Gustavo Bueno Foundation

Plaque of the Gustavo Bueno Foundation in Santo Domingo de la Calzada

The Gustavo Bueno Foundation is a Spanish private institution whose main objective is the cultivation of philosophy, particularly philosophy in the Spanish language and especially philosophical materialism, a system built by its founder, Gustavo Bueno Martinez. The Foundation was established in 1997 and in 1998 it settled in its current headquarters. Its president is Gustavo Fernando Bueno Sánchez, son of the philosopher.

The Gustavo Bueno Foundation includes several philosophical projects:

• Philosophy magazines The Basilisco and The Catoblepas.
• The promotion of projects aimed at digitizing and disseminating philosophical texts in Spanish: Philosophy Project in Spanish, the recovery and translation into Spanish of Latin works and the digitization of the work of Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Cardinal Ceferino González and other authors.
• The organization of courses and meetings of philosophy in Oviedo, Gijón and Santo Domingo de la Calzada.

Headquarters

The Gustavo Bueno Foundation has its headquarters in Oviedo (Asturias), in the building of the old Miñor Sanatorium, which was ceded to it for fifty years and exclusively by the Oviedo City Council while Gabino de Lorenzo was mayor under the government of the PP. The municipal palace has an area of more than one thousand one hundred square meters. The City Council itself contracted and financed the rehabilitation and conditioning works, the cost of which was 14 million pesetas, approximately 84,000 current euros. However, the documentation examined in 2016 by Wealth Management technicians shows that said agreement was never signed, so it would not have "legal support".

The Foundation also uses its headquarters to host meetings of the DENAES Foundation, of which Gustavo Bueno was the founder and patron of honor.

Visit from Councilor Rosón

In March 2019, the Oviedo City Councilor for the Economy, Rubén Rosón from the Somos Oviedo electoral group, paid prior notice to the facilities of the old Miñor Sanatorium. The objective was to carry out an evaluation of the state of the rooms, publicly owned, and communicate that the building would henceforth be shared with other companies, given that with the space available to the building "uses could be combined& #34;. However, and despite the fact that the mayor communicated his visit several days in advance, the members of the Foundation prevented the mayor from accessing beyond the library, in which both parties maintained a "tense& #3. 4; and "heated" discussion. During it, the members of the Foundation prevented the councilor from explaining himself, according to the press addressing him with "expletives, insults and harassment." He proceeded to report the facts to the police.

In a subsequent visit, the Foundation did not even receive the councilor, not allowing him access to the building despite the fact that there were people inside. Rubén Rosón came accompanied by a local police officer in plain clothes.

Subsequently, the mayor of Oviedo, Wenceslao López of the PSOE, criticized the performance of his councilor Rosón, calling it "simply a spectacle," especially when Rosón's powers did not include intervening in the state of heritage municipal since he was councilor of economy. López endorsed the permanence of the Foundation in the palace even without having an agreement, signing with the City Council in 1998. In his own words, there is a "de facto situation with twenty years of documented facts that give the foundation the right to continue being a tenant of the facilities. Rosón asked to evict the Foundation and asked the mayor Wenceslao López to "have the courage to do so".

Ideological position and accusations of sectarianism

It has been mentioned that among the members of the Fundación and their entourage ultra-conservative ideas predominate, of a liberal nature and in defense of the Spanish nation and the capitalist system. The organization has been sometimes compared with a "sect" for his "dogmatism" around Bueno and by the tendency among its members to protect each other.

In October 2017, the Gustavo Bueno Foundation joined a demonstration called by the Foundation for the Defense of the Spanish Nation (DENAES), together with organizations such as Fundación Villacisneros, Hazte Oír, Foro de Guardias Civiles or Círculo Balear, among others. The reason for the concentration was "the defense of the Spanish nation" before the Declaration of independence of Catalonia.

The approaches of the Gustavo Bueno Foundation have been used to fix some aspects of the ideology of the far-right party Vox.

Funding

Oviedo City Council covered all the Foundation's expenses from the beginning, approximately 100,000 euros per year, which in 2005 increased to 160,000. In 2008, the Foundation had an extraordinary endowment of around 800,000 euros, of which 565,198.40 euros were used to prepare the exhibition "Oviedo: Twelve Centuries". For the exhibition, the Foundation hired the company Ingenia-qed, of which Carmen Bueno Sánchez, daughter of the philosopher and sister of the president of the Foundation, was the majority shareholder and project manager. In 2015, the new local government of the Oviedo City Council decided to paralyze the annual subsidy of 155,000 euros that the Gustavo Bueno Foundation received, "after the "doubts" expressed by officials about the application of the aid". However, the accusation was dismissed by the Court of Accounts.