Getting Tough in Spain
ALAN, RAY
AFTER THE MAY PROTESTS Getting Tough in Spain BY RAY ALAN Madrid The media in Spain have enthusiastically exploited Watergate as yet another example of the hypocrisy and corruption to be...
...Yet Spanish Right-wingers do not seriously care about the ins and outs of royalist politics...
...Self-styled "Leftists" (believed to be Maoists) stabbed a young officer to death, and in revenge the police allegedly tortured about 20 of the 240 or so suspected Leftists they arrested in May...
...In the last few weeks, Guer-rilleros of Christ the King and members of the tiny neo-Nazi Spanish National Socialist party have made Ray Alan, a frequent NL contributor, is the author of Spanish Quest...
...Franco remains head of state-and politically, if not medically, he is as strong as ever...
...In this category, the Cruz lberica affair deserves special mention...
...Admiral Carrero Blanco is commited to the cause of Prince Juan Carlos, Franco's designated successor as chief of state...
...Franco's propagandists have studied the lessons of the 1968 Maoist and Trot-skyist riots in France, which so scared the middle classes and better-off workers that the Gaullists, despite being bankrupt of ideas and bereft of prestige, were able to win a general election...
...My personal impression, however, is that Iniesta has missed the bus...
...On one such occasion, an impressive number of secret police members marched en bloc (a subversive act under Spanish law...
...Unfortunately, in modern Spain comic opera is apt to degenerate into Grand Guignol...
...AFTER THE MAY PROTESTS Getting Tough in Spain BY RAY ALAN Madrid The media in Spain have enthusiastically exploited Watergate as yet another example of the hypocrisy and corruption to be expected of democracy in general and the United States in particular...
...Another, more liberal, general is currently attracting greater political attention: the Army chief of staff, General Manuel Diez Alegria...
...Had not Franco himself proposed a monarchical restoration, they would have preferred a "regency," their euphemism for another period of dictatorship under another general...
...The police have opened fire on strikers, killing one and injuring several others...
...As for White House attempts to shield the buggers, did not General Franco himself proclaim an amnesty for the ex-ministers involved in the huge Matesa scandal only two years ago...
...I have already mentioned in these columns ("Spain Moves Further Right," NL, July 10, 1972) the Andalusian editor who picked up his telephone one morning and heard himself speaking: Something had gone wrong with a police tape recorder, and it played back to him three of his conversations from the previous day...
...There is also a queasy feeling in the universities, where thousands of students have lost several weeks of study, and may be forced to drop out, because of strikes and closures provoked by the authorities' efforts to purge and regiment higher education...
...And what could be more comic-opera in 1973 than bands of demonstrators shouting "Long live Fascism...
...Neither the conservatives nor the democratic opposition want a return to the disorders of the 1930s...
...In this climate, groups like the Guerrilleros of Christ the King and the Maoists and Trotskyists, although insignificant numerically, are among the regime's best friends...
...Extremists are not content with shouting silly slogans...
...Some professors have been humiliatingly forced to swear an oath of loyalty to the regime in the course of a grotesque pseudoreli-gious ceremony...
...Their main concern is to insure that the Franco regime survives Franco-that the dictatorship continues undiluted...
...In the past, the Right has tended to mistrust him because "he reads books," has spoken out against military intervention in politics, and his brother is a Left-wing Jesuit...
...and "Down with the weak...
...The violence and demonstrations of May so strengthened the regime's Right wing that it was able to press for the elimination from the Cabinet of relatively moderate ministers...
...A prison medical inspector is understood to have been arrested after sending the president of the Madrid medical college a report on the deplorable condition of men arriving at the big Carabanchel prison after police interrogation...
...In the consequent reshuffle, Franco (now 80) formally transferred the premiership to his closest collaborator and adviser, the 70-year-old Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco...
...But since then a more attractive-and, apparently, brighter-candidate has emerged: Don Alfonso, an enthusiastic supporter of the Movement and the husband of Franco's granddaughter Maria del Carmen...
...In terms of heredity and personal seniority, Alfonso would have an unassailable claim to the throne had not his father, the Duke of Segovia, who suffers from a speech defect, renounced his claim to the succession many years ago (he has recently revived it...
...Indeed, the government's appeal to the newly prosperous, largely apolitical middle class is based on its ability to maintain order...
...In recent weeks we have seen antigovemment protesters supported and in some instances organized by police officers...
...several attacks on the persons and property of presumed democrats...
...Though extreme Right-wingers would not be enthusiastic about him, in principle they prefer a general to almost any civilian in almost any post...
...The transfer was only formal because Carrero has been acting premier for several years...
...The journal is on sale as usual...
...Some commentators here have had fun with the "comic-opera" aspects of Watergate, but this angle too is eclipsed by everyday happenings in Spanish politics...
...Yet I must confess to feeling a certain sympathy for it since last April, when its editor determined to pay his contributors higher fees and decided upon heroic measures to raise the money: He led his staff, revolvers at the ready, into the Banco Atlantico and relieved it of $100,000...
...The public reaction, however, has been little more than a shrug...
...Nonetheless, many of Spain's most vociferous Right-wingers consider him too weak to guarantee the survival of "the principles of the Movement...
...By now, anti-Yanqui propaganda is becoming a bore, and sophisticated Spaniards know too much about their own government's way with political opponents to be horrified by a straightforward bit of bugging...
...Out of loyalty to Franco, most Rightists applauded the choice of Juan Carlos four years ago, in preference to his more liberal father, Don Juan...
...He is due to retire soon, but he is an active, alert man who can be expected to speak out against any abandonment of what he assumes to be "Franco's principles...
...Diez Alegria is the officer who would attract the broadest support in the political and ecclesiastical establishment should Franco's plan to have himself succeeded by Don Juan Carlos break down...
...But recently he was seen in a Right-wing demonstration, and he is said to be mending his bridges with the Right...
...We have also heard ultra-Catholics, including priests wearing cassocks, denouncing "murderers in priests' robes" and demanding that Cardinal Enrique y Tarancon be sent to the scaffold...
...Their favorite in that field is General Iniesta Cano, the director-general of the Guardia Civil, Spain's ubiquitous gendarmerie...
...The Right-wing extremists are to some extent "licensed" and controlled by men in touch with the police and the official Movement (ex-Falange...
...Right-wing violence is given little publicity-just enough to reassure those conservatives who consider it an acceptable way of keeping subversives in their place, as well as to give democrats something to worry about-and its authors are rarely imprisoned: The staff of Cruz lberica, arrested a few hours after the bank raid, was released on light bail when the appropriate strings were pulled...
...Like Juan Carlos, Don Alfonso is a grandson of the late King Alfonso XIII, who abdicated in 1930...
...Iniesta, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, has said that "Franco's principles will continue to govern Spain for centuries: -Nothing fundamental will change...
...During the May demonstrations, one of which he led, there were loud cries of "Iniesta to power...
...A Fascist periodical, Cruz lberica carries the routine, mindless mishmash of anti-liberal-Jewish-capitalist-So-cialist dogmas...
...In contrast, excesses of the so-called Leftists are given sensational treatment by the press and serve as pretexts for mass arrests...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 14
