Chapter 22: The Death of Franco
"The assassination interrupted the continuity planned by Franco, as was its intention. A new prime minister would have to be found, yet there was no one who could take the place of Carrero Blanco in the Generalissimo's thinking, which relied more on selection and continuity of personnel than on the role of institutions, even of the institutions designed by Franco himself. "
"He finally decided on Arias Navarro on the morning of December 28.’
This was a questionable choice, for Arias's primary experience had been in local government and police work, and his ministry had failed to main-tain adequate security to prevent the recent magnicide."
"The Arias Navarro government that was announced on January 3, 1974, would be the last to serve under Franco and represented an extensive turnover of personnel, only about one third of Carrero Blanco’s ministers retaining their portfolios...The new cabinet was largely composed of remnants of the bureaucratic inner core of the regime, "
"This was the first all-civilian cabinet (with the exception of the heads of the military ministries themselves) in the history of the regime, and it also included a few relatively nonpolitical technical appointees. Gone were the members of Opus Dei and their associates (though Franco apparently would have preferred to retain López Rodó), putting a sudden end to years of hysteria about the supposed Opus domination. Whereas Carrero Blanco had at least gone through the motions of consulting with Juan Carlos in preparing his government, Arias Navarro ignored the Prince of Spain altogether, and with the exception of Barrera, included no one with a very overt monarchist identity. Thus the new government had little appearance of aperturismo and seemed designed to guard the death- watch of Franco.
Yet such an appearance was deceiving, for its members were also in large measure bureaucratic pragmatists and included only one genuine doctrinaire, the Falangist Utrera Molina as minister secretary of the Movement. Arias Navarros chief advisors, Carro Martínez and Cabanillas, managed to convince the new president that the pace of aperturismo had to be accelerated. To some extent they also managed to include in this inner core of consensus his other main stalwart, the first vice-president and interior minister García Hernández, though the latter held reservations. This produced agreement that a system of political associations must finally be introduced and that the government must move toward recognition of more distinct cultural and regional pluralism. Cabanillas, as image-maker for the president, tried to set the tone."
"Arias Navarros first major public address on February 12, 1974, promis- ing significant reforms, nonetheless came as a surprise. The speech itself was apparently written by Gabriel Cisneros, a young journalist who as a national councillor of the Movement represented the younger generation of aperturistas within the regime and served Arias as subdirector general of the presidency of the government. The address began by vowing the most complete loyalty to the regime and affirming that the historical legitimacy of the succession of Juan Carlos lay in the “Eighteenth of July.” Arias then declared, “Due to exceptional historical circumstances, the national consensus backing Franco was expressed in terms of support [adhesión]. In the future, the national consensus in support of the regime must be expressed in the form of participation.” He specifically promised (1) to withdraw the current new proposal for a law on local government and to replace it with another by May 31 that would permit the election of mayors and of presidents of provincial assemblies; (2) to send to the Cortes before June 30 a new law regulating incompatibilidades (conflicts of interest) for those holding parliamentary seats; (3) “immediate acceleration’ of a new syndical law that would permit more “autonomous activity; and, most important of all (4) to prepare a new statute regulating the right of association in order, in the torturous language of the regime, “to promote the orderly concurrence of criteria —that is, the expression of political viewpoints—though without setting any timetable.‘
Soon after becoming president, Arias had been convinced that at least minor reforms and some appearance of movement would be necessary to sustain a government. He hoped to guarantee the continuity of the regime by limited changes that might conciliate moderate opposition and even more, win back the critical and reformist sectors within the regime itself, thus making possible reconstruction of its internal basis."
