[The following two items dealing with the assassination of Franco's premier, Carrero Blanco, appeared in the January 4 issue of the French Trotskyist weekly, Rouge. The first consists of extracts from a declaration released December 21, the day after the assassination, by the united Political Bureau of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria-Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna (VI)
[Revolutionary Communist League- Basque Nation and Freedom (VI)] a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International created by the fusion of the LCR and ETA(VI).
[The second is an interview with one of the members of the LCR-ETA (VI) explaining more fully the organization's position on the assassination and appealing for international support against Francoist repression. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
That repression was the basic policy of the Carrero government had become obvious to the workers and students.
That the intensification of repression has not been able to block the mass movement, whose rise has continued since the
Burgos trial, leads us to think that the execution of Carrero, in its turn, far from putting a brake on the combativity of the workers and popular masses, will constitute an encouragement to extending the struggle against the dictatorship. It has revealed the vulnerability of the repressive apparatus in the person of one 62
of its key men at a time when the attack on the masses and the vanguard was getting tougher and more open.
Especially at first, terror and consternation shook the bourgeoisie. Certainly, the dictatorship did not disappear with Carrero and it is not through a succession of executions of individuals that it will be possible to overthrow it. But the masses will be able to understand that if one individual action could have such effects, it will not be possible to contain massive and organized revolutionary violence by any measures.
The effects that this event will have within the ruling class are obvious. While it could have been imagined with some reservation that Carrero might have been able to fill the vacuum that will be left when Franco dies, today the breadth of solutions for the regime is quite limited.
Carrero's threefold quality as a Franco confidant, a man perfectly at home in the state apparatus (whose cohesion is basic to succession), and one who commands the prestige of not being linked to any faction of the bourgeoisie made him the man most able to assure the transition to post-Francoism. None of the candidates for succession can claim such authority within the various factions of the ruling class. The contradictions within the ruling class will now become more acute and manifest themselves much more openly.
Finally, both in the encouragement to the masses that the execution of Carrero Blanco represents and in the objective effects his disappearance will have within the ruling class, the consequences of the attack appear positive to us.
For this reason our support to the action is total.
There will be those who say, and correctly, that the execution of Carrero will immediately involve an intensification of Francoist repression in an attempt by the regime to return the blow it has suffered. But it would be pure opportunism to present this fact as an "argument" to condemn the action, because that would amount to hiding behind the current weakness of the vanguard as a pretext for refusing to take on the revolutionary tasks that the crisis of the dictatorship poses with a burning urgency.