Last public statue of Spanish dictator Franco is removed

Last public statue of Spanish dictator Franco is removed

The last public statue in Spain of the former dictator Francisco Franco has been removed from the city gates of Melilla, a Spanish enclave and autonomous city on the north-west African coast.Without much fanfare, a group of workmen took down the statue on Tuesday, using a mechanical digger and heavy drills to chip away at the brick platform on which the statue stood, before lifting it off by a chain around its neck and carting it away in bubblewrap on a pickup truck.The statue, erected in 1978 three years after Franco's death, commemorated his role as commander of the Spanish Legion in the Rif war, a conflict fought in the 1920s by Spain and France against the Berber tribes of the Rif mountainous region of Morocco.“This is a historic day for Melilla,” Elena Fernandez Trevino, in charge of education and culture in the enclave, said on Monday after the local assembly voted to take the statue down, pointing out that it was “the only statue dedicated to a dictator still in the public sphere in Europe”.Only the far-right Vox party voted against the move, arguing that the statue celebrated Franco's military role and not his dictatorship, so the Historical Memory