Via Laietana police station: a symbol of democracy or of Spain’s dark past?

When Spain’s second-highest-ranking Interior Ministry official praised the Spanish National Police in Catalonia, whose headquarters are located on Barcelona’s Via Laietana avenue in the city center, he probably hadn’t fully considered just how controversial his words would prove to be. 

“The police headquarters on Via Laietana are a symbol of public service from which many generations of police have contributed and continue to contribute to strengthening our country’s democracy,” state secretary for security Rafael Pérez Ruiz said on Monday during his visit to the Catalan capital.

“Remembrance is key to promoting human rights,” Catalan president Pere Aragonès, of Esquerra Republicana, retorted on the first day of Catalonia’s general policy debate in Parliament. “We will work to turn the Spanish police headquarters on Via Laietana into a place of remembrance and to denounce Francoism.”

Esquerra’s pro-independence allies Junts, meanwhile, condemned what they described as Pérez Ruiz’s “absolute ignorance,” while Spain’s junior coalition partners, Podemos, also decried the Socialist’s remarks, prompting the Spanish government to issue a clarifying statement a day later. 

“Torture and repression took place there,” admitted Spanish government spokesperson Isabel Rodríguez, steering clear of dismissing her colleague’s comments. “If anything, this government can be proud of how it has honored the democratic memory of our country.”

What happened there?

To understand why many took offense to the Interior Ministry official’s comments, we need to go back to the Franco dictatorship. 

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. 

In 2019, the Barcelona council unveiled a historical marker only meters away from the building that was destroyed three days later — it has since been replaced. Beyond this, there have also been numerous calls to remove the police and turn the building into a ‘historical memory’ site — these have grown even louder now following the state secretary for security’s visit.

“The best way to correct [Pérez Ruiz’s] unfortunate remarks would be to turn the police headquarters into a ‘historical memory’ site,” Gerardo Pisarello, the son of an Argentine ‘desaparecido’ and an MP for Podemos, said in Congress on Tuesday. 

But Spain has been notoriously reluctant to deal with its past. In 1977 the country passed an amnesty law that freed political prisoners and allowed those in exile, such as Carles Vallejo, to return. Yet the same law also guaranteed that those who had carried out crimes against humanity during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship would never be tried for their actions. And although Spain’s two most recent Socialist governments have made some moves in favor of ‘historical memory’, critics view them as insufficient. 

If the Via Laietana police station is ever to become a museum, it will first have to overcome the objections of the right and far-right, who have long insisted on “amnesia” - that is, forgetting the legacy of Franco’s fascist authoritarianism while, at least allegedly, focusing exclusively on the future.