Vice President Ollo takes part in the Territorial Council for Democratic Memory
The Vice President of the Government of Navarre, Ana Ollo, has taken part in the Territorial Council for Democratic Memory, an inter-regional body in which she highlighted the importance of institutional cooperation in the field of historical memory. One example of this cooperation is the bilateral agreement signed between the Department of Memory and Coexistence, Foreign Action and Basque Language of the Government of Navarre and the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory to exchange information on victims of Francoism. Moreover, within the framework of this institutional collaboration, Navarre will receive €138,618 this year to promote projects and programmes related to democratic memory, as reported at today’s meeting. The meeting, in which the Chartered Community of Navarre participated online, also addressed other issues such as the State DNA Bank or the regulatory and organisational development of the Democratic Memory Act.
Furthermore, regarding the item on the agenda referring to the creation of a register and census of victims of the War and the Dictatorship, Councillor Ollo recalled that, on the occasion of the recent visit of the Secretary of State to Navarre, a cooperation agreement was also signed this Tuesday between the General State Administration (Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory) and the Government of Navarre. This agreement aims to update, within their respective territorial scopes, the maps locating disappeared persons as well as the register and census of victims, under the legal framework of Act 20/2022, of 19 October, on Democratic Memory, and Regional Act 33/2013, of 26 November, on the recognition and moral reparation of Navarrese citizens murdered and victims of repression as a result of the 1936 military coup.
The Directorate-General for Attention to Victims of the Ministry is promoting the creation and maintenance of the State Register and Census of Victims, as well as the management and updating of the Integrated Map for locating disappeared persons, and cooperation with other public administrations in order to coordinate the different maps that may exist. Navarre has already travelled a long path in this respect, initially through citizen and associative initiatives, and especially since 2015 through the Government of Navarre itself, via the Navarre Institute for Memory, which depends on the department headed by Vice President Ana Ollo.
The launch in 2016 of the Exhumation Programme by the Navarre Institute for Memory – in collaboration with memory associations and through agreements with the Aranzadi Society of Sciences, as well as with the involvement of NASERTIC – represented a major boost and a systematisation of the search, exhumation and identification of the remains of people murdered or who died in captivity in Navarre following the 1936 coup and during the dictatorship, whose whereabouts were still unknown. In fact, over the last decade, the Government of Navarre has managed to identify, through the public DNA bank, 30% of the bodies of victims of Francoism that it recovers thanks to the work of the Navarre Institute for Memory. This institute has a map of 269 mass graves, in addition to an extensive documentary database in its digital archive, Oroibidea, with references to nearly 25,000 victims of Francoism.
According to the latest assessment of Navarre’s Exhumation Plan, since 2016 a total of 166 actions have been carried out, of which 38 have been successful. In these 38 graves, the remains of a total of 163 people have been recovered, of whom 47 have been identified. The Navarre DNA Bank, managed by the public company NASERTIC, has 418 open case files thanks to samples provided by families searching for their missing relatives.
All this experience and documentation place Navarre as a benchmark in this field. This, together with the fact that both the State Administration and the Institute for Memory use the same open-source software application, called “Dédalo”, allows for rapid interoperability and the transmission of information between the parties, which in the signed agreement “express their interest in developing a joint project aimed at updating the Register and Census of Victims, as well as the map locating disappeared persons within their respective territorial scopes”.
Source: navarra.es
