Spanish Government Funds Group That Exalts Franco

Spain's rightwing People's party government has poured about £50,000 of state funding into a foundation dedicated to the memory of General Franco, the dictator who ran Spain with an iron fist for 40 years, it was revealed yesterday.

Over the past two years the culture ministry has spent about 10% of its total funding allocated to independent archives to help the National Francisco Franco Foundation computerise its files.

The group has been criticised for allowing only Franco sympathisers to access its files.

Senior members of the People's party of the prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, yesterday condemned the grants. "It is not reasonable for state money to be spent on promoting the values of a dictator," said the head of the People's party in Catalonia, Alberto Fernandez.

"Modest, honest and providential," is how the foundation's website describes the man known as the "generalissimo" and who is held responsible for the summary killings of tens of thousands of Spaniards.

The foundation, headed by Franco's daughter Pilar, also claims that the 1936 military rebellion against the elected government that sparked the Spanish civil war and allowed the general to seize power was legal and legitimate.

Among the foundation's stated aims is the organisation, every year, of celebrations to mark Franco's death. It also maintains fresh flowers on his tomb and that of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the extreme right Falange party.

"These grants are both morally and democratically deplorable," said the Socialist party's culture spokeswoman Carme Chacon. "The only people who have access to their files are those who pass through their sectarian, ideological filtering system."

Among those to have been barred access to the files is British historian and Franco biographer Paul Preston.

The funding has outraged unions and other organisations in Catalonia who have been refused permission to reclaim documents taken from their archives during the civil war. The files are deposited hundreds of miles away in a military library in Salamanca.

"The government refuses to return our archives but funds those of the people who stole them," said Josep Andreu, archivist of Catalonia's General Workers Union, who discovered that the grants were being given. He said the foundation had received seven times more public funding than any other private archive over the past two years.

A culture ministry spokesman, Juan Allende, described the financing as "a great success". "It means the archives can be freely accessible to historians and the public."

But historians said the archives, containing 27,000 documents,were still closed. "The ministry must oblige them to open their doors," said Javier Tussell, a historian.

The row comes days after the People's party mayor of Castellon, eastern Spain, was forced to withdraw a publicly funded book in which he praised some of Franco's policies.