Francisco García Avilés, mayor of Vox in Puente de Génave (Jaén), has done it again. With a photograph of the dictator Francisco Franco, with the motto “Franco, Franco, long live Spain, until Spain”, he published, for another year, a Francoist calendar with the aim of distributing it among the clients of the agency which he himself directs. The councilor of the far-right party, who became mayor in 2023, hides behind the fact that it is a tradition he has been carrying on for at least 15 years and evades any political responsibility because, he says, the business is now managed by his previous partner. However, last summer a sign was posted on the door advising that the office would be temporarily manned in the afternoon “by Paco.”
The mayor of Bridge used his personal social networks to launch and disseminate the calendar, and he has received many booking requests since Thursday. García chose as the almanac design a photograph of the leader that complements the unconstitutional eagle flag.
Although the Vox mayor dissociates the City Council from the controversial calendar, he himself admitted to having a small statue of Franco in his city council office which, he said, a neighbor gave him. And other colleagues from his municipal group even asked him to remove the photographs of the dictator he had in the window of the mayor’s office.
Francisco García Avilés governs with an absolute majority in Puente de Génave (2,200 inhabitants), obtaining 49.16% of the votes and six of the 11 councilors of the Corporation, against four from the PSOE (which governed the municipality for three decades) and one from the PP. The far right has grown from five to 28 city councilors in the province of Jaén, and Puente de Génave was the only Andalusian city where Vox was the most voted party in both local elections and the July 2023 general elections.
The mayor of Jaén is a repeat offender with calendars. In 2024 he distributed 800 copies of an almanac among his customers which then reported the images of Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera with the phrase “I am responsible only to God and history”.
“I don’t have to have any decorum, everyone does what they want in their job,” the Puenteño city councilor later declared to this newspaper, for whom these types of almanacs “don’t offend any neighbors, only the fools of the PSOE.” The vice-president of the Jaén Provincial Council, Pilar Parra (PSOE), accused the PP of collusion with Vox. “You have opened the door to sociological Francoism without complexes,” Parra said in a plenary session, alluding to the Puente de Génave almanac.
This is not the only eccentricity for which Francisco García had his moments of glory. In his first year as mayor, on the occasion of Pride Day, he became the first Vox mayor in all of Spain to decide to display the LGTBI flag on the balcony of the town hall. And this despite the fact that the councilor himself had been very critical on social media towards the people of that group.