"Of Ariass ministers, Cabanillas had by far the most immediate impact. He launched a major campaign to present Arias as the chief avatar of enlightened reformism, a modern conservative who understood the requirements of the times and would carry out a conservative but genuine apertura. This brought the new president considerable publicity abroad, and some observers thought that he almost came to believe his own propaganda. Most important, Cabanillas virtually eliminated what remained of general censorship in Spain, except with regard to direct criticism of Franco and the government. With Ricardo de la Cierva as director general of popular culture, the office in charge of publication guidelines,® the Ministry of Information largely ceased to prosecute or otherwise restrict publishers, who took greater and greater latitude. Censorship was increasingly left to whatever sense of prudent restraint still existed or to the initiative of state prosecutors within the regular criminal justice system. The latter was not staffed to deal with the minutiae of Spains large and highly diverse publishing industry, though individual publishers were still occasionally fined or prosecuted. Thus 1974 became the year of the great destape—the “uncovering—as the eruption of nudity in common publications far exceeded even the increase in political discussion."
"The winter of 1973—74 closed with two new causes célébres. The first was provoked by the new bishop of Bilbao, Antonio Añoveros, originally a Navarrese Carlist chaplain in the Civil War but now aligned with ecclesiastical progressivism and the spirit of Vatican II. Influenced by his Basque Nationalist vicar general, on February 24, 1974, he delivered a sermon on the application of religious norms to society that at one point called for Basque cultural freedom and a change in government policy concerning regional rights. "
"This was followed on March 2 by the execution of Salvador Puig Antich, a young Catalan anarchist of good family, who had been convicted of killing a policeman while resisting arrest, and by the execution of a common criminal of Polish origin for having murdered a Civil Guard. An international campaign had been organized for commutation of the death sentence, but Franco proved implacable on this occasion, only the second and third executions in Spain in eight years. The death of Puig Antich excited great feeling and public disturbances in Catalonia, where it was interpreted as a symbolic punishment of Catalan regional aspirations.
The uproar over the Anoveros affair and the execution of Puig Antich severely tarnished the new image of the Arias administration as a reformist government. Months passed with little progress toward the promised legislation except for a preliminary sketch of a new local government bill. The governments main activity consisted of a long series of personnel changes in the senior administration."
"The Portuguese revolution suddenly erupted on April 24, dramatically though almost bloodlessly overthrowing the longest-lived authoritarian regime in the western world. Downfall of the Portuguese regime was provoked by protracted colonial war in Africa, a conflict from which Franco had carefully dissociated his own regime. Nonetheless the Portuguese Estado Novo had always protected the Spanish regime's western flank; its overthrow could not but encourage all those forces seeking fundamental change in Spain.
...Though Spanish policy toward Portugal generally followed the moder- ate tack taken by the United States, the subsequent course of events there, in which a semisocialist revolution was promoted by some of the officer corps, was bewildering to Franco. He is supposed to have re- marked, “What can be expected of an Army that is led by its supply corps [Intendencia]?” referring to the fact that the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement was based on officers in home garrisons and supply and train- ing cadres. Even worse was the flood of favorable comment in the Spanish press over the revolution in Portugal, which Franco complained amounted to “a press campaign in reverse.”"
"Later, at the height of the abortive “Tancos revolt” in March 1975 which helped to provoke the most radical phase of the revolution, the defeated Portuguese General Spínola asked for Spanish intervention under the mutual defense terms of the old Iberian Pact. Franco prudently refused, declaring that the Portuguese government earlier had effectively voided the Pact. Nor were conservatives granted asylum in the Spanish embassy, for if it had been attacked by radical mobs, Spain would have had no choice, according to Franco, but to send in paratroopers, virtually involv- ing the two countries in war.”
The success of the Portuguese revolution confirmed the worst fears of Spanish ultras. It further slowed the pace of aperturismo in Madrid and stimulated a new campaign by the Bunker directed especially against Cabanillas and the relaxation of censorship."
"On July 9 Franco was felled by an attack of thrombophlebitis...he considered turning over the acting powers of chief of state of Juan Carlos, who did not express any eagerness to receive them. The Prince feared being compromised by having to act temporarily as chief of state under the Franco sys- tem without full authority of his own, and told the Caudillo that he did not wish to appear to be in any hurry or trying to push Franco out."
