Escaping Steam

For a moment last week, Franco's steely hand fumbled. In Madrid, civilian crowds battled police, defied the Falange, burned copies of the newspaper Arriba in the streets. It was the biggest mass defiance of Franco's police in the 15 years of his regime.

It all began quietly enough when the Falange organized a "spontaneous" demonstration of Madrid students to protest Queen Elizabeth's planned visit to Gibraltar (TIME, Feb.1). Classes were dismissed, flags passed out, and thousands of students set off happily for the British embassy shouting "Death to Queen Elizabeth," and "Britain, get out of here." On their way, they enthusiastically smashed the windows of a British bank.

At the embassy, they found on guard rows of red-capped Policia Armada, the heavy-handed troopers Franco employs to keep order in the cities. Sure of official sanction, the students surged on. The jittery police lost their heads. Brandishing heavy rubber truncheons, they laid open heads, clubbed shoulders, thumped backs. Amazed, then aroused, the students fought back with bricks, branches torn from trees, even shoes snatched off their own feet. Bystanders joined in, seizing the chance to strike at the hated Policia Armada. For two hours the fight raged, subsiding on one street corner to flare up on another. Some 80 demonstrators and 20 police were wounded.

"Murderers!" Gibraltar and Britain were forgotten. "This morning the professor told us that there would be no class because we must stage a demonstration, and this is what we get," complained one student, nursing his bruises. The Madrid authorities were busy too. They ordered all references to the riot out of newspaper reports, confiscated all pictures of the actual fighting.

Next morning 4,000 university students marched in grim silence to the Puerta del Sol in front of the police head quarters building. There, squatting on the pavement to foil any police charge to disperse them, they shouted, "Down with the armed police," "Murderers." Officials anxiously telephoned for instructions.

When Director General of Police Rafael Hierro appeared on a balcony and tried to speak, the crowd yelled: "Assassin!" Infuriated because neither press nor radio had mentioned the riots, the students scoured downtown Madrid for copies of Arriba and made bonfires of them, howling for "freedom of the press"--a concept whose meaning had suddenly become clear to them. They stormed Radio Madrid in an attempt to broadcast their complaints.

Then police got their orders. Mounted cops charged the crowd; pistols were fired over heads. By nightfall, more than 100 men lay in Puerta del Sol's damp cells.

Irreparable Accidents. At week's end, riots had subsided, but not feelings. The police issued a cautious communique (the only item to appear mentioning the riots), blaming "outside elements," and denying reports that some demonstrators had suffered "irreparable accidents." The students' anger was directed at the police--not at Franco or the regime itself.

But, as one old university professor put it: "Without the means of free expression, it is impossible to gauge the feelings of the Spanish people. It is dangerous to allow them to let off steam because you cannot see in which direction the steam will go."

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