3. The International Context
In 1973 the world entered the first serious economic recession since the Second World War. The 1970s was a stormy period for most European countries. In Chile, the election of the popular unity government of Salvador Allende was followed by the coup d’état of General Pinochet. In Argentina and Uruguay, there were also revolutionary movements that ended up in right-wing dictatorships.
But in Europe the process was moving swiftly in the opposite direction. In 1974 the Greek military junta was overthrown by a revolutionary movement. In the same year, the fascist regime in Portugal was overthrown by a revolution. There were big strike movements in Britain and France, and there was a civil war in Cyprus. Under these circumstances there was a sharp turn to the left on the part of the socialist parties in many European countries.
The world recession hit Spain harder than the rest of Europe. This was reflected in a sharp increase in the trade deficit, which by the mid-1970s had doubled, reaching 340 billion pesetas – the biggest trade deficit in the world at that time. The tantalising vision of the good life that was created by the regime turned out to be a mirage, which clashed at every step with the reality of Spanish life. Cazorla Sánchez points out that the onset of the 1973 world economic crisis meant that these “just tasted, sweet fruit[s] were snatched away.”1
In an effort to make Spanish exports more competitive, the government devalued the peseta by ten per cent against the dollar in February 1976. Despite this, Spanish exports only represented forty-five per cent of imports. Spanish capitalism was uncompetitive because of the parasitism of the ruling class, which preferred to enrich itself through speculation rather than to improve productivity by investing in technology and new machinery.
While in 1973 new capital investment increased at a rate of 12.5 per cent, it subsequently collapsed, contracting by four per cent in 1975. In the first four months of 1974 the balance of trade deficit rose by ninety-five per cent – so that exports only covered imports by forty-seven per cent – compared to fifty-seven per cent in 1973. The value of imports, mainly of raw materials and technological know-how, rose steeply, while foreign investment was beginning to fall off.
The absolute decline in investment was reflected in the fact that in 1976 the state itself, through the Instituto Nacional de Industria, represented no less than a third of the gross investment nationally (115 billion pesetas). The lack of confidence in Spanish business was reflected in a huge flight of capital. Spanish capitalists and bankers were sending large amounts of money to Swiss accounts.
The economic crisis found its reflection in an intensification of social upheaval. The international recession hit Spain at a crucial moment. Inflation, which stood at twelve per cent in 1973, continued to soar, rising from 14.2 per cent in 1974 to seventeen per cent by 1975 and reaching twenty per cent in 1976. The rising cost of living undermined workers’ living standards. Unofficial sources put the rise as high as forty per cent in relation to basic necessities. The price of bread, a staple part of Spanish diet, rose by thirty-five to forty per cent in the first quarter of 1976. The working class had to struggle to keep wage increases in line with inflation.
Pamplona 1973: The Anatomy of a Strike
Such were the conditions at that time that a small incident in Motor Ibérica, Pamplona, sparked off the biggest explosion in the post-war period. Out of a population of 180,000, 40,000 workers came out on strike in solidarity, with 200 sacked engineering workers from the plant. Meetings, demonstrations and councils were held in which not only the striking factory workers participated, but housewives, students, and shopkeepers played an active role.
The movement started in May 1973, when workers were locked out by the bosses following a dispute, during which the management alleged that workers had prevented goods leaving the factory and sabotaged machines. Strikers clashed with police and troops in the streets. Over 200 were arrested and many injured in violent fighting. The workers were forced to take refuge in a church. The following day, not only most other workers in the town, but small businessmen, shopkeepers, bar owners and students stopped all activity. The streets were practically deserted.
A general strike was called for 14 June 1973. The workers elected a strike committee consisting of representatives of all the most important companies. For several days the police and the Civil Guard stood by. Although they were equipped with the latest anti-riot weapons developed by British, American and French ‘democracies’ they were unable to halt the tide of working-class mobilisation.
In my hands I have a report by the UGT, written at the time, which provides a detailed account of what unfolded during those dramatic weeks, day by day, almost hour by hour. It gives us a real sense of how things were. Reading it today, one cannot fail to be moved by the courage of the workers, their fighting spirit, their high morale and defiant attitude.
Because it faithfully conveys the spirit of those times, not just in Pamplona, but in every part of the country, I have decided to reproduce it, virtually in its entirety:
9 May – The strike began at 8.00 am following a long delay in implementing a court ruling in favour of a workers’ claim. Despite threatened fines and sanctions, the workers decided during an assembly to continue the strike until the sanctions were lifted.