"The entire month was a period of intense speculation amid all manner of political conversations, including some that began to take the form of virtual conspiracy. The boldest was the position advanced by Cabanillas (and supported to some extent by Carro Martínez and Barrera de Irimo, the minister of finance, who directed economic policy). This strategy would have insisted that the logic of the situation and of Spains succession laws must no longer be resisted and that the only responsible course was to proceed directly to the coronation of Juan Carlos and his investiture with full powers, even while Franco still lived."
"Fully informed of developments, Franco was apparently further stimulated to resume control as soon as possible by a report (possibly distorted) concerning a telephone conversation between the Prince and his father in mid-July soon after Franco entered the hospital. This reawakened all Franco's suspicions of Don Juan and his fear of the latter's influence on Juan Carlos. On September 1, only two days after the last cabinet meeting, Franco abruptly called Arias Navarro to declare that he was “cured” and would be resuming power right away. This took place officially on September 3, with Juan Carlos barely being informed of the fact before it hit the newspapers. To intimates, Franco justified his precipitous return by the diplomatic crisis developing with Morocco over the Spanish Sahara.'"
"The political opposition had meanwhile become increasingly active, and 1974 was already well on its way to its record as the greatest year for strikes in Spanish history to that date (with the possible exception of 1936). Most of this was being reported in the largely uncontrolled Spanish press. The most direct repression took place in the Basque provinces, where political opposition was by far the most overt. During the years 1973-75 more than 6,300 Basques were arrested by police, although the majority were soon released."
"Franco finally acted to tighten up the government when he intervened directly to order Arias to dismiss Cabanillas because of his informa- tion policy and relaxation of the censorship. After this was announced on October 29, it was followed by the resignations of Barrera de Irimo, Francisco Fernández Ordóñez (new president of the INI), Ricardo de la Cierva and Marcelino Oreja (subsecretary of information), and of other aperturistas holding state administrative positions below cabinet rank. This was a major blow not only to apertura but also to reforms in economic policy introduced by Barrera.”
Arias Navarro found himself trapped in mid-stream. While state policy became more rigid in some areas, he tried to salvage part of his program by moving ahead with the proposal for political associations. This was the most important of the promised reforms, and two different versions were being prepared, one along the lines of previous proposals by Utrera Mo- lina, the minister-secretary of the Movement, the other by a young aper- turista, Juan Ortega Díaz-Ambrona, appointed by Carro director of the Instituto de Estudios Administrativos."
"The latter formed a committee in his institute of young reformers such as Gabriel Cisneros and Rafael Arias Salgado, son of the former informa- tion minister. Their project proposed to open the right of association broadly to all Spanish citizens, not restricting it to membership in or the control of the Movement. When the initial project was ready in August, it was edited by Carro and then passed on to Arias Navarro. The presidenteventually transmitted it to Franco for his approval on November 14, but Franco quickly gutted the project to bring it back under the control of the Movement once more. Ortega Díaz-Ambrona then resigned his post on November 26, after police arrested a number of key leaders of the demo-
cratic opposition at a private meeting."
"This opened the way for Utrera’s project, which was developed by a select committee of the National Council composed of remaining Movement leaders such as Jesús Fueyo and Fermin Labadíe Otermín. Utrera was proud of the fact that he was the first minister secretary who had entered the Movement as a “flecha” (member of the adolescent youth group) and thus had passed his entire life within it, working his way from the bottom to the top. Preparation of a controlled statute of political association formed part of his program for revitalization of the Movement, on which he worked actively throughout 1974. This was to involve the reform of the organizational structure itself, stimulating the activity of local members and the role of the local and provincial councils of the Movement. One major goal was to encourage the ideological rearmament of the regime by reanimating the Instituto de Estudios Politicos under Fueyo and creating new cultural and recreational centers for the Movement on the local level. Another major goal was revival of the moribund youth organizations of the Movement, and to that end Utrera visited most of the remaining youth camps during the summer of 1974 to try to whip up enthusiasm.” He drew at best a limited response, for most affiliates had long since abandoned the Movement, while even some of the remaining nominal leaders were not convinced that it had any future and were looking toward reformist alternatives. Arias Navarro had come to resent Utrera as the leader of the ultras within the government, a subverter of the original reform plan who sought to develop a major power base of his own. Arias had originally sought to eliminate Utrera in the minicrisis of October which ousted Cabanillas, but Franco would not hear of it at that time."
