Spain: Calculated Magnanimity

STANDING stiffly behind his desk in Madrid's Pardo Palace, Dictator Francisco Franco last week delivered his annual state-of-the-nation address with all the emotion of a wooden soldier. For 20 minutes, the Caudillo, 78, methodically pumped his right hand up and down for emphasis as he spoke in his lisping, high-pitched voice of trade-union reforms, of Spain's Common Market hopes, of Richard Nixon's visit in October. But of the political crisis that continued to send seismic waves throughout the country Franco said practically nothing. There was an odd, stilted sentence--"A spattering of the currents of upheaval agitating the world has reached us"--and little more.

That was quite an understatement. Since early December, when the trial of 16 youthful Basque terrorists got under way in the garrison city of Burgos, the country has been torn by the worst upheavals of Franco's 31-year rule. The regime's barefisted attack on the Basques, who were tortured by police and tried in a military court under a questionable "banditry and terrorism law," sparked opposition not only from the 2,000,000 ethnic Basques of northern Spain, but also from the country's Catholic clergy, its lawyers, its labor leaders, its students and some Cabinet ministers. Even more threatening was the backlash; army hard-liners demanded special powers to crack down on pro-Basque demonstrations, and hundreds of thousands of aging Falangists swarmed into the plazas, alternating anachronistic fascist salutes to Franco with menacing protests against "weak governments."

Firing Squad. Spain's "disagreeable tension," as one Madrid newspaper rather euphemistically described it, reached the snapping point early last week. After the West German consul in San Sebastian was freed by the Basque terrorist group that had kidnaped and held him hostage for three weeks, speculation increased that the 16 would be treated with moderation. But when, after 21 excruciating days of deliberation, a verdict was finally produced by the five-man military tribunal and approved by the local military governor, some of the sentences were even harsher than those demanded by the prosecution. One defendant was acquitted, but the other 15 were sentenced to a total of 519 years in prison. In the case of the six Basques charged with the murder of a police chief in 1968, the court was not satisfied with simple death penalties; three of the terrorists were ordered to face the firing squad not once but twice because they had been convicted of both "banditry" and "assassination."

In Spain's three Basque provinces, terrorist leaders promised to assassinate two government officials for every Basque executed. Other Spaniards greeted the verdict with shocked silence.

Abroad, outrage was the reaction. Messages urging clemency poured into Madrid from all over Europe. In France, three Spanish bank branches were ransacked, stoned or burned.

In a sense, the draconian sentences expressed the army's pique at the gingerly moves toward liberalization undertaken by Franco's technocrats. Though the verdict was meant to embarrass Franco, he put it to masterful use. Acting swiftly--by tradition, death sentences are executed within twelve hours--Franco first summoned his Cabinet and then the prestigious Council of the Realm. Soon a short announcement from the Pardo Palace told the nation that Franco "has seen fit to commute all the death sentences." The six would still get life, which under Spanish law means a maximum of 30 years for the three convicted of one capital crime, and 60 years for the three with two such convictions; pardons or paroles are out of the question. Nonetheless, the government news agency Cifra promptly sent out a flash: AMNESTIED, AMNESTIED, AMNESTIED.

Last Lunge. For the moment, Franco's calculated magnanimity seemed to have satisfied all sides. Even the convicted terrorists went so far as to say through their lawyers that "it was the common people who had won out in the end." Hardly. Early on, the issue went beyond the Basques to the shape and direction of post-Franco Spain itself. The Basque terrorists brought a whiff of anarchy to Spain, and that was all that the fading, right-wing Falange needed to try a last lunge for power. The blue-shirted Falangists had been useful to Franco during the Civil War, when they were, as the German aircraft manufacturer Willy Messerschmitt described them, "merely young people for whom it is good sport to play with firearms and round up Communists and Socialists." But when Franco set out to earn Spain international respect and a handhold in Europe, the aging blueshirts became an embarrassment.

In eclipse, the Falange has long raged at the rise of the pragmatic, outward-looking Opus Dei, whose members dominate Franco's 19-member Cabinet. As many conservatives in and out of the Falange see it, the efforts by the envied "holy Mafia"--also known as "Octopus Dei"--to build bridges to the rest of the world, Communist and nonCommunist, are directly responsible for Spain's increasing problems with all manner of separatists and dissidents at home. In their mass rallies, the Falange faithful often take up a pointed chant: "Franco si, Opus no!"

Masterly Inertia. Who wins? For the moment, Franco seems determined to exercise what Journalist Brian Crozier calls his "masterly inertia"--his practice of moving on an issue only as little as possible and as late as possible. Now that the army, too, has begun to fret about Spain's social disease, however, the pressure on the Caudillo to end the liberalizing influence of the technocrats may grow irresistible.

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