On the morning of September 27, five revolutionary militants in Madrid, Barcelona, and Burgos died under the bullets of the Francoist firing squads, All Europe was stupified, stunned. Hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets shouting their hatred and their determination to prevent any new Francoist crimes, while the bourgeoisie nervously watched the Francoist regime sink into a barbarous insanity that may well precipitate its fall. From the many death sentences to the murder of the five militants of the FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriotica - Antifascist and Patriotic Revolutionary Front) and the ETA-V (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna-V - Basque Nation and Freedom, Fifth Congress), from the adoption of the decree-law against "terrorism" to the demonstration in support of the regime, which drew 200,000 people to the Plaza del Oriente in Madrid, the events in Spain have taken a surprising and disturbing turn during these past weeks. The slow decomposition of the dictatorship that seemed to be following its irreversible course under the hammer blows of powerful mass struggles looked like it had been checked. A trembling and snivelling old man, Franco still holds the levers of power in iron hands. Behind him, the far right is raising its head, while bourgeois circles are bowing in silence. This reinvigoration of the far right is not only the result of Franco himself regaining his vigor. In fact, although there is a social layer that felt the Portuguese events of April 25, 1974, like a blow in the face, there are tens of thousands of functionaries and state employees who constitute the day-to-day repressive apparatus of the dictatorship. Removed from many of the cogs of power by the very evolution of the regime and traumatized by the disappearance of Carrero Blanco, who represented on essential element for the continuity of the regime, and by the turn taken by Arias Navarro, who they had correctly considered one of their own but who, upon formation of his government, announced his evolutionist intentions in his famous speech of September 12, 1974, these sectors of the state apporatus in which the Francoist old guard is concentrated have for a year and a half been engaged in a battle that is all the more active because their very existence is at stake. The experience of Portugal showed that the bourgeoisie was prepared to let these people go down the drain when the dictatorship collapsed; it also showed that they would be the first targets of the mass mobilization. For a year now, transfer requests from policemen stationed in the Basque country have been piling up of lightning speed - an eloquent indication of the crisis of consciousness. These sectors of the state apparatus, who can expect nothing from any evolution of the present regime, no matter how controlled and gradual, have found in the recent events material for a counteroffensive the violence of which is surprising. But the latest events cannot be explained purely by the exasperation of a given social layer whose existence is linked more than any other layer to the survival of the
----- pull-quotes on this page ----- SPAIN after the murder of five militants a brutal by PACO ROBS ASSASSIN
regime. What really come through during these events was the deep crisis of the leaders of the Spanish bourgeoisie, a crisis that is strikingly illustrated by the bankruptcy of the Arias Navarro government and its inability to develop a coherent political program. Although most of the press was timidly echoing the international pressure in favor of measures of clemency, as soon as the executions actually took place there was an unfailing lineup behind Franco on the part of all sections of the regime, whatever their oppositional inclinations may have been up to then. The press, radio, and television launched a hysterical campaign to support the regime, to the point that one would have thought it was the 1940s again. With the exaltation of fanatical nationalism and the ardent denunciation of communism and free masonry, it was the crusade spirit of the war years that marked the barely audible speech the dictator made before the 200, 000 people assembled in Madrid's Plaza del Oriente on the occasion of the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Francoist regime. The size of this demonstration resulted above all from the measures that were taken to guarantee its success: systematic tapping of the population within a several-hundred-mile radius of Madrid, shutdown of the factories in the capital, paid holidays for the state employees. But more than an apparently miraculous reconstitution of a new mass base for the regime, the demonstration must be seen as representing the odherence to the regime of still relatively large layers of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, the same layers that have lined up against the revolution in Portugal. 61122 There should be no mistake, what occurred or the beginning of September was a brutal tur in the policy of the regime and not a simple temporary shift to satisfy the hardliners. The economic recession, with its trail of unemployment and poverty, has only just begun to hit Spanish society full force. Powerless to crush the mass movement of which the Basque country represents the most advanced point, this regime has lost sight of any long-term project and is no longer concerned with anything but survival. It is capable of killing again, but it is incapable of holding off its own fall. The few bridges toward a peaceful evolution of the regime that had been built with such difficulty have now been demolished. The coming confrontations and the new general strike in the Basque country - o real national mourning in which hundreds of thousands of workers have participated - show how near is the moment when the overthrow of the dictatorship will be on the agenda, By trying to restrict the development of the situation while simply waiting for the death of Franco or a hypothetical initiative by the general staff transferring power to Juan Carlos, the Communist party and the Spanish Social Democracy are only prolonging the death agony of a dictatorship that has sunk into barbarism. #
EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS
The "legal" murder of five political prisoners by the Franco dictatorship has not only provoked important