“You can kill men, women, children like mine who have not yet been born. But what about ideas? “With what bullets will you kill ideas?” The collective imagination attributes this phrase to the activist Aurora Picornell, assassinated by the Franco regime on Twelfth Night in 1937. Before leaving the prison with the Falangists who arrested her, it is said that the young woman said goodbye to her cellmates, carrying with her a reel. of thread that she promised to send them if she survived. After being tortured, she was shot and buried in a mass grave. The reel never came back. His name returned to the news this Tuesday after the president of the Balearic Parliament, Gabriel Le Senne, of Vox, smashed his image during a plenary session of the regional chamber.
The events occurred when opposition deputies placed images of victims of the Franco regime during the debate in Parliament of a proposal by Vox, with the support of the PP, aimed at repealing the law on democratic memory of the Balearic Islands . The action resulted in the expulsion of two socialist deputies and Le Senne shattering the image of Picornell, the republican icon of the islands.
During the government control session in Congress this Wednesday, Pedro Sánchez asked the conservatives to demand the resignation of the president of the Balearic Parliament: “His execrable behavior would deserve the disapproval and resignation of his parliamentary majority,” he said. -he declared before Congress. ranks of the PP, remained silent. “They should ask for forgiveness,” the first vice-president, María Jesús Montero, told Vox. “In the Balearic Assembly they tear up the photo of a person victim of reprisals, murdered by the Francoists, because the homeland they are defending is a divided homeland that this country fortunately left behind a long time ago”
Falling from grace during the dictatorship, Picornell became an icon of historical memory and republicanism in democracy, so much so that she is popularly known as the Passionflower of Majorca. Picornell is considered a transgressive character who sought to break with the traditional role of women since the beginning of the 20th century.
Born in 1912, Picornell distinguished himself from an early age in a closed, Catholic and traditional society like Majorca. Picornell moved towards two new areas for women of the time: secularism – in 1930, she joined the Secular League of Majorca – and feminism – in 1928, she wrote the prologue to the book. The womanEast superior to man?by the writer Margarita Leclerc. Picornell made important steps in feminism in the 1930s and was the first to promote Women’s Day activities in the Balearic Islands in 1934.
After the establishment of the Second Republic, Picornell joined the Spanish Communist Party and became one of the party’s most prominent figures in Majorca. Her oratorical qualities, her empathy and her constant mobilization led her to make the leap into the trade union world: as she dedicated herself to textiles, like a large part of Majorcan women, she organized the Mallorcan Sewing Union.
Being so actively involved in the workers’ and communist movement led to her being one of the first people to be arrested after the military coup of 1936. Mallorca was, from the start, in the rebel zone . Picornell was taken to the provincial prison of Palma, while the Franco regime overthrew the Republic in which the Majorcan Pasionaria professed.
She did not stay in prison long: on Twelfth Night of 1937, from January 5 to 6, the regime killed her. He was 24 years old. Picornell and his four companions were murdered in the Porreres cemetery. The tailor’s body was buried in the Camisanto mass grave. His execution shook the island. “Look, look at Aurora’s bras.” This is how historiography relates that a man, “a very sad character of citizen fascism”, entered a bar in Es Molinar (Palma) and, visibly happy, took out a bra from his pocket and announced the death of Picornell.
It will be necessary to wait until January 2023, i.e. 86 years after his assassination, for the remains to return to his loved ones. The remains of Aurora, her father, Gabriel Picornell, and the four other “Molinar Reds” killed alongside Picornell were then handed over to their descendants during a moving ceremony during which the vice-president of the government, Yolanda Díaz, the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero and many other authorities, as well as relatives of the victims of the reprisals of the Franco regime and a wide representation of the civil sphere.
The approval of memory laws at the state level and, in particular, at the regional level, facilitated the discovery and excavation of the remains of women victims of reprisals by the dictatorship. A few months later, PP and Vox accepted a change of government after the May 28 elections and, as they have done in other territories, they are advocating the repeal of these laws.
