Socialist Party has been split in previous votes related to the police station closure.
In 2017, the Spanish Socialists voted in Congress in favor of an Esquerra Republicana (ERC) proposal. Catalonia’s Socialist Party took a similar position in 2019.
But, two years later, the party abstained in a similar vote, also proposed by ERC.
Proposals and not only complaints
The city council right now wants to push the initiative forward, therefore they have already met with several parties to explain their museum project.
Among the proposals, they want to create a space to explain the history, political repression, and torture, as well as spaces for those who suffered while the police station was used during Francoism.
The Catalan government is already in favor of the new museum, so right now, authorities only need support from the Spanish executive.
"We will have more chances with the Ministry if our project is prepared and full of reasons why it should exist," the Democratic Memory councilor said to ACN.
Marking where atrocities happened in Barcelona
In 2022, the Catalan capital will work on a new map that will pinpoint all places where atrocities happened in the city. The map would show information from neighborhood police stations, torture spots and all those places that are "part of the state’s repressive world," Rabassa said.
Another map the city is preparing will show all those sites in Barcelona with a "slave and colonial past." As an example, it will feature the removed Antonio López statue, now replaced by a red and colorful anti-racism statue, but the Christopher Colombus statue is "more complicated," Rabassa recognized.
What happened in Via Laietana police station?
From 1941 until Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, the building housed the Political-Social Brigade — Franco’s secret police in charge of suppressing dissent — and anti-Francoists were routinely interrogated and tortured there.
One of these people is Carles Vallejo, the president of the Former Political Prisoners Francoism Association. Active in the labor movement, Vallejo was arrested in 1970 at age 20 and tortured at the police station for 20 days straight before being sent to Barcelona’s La Model prison.
“I try to avoid Via Laietana because it all comes flooding back,” Vallejo told Catalan News in late 2020, then 45 years after Franco’s death. Life in prison, he said, was better than at the police station, despite being held in solitary confinement for a month: there was no “direct torture” there.
The police station now
The Franco-era General Police Corps, to which the Political-Social Brigade belonged, was restructured following the dictator’s death in 1975, becoming the Superior Police Corps before eventually being dissolved and incorporated into the current police force — indeed, one frequent criticism of Spain’s transition to democracy is the institutional continuity that exists from the pre-democratic era to these days.
In recent years, Via Laietana has been the site of pro-independence protests that have at times descended into violent clashes with the police, such as the week in late 2019 that the leaders of the movement were sentenced to lengthy terms behind bars for organizing the 2017 vote deemed illegal by Spain.