11 May – Strike continues. The management announced that no workers would be sanctioned unless they were trade union representatives. The workers did not accept this discrimination so management suspended the workers for two days with loss of pay.
15 May – At 8.00 am the head personnel manager proposed to an all-workers meeting that they should take a secret vote over a return to work, alleging that a majority of the workers were being coerced by a minority and in fact wanted to go back. The vote gave the following result:
For the strike: 207
For a return to work: 3
Blanks: 3
Spoilt papers: 3
At 3.15 pm the personnel manager declared a general lay-off.
By the end of the week various strikes had taken place in solidarity. At Authi for example, 300 workers were suspended without pay and were fined for going on strike. The struggle intensified and the question of going out on the street was discussed.
8 May – Today the workers of Motor Ibérica went down at 7.15 am to Authi, where they showed solidarity with the workers who were suspended, demanding the removal of the sanctions; the management only lifted the original sanction but not the suspension of work and pay.
At the factory gates the workers began a demonstration through Landaben (industrial estate); 2,000 workers went out from the industrial estate of Landaben and marched out in demonstration but came face to face with the police, who were using the new methods of anti-riot control with tear gas and rubber bullets.
9 May – The struggle continued in Pamplona. Today the police are maintaining a watch over the factory gates driving around in Jeeps and lorries, but there have been no incidents.
The Authi Strike
The dispute at the ex-British Leyland subsidiary of Authi in Pamplona was indicative of the way industrial disputes were developing and what consequences they were having amongst the ruling class. The conflict started on 2 June and lasted until 2 July. Over a thousand workers had locked themselves in the factory in protest against the direction of the negotiations for the renewal of the collective agreement and an end to repressive measures taken by the management. They also demanded a monthly wage increase of 6,000 pesetas and the reinstatement of three workers who had been dismissed the previous December.
The bosses offered a wage increase of 2,300 pesetas and asked for a postponement of the collective agreement negotiations until the purchase of the plant by General Motors had been confirmed. The workers abandoned their sit-in when the police arrived, and management suspended the entire workforce for two days without pay. Meetings between workers’ representatives and management led nowhere. The workers stuck by their demand for 6,000 pesetas because their calculations showed that, between July 1973 and June 1974, the cost of basic necessities had risen by forty per cent.
Workers refused to begin work on 30 May 1973 and management responded with another lockout without pay. That same evening, some 1,500 workers and their wives held a meeting in Pamplona Cathedral where they demanded trade union freedom, the right to hold meetings and freedom of expression. The following day the workers met again in the cathedral, but were driven out by the police. The Archbishop of Pamplona condemned the police activities – saying that the police had no authorisation to enter the cathedral. The Civil Governor replied that churches should not be used for illegal purposes. There was another meeting of the workers on 1 June, but this time the police did not intervene.
This clash between the Church and the Civil Governors was a clear symptom of the crisis of the regime. The Church, which constituted a solid bulwark of reaction for decades, found itself under growing pressure to distance itself from a disintegrating and hated regime. The workers returned to work on Monday 3 June, but walked out again after holding a meeting. Meetings were held in the cathedral with representatives from other factories to discuss solidarity action.
On 9 June 1973 a demonstration took place in the Old Quarter [el Casco Viejo] organised by CCOO. At 8.30 pm about 300 people held a demonstration shouting “Motor, Motor, Freedom, Freedom” marching through Navarrería Street to the Town Hall. Workers gathered in small groups, mostly spontaneously, to hold running meetings in all parts of the Old Quarter, turning over cars and shouting slogans until 11.30 pm. Meanwhile the police were guarding strategic points in the Old Quarter.
12 June – From midnight until 5.00 am, 14 lorries went into Motor Ibérica and all the products and a part of the heavy machinery were carried away. This signified not only the sacking of the workers and the closing of the factory, but also that the firm intends to pressure the workers and to instil fear in them.
500 people from the working-class areas of Pamplona tried to prevent the entry of lorries during the night, but were able to do little when faced with the pistols and machine guns of the Civil Guard.
This was an extremely serious measure since the decision of the firm had still not been resolved, and the workers pointed out that the company had broken its pledge by closing down the factory without even having presented a case for a ‘expediente de crisis’ (a procedure which allows mass layoffs). The Governor protested that he was unaware of this, and said that he had not authorised anything to be done. Whose orders were the Civil Guard obeying?
