Outlawing associations that glorify Francoism has never been easy. Today marks another step toward achieving this goal, but it hasn't ended with one of the dictatorship's most active and staunch defenders: the Francisco Franco Foundation. With the favorable votes of all political parties, except for Vox, which voted against, and the abstentions of the Popular Party and the Navarrese People's Union (UPN), which abstained, the Congress of Deputies approved the new law on associations this Thursday.

The Spanish government will allocate €1.5m to the shock plan for the recovery of democratic or historic memory - terms used when talking about victims of the Spanish civil war and Franco's dictatorship - launched in 2020, most of which will be devoted to the exhumation of mass graves in 2021 (€1.2m). A further €750,000 will be direct aid granted by the ministry and the other half will be managed by the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP). They have opted to aid 114 projects to locate, exhume and identify graves and 44 projects for the recovery of democratic memory. "There will not be a single day this year that we do not work on the exhumation," promised the Vice President and Minister of Democratic Memory, Carmen Calvo. This is the first state aid aimed at recovering bodies buried in mass graves since 2013, since despite the fact that the Spanish law of historical memory dates from 2007, the People's Party governments left it without endowment. The Catalan administration will receive €335,000 for four specific projects.