No historical commemorative plaque has suffered so many attacks and destruction in recent years in Barcelona. This is the lectern that recalls the past of violence and repression of the police station of Via Laietana, the current police headquarters of Catalonia and through which dozens of political prisoners passed under the Franco regime. Since its installation in 2019, it has been vandalized up to fifteen times, a figure far from that recorded by any other similar signage.
Since its inauguration on March 26, 2019, the lectern has been the subject of recurring attacks. Just 48 hours after Barcelona City Council placed it for the first time, about 20 meters from the police stations, the sign appeared to be burned. In the following two months, it was vandalized two more times. And since then, it has suffered an average of three attacks per year, considering that due to the renovation works on Via Laietana, it had to be removed from the sidewalk for several months.
“These are systematic and organised actions, it is not someone who passes by and decides to paint it,” explains Carles Vallejo, president of the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of Francoism. This activist was tortured in 1970 in the dungeons of this building – then headquarters of the fearsome Francoist Politico-Social Brigade –, accused of having created a union section of the workers’ commissions in the Seat factory.
The Barcelona City Council attributes these acts of vandalism to the fact that “some people consider it controversial” due to its location in front of the police station. Without openly naming anyone, they add that this “denotes the discomfort of certain social sectors with the reparation of democratic memory.”
The plaque, titled 43 Via Laietana. Memory of repressionremembers that these facilities were already an epicenter of torture since the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and also during the Second Republic, when the workers’ movement called it “The Bloody Mill.” Under Franco, dozens of activists opposed to the regime, from Manuel Vázquez Montalbán to Lluís Llach, Gregorio López Raimundo and Jordi Pujol, were victims of police violence there.
More protection and agility when replacing it
After its reinstallation following the works on Via Laietana in April 2024, the text of the plaque was destroyed twice and has not been repaired since July. This situation has sparked complaints from historical memory activists, who are calling for greater agility from the council.
“The only way to neutralize this extreme vandalism is to react with perseverance, to repair it immediately after the neighbors inform us, and thus the perpetrators do not achieve their objective, which is to remove the sign from the public space,” says Vallejo.
Sources from the city hall respond that “if there has been a long period of days without repair, it is due to municipal ignorance.” The municipal government defends its commitment to the victims of torture in Via Laietana and claims that proof of this is the installation last November of another memorial in the same place. It is the inscription on the sidewalk of the words repair, justice And memory.
At the same time, this summer, the Barcelona Ombudsman, the equivalent of the Ombudsman, asked the Barcelona City Council to “intensify surveillance measures” and take the necessary actions to clarify these events. However, the council no longer denounces it. It did so for the first time, in 2019, and a Barcelona court even opened proceedings and requested recordings from the multiple security cameras located on the facade of the building, but the headquarters responded that it was unable to focus on the lectern. The case was closed shortly after.
However, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of the Franco Regime openly accuses the National Police and accuses them of looking the other way. “If they have done nothing during all this time, it is because they are accomplices, I am sorry but it must be said that way. The desk is within the control radius of their cameras and they do nothing,” complains Vallejo. When asked about this issue, the National Police did not respond.
At the same time, maintaining this signage is something that has been bothering the City Hall in recent years. After verifying that it was the target of regular attacks, the government of Ada Colau, through its advisor for Democratic Memory, thought about ways to protect it. They considered different options to protect it, but came to the conclusion that none of them would prevent someone from spray-painting it. So they opted for the opposite: a simple and cheap formula, in the form of vinyl, which would allow them to replace it whenever necessary.
Since 2019, the municipality reports that around 4,500 euros have been spent on repairing this lectern.
Waiting for the memory center
The installation of this discreet sign, which was greeted as a crime and an attack by the police unions, is in reality only a small part of the struggle that exists around the current building of the police station. The big dispute revolves around the future of the property, whether it should continue to house police stations or whether it should be transformed into a historical memory center to disseminate information about the repression that took place inside.
Although the Congress approved its museification in 2017, on the proposal of the ERC and with the favorable vote of the PSOE, in 2023 the same idea was rejected with the opposite vote of the socialists. The Ministry of the Interior, both with the PP and now with Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has always opposed the withdrawal of the police from the place, despite the insistence of the Generalitat and the City Council, especially during the mandate of Colau. municipal executive.
“The current police feel unfairly targeted by our demands,” Vallejo laments. “The best thing a democratic police can do is to leave this space that houses immense pain and contribute to making it a space of memory, as is happening in many countries, from Germany with the Stasi to Argentina with its dictatorship,” he said. States.
The latest news from the central government dates back to the announcement made by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Torres, during his visit to Barcelona last April. He assured that the police station will be designated a “place of memory”, a figure provided for in the Democratic Memory Law of 2022 and requested by entities such as the Ateneu Memòria Popular, the Fundació Cipriano García-CCOO or the Amical de Mauthausen. But this does not mean that the building will no longer be the headquarters of the National Police of Catalonia.