"This new Estatuto Jurídico del Derecho de Asociación Politica still restricted associations to the ideological orbit and organizational control of the Movement, but unlike the earlier proposal by Fernández Miranda, did not technically require members of proposed associations to also be members of the Movement. It authorized formation of political associations that were in accord with the principles of the Movement, subject in each case to final approval by the National Council. Each association must achieve a minimum membership of 25,000 distributed through at least fifteen provinces. In thinly inhabited provinces with less than 500,000 legally responsible residents (población de derecho), a minimum of 2 percent of that population must be registered with the party in order for that province to qualify, a figure reduced to 1.5 percent for provinces with between 500,000 and a million in that category, and to 1 percent in those with more than a million. The Movement was to contribute toward the financing of each qualifying association, which would be authorized to participate in whatever electoral processes might be established by law. Three categories of fines were set up to punish associations that might subsequently infringe the terms of these regulations."
"Fernández Miranda declared in an interview that “the political associationism of our system is not primarily based on ideological pluralism, the basis of a party system, but finds its true source in the pluriformism inherent in our National Movement since its origin.” One critic wryly observed, “This gives the impression that the new decree-law primarily
favors the association of those who have never permitted us to associate ourselves,* and the well-known sociologist Salustiano del Campo succinctly defined it as “a typical Spanish invention.” García Hernández declared the following May, “The government is trying to carry out the great operation [of transformation] of the established system, but still within the same system,”’ while Ricardo de la Cierva wrote that the biennium since Carrero Blanco first became president was “possibly achieving the difficult goal of joining together the disadvantages of both authoritarian and democratic regimes, without the clear advantages of the one or the other. * The Bunker vociferously denounced the proposed freedom to associate as the beginning of a limited political party system that would totally alter the basis of the regime, while a series of opinion surveys take between 1969 and 1975” made it evident that by 1975 a clear majority of Spaniards favored a democratic parliamentary system.”"
"Yet Franco himself stalled the apertura during his final months, fearing to see the whole system unravel. To the end of his days, the Caudillo remained convinced that the only hope of a monarquía instaurada lay in strict maintenance of the institutions of the regime, observing privately in December 1974 that if a plebiscite were held, the monarchy on its own would gain less than 10 percent of the vote.'
Thus after a full year, the Arias government could produce no evidence of fundamental change. Opposition mounted steadily, faced by a weakening and sclerotic regime, producing the closing even of a provincial university such as Valladolid and a continuation of the strike wave that included theater actors, and more covertly, some low-level administrative employees of the regime. On February 6, 1975, 500 ranking bureaucrats in the state administration petitioned the government for a genuine democratization, as a new round of political meetings began among reformers and oppositionists and speculation mounted on all sides."
"The second crisis of the Arias Navarro government erupted on February 20, when its third vice-president and minister of labor, Licinio de la Fuente, resigned under fire from cabinet hardliners and national employers councils.
...Arias became determined to use this opportunity to carry out the kind of government reorganization that he would have preferred the preceding October.
