Nona Perera took advantage of her intervention in the central campaign event of Unidas Sí Podemos to announce that she will take "the heritage protection policy that she deployed from the General Directorate of Heritage to the heart of Arrecife" to avoid "the erasure of our identity and collective memory."
Perera, during her time as head of the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands, achieved "the integral protection of the Tindaya Mountain, one of the largest archaeological sites in the entire archipelago, after decades of struggle from social movements," she recalls.
"After many trips to Brussels, Madrid or Bilbao, we found the solution here, entering the Government of the Canary Islands," she comments. The candidate also highlighted "the courage that the entire team of the general directorate had demonstrated in applying the heritage law to sanction for the first time a large promoter who was attacking aboriginal heritage in the south of Tenerife, in Cuna del Alma," she says. According to the former general director, that opens "a new stage in which destroying our heritage will never be free again," she points out.
Both cases, that of Tindaya and that of Cuna del Alma, Perera described them as "two of the possibles that they told us were impossible." The candidate congratulated all the groups that pushed, studied and fought to protect both enclaves and only with them "it was possible and the victory is theirs", she makes clear.
For Nona Perera, the defense of memory and culture is fundamental for any people because "living goes hand in hand with knowing who we are, with having awareness and knowledge of why we are here," she points out. "Taking care of heritage is taking care of ourselves", she says.
Proof of this, she pointed out, is that "every time they want to subdue a people, the first thing they attack are the signs of their identity, to end it, to expel them from their territory."
To conclude, Perera recalled that "until now the government had never used the obligation it has to sanction those who attack our memory." "Heritage is not a weapon to be thrown, it is a shield to protect what we are", she concludes.
