Four days, 17 witnesses and a deep review of our Contemporary History. The judgment on Pazo de Meirás has been seen for sentence and waiting for us to know if the judge of the Court of First Instance number 1 of A Coruña he estimates the state’s demand or agrees with the Francs. A sentence that, probably, will have a long judicial journey until the Supreme court. A judgment that looks askance at the statues of Abraham and Isaac, which are located within Meirás, and which justice has recognized (for now) as the property of the Franco.
A trial in which different questions have been raised: To what extent can an authoritarian State dissociate itself from the personal figure of the person who holds all power? Did Franco act in good faith when registering the Pazo as personal property in 1941? Did the State abandon the property after death of the dictator assuming that the Pazo was not public property?
Questions, these and more, that the judge must answer in these next few weeks to write her sentence. Marta Canales should focus on which legal aspects have more weight in a judicial process that includes a civil war, a 40-year dictatorship, a period of transition to democracy and a rule of law whose life is little longer than the authoritarian regime that it preceded.
The files
Documentation is missing, some because it has disappeared for various reasons; because some institutions, like the Royal House, do not facilitate their access; because the municipal archives are more a mess of papers than a documentation center.
In this regard, the work of the authors of ‘Meirás: A pazo, a caudillo, a plunder’, Manuel Pérez and Carlos Babío, who have recounted the “atmosphere of vigilance and oppression, of continued suspicion” in which the Spanish lived during the dictatorship. The Franco lawyers have pointed out in this regard that not everyone “would be against Franco.”
And there were, there seems to be no doubt about that. The local authorities that with the purchase and donation to Franco had a specific objective: “to attract the State to Galicia, to make A Coruña the political and government capital at least during the summer period.” A story with names and surnames, Alfonso Molina, Pedro Barrie de la Maza or the mayor of sada in 1938, Toribio Pollan, which threatened to include on “black lists” the “bad patriots” who “voluntarily” (sic) refused to participate in the popular subscription promoted by the Pro Pazo Board for the purchase.
Among what was exposed by the lawyers of the different administrations and the Franco lawyers we find the contemporary history of Spain, Galicia and A Coruña; the experiences of thousands of families, a vast archive and decades of political changes (always latent during the four days of sessions).
The immense difficulty of this patrimonial dispute is summarized with a sentence from the conclusions presented by the State Attorney, Javier Suárez: “the time of history is not the time of men.” But that time has come. Now it’s time to wait for the sentence.
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