...When the new government was finally announced on March 5, it had been reorganized in a more reformist direction, "
"Yet the whole associationist ploy seemed doomed, for the bulk of the opposition and even many moderate reformists refused to participate.” By September 1975 only eight associations had been formally registered, and of these only the UDPE of Suárez had gained the requisite 25,000 members. Six of the eight originated from various segments of the Movement, and at most three or four stood for serious reform"
"A general scramble had already begun among those currently or previously associated with the regime and its administration to define new identities for themselves. Such a stampede was developing that the monarchist writer Luis Ma. Ansón wrote an article entitled “Moral Cowardice” that appeared in ABC on May 20, 1975:"
In political Spain one now hears with greater frequency each day the interminable call of sheep and the loud cackle of chickens. There is also the sound orats abandoning the ship of the regime. Each day moral cowardice takes hold of greater and greater sectors of our political class. Such a spectacle of fear and desertion gives one a vicarious sense of shame.
. . . Without sharing their ideas, I nonetheless must proclaim my admiration for those Franquists and Falangists who still defend, within the logical evolution of time, those principles for which they earlier fought bravely in war and peace. And shame rises to my face for those other Franquists and Falangists, for those men of the regime, for those chickens of the system who sometimes dissimulate what they used to be, at other times deny their own convictions, and besmirch the principles and symbols with which they formerly enriched themselves in order now to align themselves with the change and continue to fill both cheeks in the future. There are some ready to proclaim the most humiliating repentance so long as they can gain a single sentence of praise from those new leftist journals who hand out democratic credentials or impart Red blessings according to their own caprice.
"Moderate opinion, which by 1975 was the largest single current of opinion in a prosperous, reasonably sophisticated Spanish society, looked beyond Franco to the monarchist transition for representative reform of Spanish institutions. "
"The opposition, sensing the weakening of the regime and enjoying un- precedented freedom, accelerated its efforts, to which the government responded with intermittent barrages of fines, prohibitions, and arrests."
"The first new effort to unify the opposition had been announced bthe Spanish Communist Party in Paris on July 30, 1974, with the formation of a pseudodemocratic umbrella organization called the Junta Democrática. The bizarre nature of this lay in the identity of the Communists’ chief allies who, aside from two minor neo-Marxist parties, were the new version of the (formerly Carlist) Comunión Tradicionalista (that now preached “self-managing socialism” under “Carlos” Hugo) and the weird monarchist publicist Rafael Calvo Serer, member of Opus Dei and former leader of right-wing integrism who had by this point, as the saying went, “evolved. “© With memories of Communist domination during the Civil War still partially alive, all other major opposition groups shunned the Junta. In June 1975 the democratic leftist and liberal parties came together in their own non-Communist coalition, the Plataforma de Convergencia Democrática. A major practical difference between the Communists position and that of the majority opposition parties grouped under the Plataforma lay in the formers demand for a provisional government, possibly under Don Juan, to replace the regime after Francos death, whereas the latter were implicitly willing to accept some sort of negotiation with the government of Juan Carlos. The Junta Democrática even managed to conduct a public session of its own in a congressional hearing room in Washington on June 10, 1975, in an attempt to influence Ameri- can policy to exert direct pressure on the Spanish government during the forthcoming transition.”
On July 29 a minor bombshell burst with the arrest of eleven Army ofhcers who about a year earlier had formed a small clandestine Unión Militar Democrática Española to generate military support for a democratic system and social reform and to avert any subsequent military intervention that might prop up the surviving institutions of the regime...but the armed forces remained solidly in support of the regime"
The Final Phase
"This was the most violent year in Spain since the days of the guerrilla maquis of the forties, with eight policemen killed during the first eight months of 1975. Their funerals were occasions for semiviolent right-wing demonstrations insisting on a crackdown. Rightist groups fire-bombed left- ist bookstores, sometimes beat up members of the opposition, and even engaged in one or two minor assaults on the cars of cabinet ministers.
