FRANCO POSTPONES TRIAL OF THIRTY-EIGHT SOCTALISTS
PARIS, Feb. 22 -~ The scheduled trial of 38 members of the Frente de Liberacion Popular was postponed two days ago without
any explanation by Spain's fascist authorities. A new date for the trial has not yet been set.
Yesterday, however, another trial before a military drumhead court railroaded a fresh batch of victims to Franco's infamous fascist prisons. Several alleged members of the Communist party and Pestana, a leader of the FLP, all of whom are accused of participation in a strike at Valencia, were given sentences ranging from one to ten years.
Among the members of the FLP whose trial was postponed and who have now been held in prison for more than nine months are the wellknown left-Catholic writer Recalde; a Catholic trade unionist of Asturia named Revilla, who has a family of seven children; the Valencia writer Francisco Gordenor; and two left-wing intellectuals of Madrid, the lawyer Zayas, who became well-known for his aid to the National Liberation Front during the Algerian war, and Elena Salas, a courageous women who organized a woman's demonstration of solidarity with striking miners right in front of Madrid police headquarters.
The FLP is the extreme left-wing organization of the new Spanish underground which was instrumental in spreading last year's miners strike in Asturia to the Basque country, to Catalunia, Valencia, Madrid and Andalusia. oo,
According to a recent article in El. Socialista, emigré monthly of the reformist Spanish Socialist party, the members of the FLP are noticeabie above all else for their ardent sympathy for the Cuban Revolution and their efforts to adapt “activism" of the Fidel Castro type to Spanish conditions.
The FLP is an underground organisation founded in 1958 by intellectuals, workers and students assembled from various traditional organizations ranging from the Christian Democrats to the anarchists. The diplomat Julio Cerron, commonly identified as the leader, is from the Christian Democrat wing.
The FLP publishes several illegal papers jn Spain. These include Unidad Obrera (Workers' Unity) in Madrid, Accion Obrera (Workers' ction) and Revolucion (Revolution) in Valencia.
In the big 1962 strike wave, the FLP was the only Spanish under~ ground organization that was ‘not caught sleeping. It worked on a= surprisingly wide scale to spread the strike.
The FLP's official Declaration of Principles includes the following paragraph as a statement of its aims in fascist Spain:
"The FLP is a revolutionary organisation. Revolution means the violent conquest of power by the working classes and the liquidation by them of the capitalist system of production, the suppression of private property in the means of production being a prerequisite for
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the organization of a classless society. Any bourgeois political regime is necessarily a class dictatorship, whatever may be its juridical or constitutional form. Therefore, the only road towards the liquidation of class society is to abolish by force bourgeois power. A power can be revolutionary and democratic only insofar as it is conquered by the workers."
The FLP stands for a radical land reform, nationalization of the banks and big industry, liquidation. of the bureaucratic state machine, the replacement. of the standing army by a people's militia and workers self-government in the factories and communes. It advocates a federation of the various nationalities living on the peninsula and a united front of all: working-class organizations,
BELGIAN METAL WORKERS