MOSCOW, October 20 (RIA Novosti) - A Spanish activist group, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARHM), has denounced the definition of ‘Francoism’ in the latest edition of the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary as “an insult to the victims of the dictatorship,” Telesur reports.
The dictionary’s new 23rd edition, presented Friday, defined Francoism as “a political and social movement with totalitarian tendencies, which began in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 around the figure of General Franco, and developed during his years as the head of state,” the ARHM activists’ website notes.
Activists from the ARHM say that the definition plays down the crimes committed by the Franco regime, noting that is an attempt to “sugar-coat” what was in reality a “terrible and violent dictatorship.” The group notes that the revision obscures the “numerous crimes committed by those who planned, supported, and fought for the successful coup of July 18, 1936.” This includes “113,000 missing, 500,000 exiled, 400,000 illegally detained, tens of thousands tortured,” and thousands of others otherwise repressed.
The group said that they are considering legal action against the Royal Spanish Academy (RSA), which is an official Spanish royal institution ostensibly responsible for promoting linguistic unity among Spanish-speaking countries.
The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory is a non-profit, mostly volunteer-funded organization which was begun in 2000 and works to preserve the public memory of the crimes of the Franco regime; it collects oral and written testimonies and excavates and identifies the bodies of victims, who were often dumped in mass graves. By 2012 the group had exhumed and identified 1,330 victims.
The recent scandal is reminiscent of the 2011 entry on Francisco Franco in the RSA’s Spanish Dictionary of Biography, a 50-volume taxpayer-funded dictionary, where Franco was described not as a dictator but just as “authoritarian,” and his soldiers as the “national army” conducting the “pacification” of regions during the Spanish Civil War. While in power, official state documents referred to Franco as "Caudillo de España" ("the Leader of Spain"), "el Caudillo de la Última Cruzada y de la Hispanidad" ("the Leader of the Last Crusade and of the Hispanic heritage") and "el Caudillo de la Guerra de Liberación contra el Comunismo y sus Cómplices" ("the Leader of the War of Liberation Against Communism and Its Accomplices").