A tough new antiterrorist law was imposed in August, restoring suma- risimo court-martial proceedings and mandatory death penalties for thekilling of security officers. It was then applied retroactively to the cases of eleven revolutionaries from ETA and FRAP who were convicted of re- sponsibility for the deaths of three policemen.* This occasioned the big- gest international campaign in years against the regime by the west European left, some of whom exhibited much greater indignation over the determination to punish these killers than they had, for example, over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Pope Paul VI showed extraordinary interest in the fate of the condemned, twice urging commutation of the sentence. Both Don Juan and Prince Juan Carlos made the same request, as did the Generalissimo' elderly and ailing brother Nicolás, oldest living representative of the Franco family.* After the Burgos trial five years earlier, Franco had commuted the maximum penalty, apparently at the behest of his cabinet, but in September 1975 he and the more intransigent government figures deemed it necessary amid the rise in opposition activity to sustain the spirit of the recent antiterrorist law. Franco did commute the sentences of six of the condemned, but five were executed on September 27.% This touched off massive and emotional demonstrations against the regime in many European cities, on at least two occasions led by prime ministers. Spanish tourist offices, banks, and consulates were assaulted, and the venerable embassy in Lisbon was totally gutted."
"However weary, aged, and melancholy, Franco would not slacken as long as he could breathe. Though he realized that Juan Carlos would make changes, he yet hoped that some of the regime's most basic institutions might survive. During these last days, for example, Adolfo Suárez came to El Pardo to report on the progress of his new political association. Taking him aside, Franco asked Suárez if he thought the Movement could survive “after the death of General Franco” (speaking of himself in the third person). The young politician replied that he did not believe so. Franco then inquired if Suárez thought the future of Spain was “inevitably democratic,” as Franco put it, and after receiving an affirmative reply, said no more.”"
"On October 16 the International Court of Justice ruled in favor of independence for the Spanish Sahara, while King Hassan threatened a mass march of Moroccans to occupy the territory. On the following day Franco presided over a meeting of the Council of Ministers strapped with electrodes connected to a monitoring machine attended by physicians in an adjoining room. When he heard the latest report on Morocco, he immediately suffered a mild coronary infarction; he had had one several days earlier.
Franco felt weak and ill after awakening on October 18 and soon sat down to draft his final testament to the Spanish people, to be read after his death. Villaverde informed President Arias that the time had come for Juan Carlos to assume the functions of chief of state once more, but when notified, the Prince shrewdly replied that he would do so only if Franco
signed an agreement ratifying the definitive succession and transfer of powers. He had no intention of being subjected to the almost comic indignities of the summer of 1974. Arias Navarro, fearing to try too hard, was unable to obtain such an agreement, and on October 19 it was simply announced that Franco had the gripe (flu)."
"It is often overlooked that, quite aside from the natural desire of Francos family, physicians, and closest supporters to save his life, there was a more immediate objective involved in prolonging his life for a few weeks. On November 26 the term of Rodriguez Valcárcel as president of the Cortes and of the Council of the Realm would end. If Franco were able to recover power by that date, he could ratify Valcárcel for a second term and thus guarantee that the Council of the Realm, which controlled nomination for future presidents of government, would remain under reliable Francoist control. Even if Franco should die shortly thereafter, it would be very difficult for Juan Carlos to inaugurate a different policy or appoint a more genuinely reformist prime minister without authorization from the Council of the Realm. But without Franco's recovery, a new head of the Cortes and Council of the Realm would soon be chosen, greatly facilitating the options of Juan Carlos for sweeping change.
Security forces began to carry out the first phase of “Plan Lucero” (Morning Star), the contingency plan to guarantee the security of the regime during the transition. Leaders of the leftist opposition, particularly Communists, began to be rounded up as a preventive measure, while groups of ultras issued threats to opposition leaders on a much broader scale (though later they made little effort to follow up on them)"
"According to a public opinion survey, 80 percent of Spaniards polled qualified his death as a loss, but 90 percent declared their positive opinion of the succession of Juan Carlos"