The only reply to these manoeuvres was given by the working class of Pamplona. At 7.00 am the following morning (13 June 1973) several groups of workers from Motor Ibérica had contacted the rest of the factories in Pamplona to inform them. At 8.30 am the workers of Motor Ibérica shut themselves in the El Salvador Church in the working-class area of Rochapea to call attention to the injustices that they were suffering. Blankets were provided by the parish and a fire kept burning during the night. At midday the police cut off the water and electricity and did not allow donated foodstuffs through.
The Governor promised the Bishop there would be no arrests if the workers left the church, which they did without any police intervention. However, during the night, one of the workers received an order to present himself at the police station. At the last moment it was agreed to call a general strike for the next day. Groups of workers ran back to the factories to report on what had happened saying that on the following day everything should stop in a show of solidarity. Housewives ran out to stock up with bread and foodstuffs.
14 July 1973: The General Strike Begins
The report continues:
Today, the working class of Pamplona has decided to support the strike at Motor Ibérica with solidarity action. In the previous week strikes of one or two hours took place in fourteen factories. Today one can speak of an almost complete general strike and the fight continues in the majority of industries in Pamplona and the surrounding areas. At 7.00 am groups of workers from certain factories went around to others to call them out.
In the industrial estate of Landaben in every factory, workers’ meetings were held, where they decided to stop for the whole morning. At 9.00 am the people went around bringing the few workers still working out on strike.
Everyone rallied in the Polygon to shouts of “Motor, Motor” and only one small factory called Unzue Sweets did not stop work. The police attempted to keep the workers from the different factories apart but did not succeed. Everyone was concentrated in the largest factory, Morris. Any worker still working was abused, particularly by the women workers.
In San Juan de Exabakola, the strike and street rally began at 7.00 am. At 12.00 pm the strikes had extended along the road to Zaragoza. Groups of workers held assemblies and voted to stop working at Pamplonica, Super Ser, Citroën, etc., and began running roadblocks.
The police sometimes fired on the workers with new anti-riot arms. In response the workers once again locked themselves inside the factories and two busloads of police blocked the exit of the workers at Super Ser. In Enel, all the factories have stopped and the workers in the street blocked the way with barricades and continually harassed the police, who had already fired several rounds of rubber bullets. Mapsa, Schweppes, Perfil en Frío, etc. have all been brought to a standstill.
In Noáin (where the Motor Ibérica factory is) the strike paralysed all activity and the struggle was extended to the neighbouring villages outside Pamplona. The Civil Guard attempted to disperse the workers with specialised mobile ‘riot control.’ Reinforcements were sent: 1,500 grises [the ‘grey ones’ – armed police who wore grey uniforms] from Valladolid, Logroño and Zaragoza, and 200 secret police as well as the chief commissioner from Bilbao.
From 3.30 pm and after the fight flared up again in the Zaragoza Road, the factories of Papelera, Super Ser, Pamplonica and Citroën, waited for the workers coming from Noáin (many among them women and housewives) under Civil Guard surveillance. The hostilities continued unabated.
In Txantrea, Rochapea and San Jorge [all working-class districts] the factory workers were concentrated in groups, and all the time meetings were being held with girders, pieces of timber and street lamps as barricades. Lorries were placed across the roads. Throughout, the police had been present and launched attacks. One barricade would fall and another one would be built immediately.
In San Juan the strike had been unanimous. At 5.00 pm some of the workers from Landaben had come to the district and occupied the causeway. Workers from the town of Echavacoiz had come to Pamplona shouting the slogan: “Motor, strike”. At the very last moment the police appeared firing rubber bullets – several had been wounded. In the evening, the strike was joined by the workers of Electrocromo, Cauna and Covinsa.
There were about 25,000 strikers. Demonstrations were improvised and led by the factory workers and the people of the district. People from balconies cheered on the demonstrators and insulted the police, throwing anything and everything at them.
Given the tension that gripped the entire city it was not possible to calculate the number of arrests. Even more so when no one expected it, and all the people and political parties were thrown into joint activity.
15 June – The strike broadened and involved more workers from industry and services etc. All the bars were closed as well as offices. Patrols of young people made sure of the closure of places that did not want to show solidarity with the strike. In the suburbs, many small and medium businesses were closed in solidarity.
16 June – Yesterday’s happenings were repeated with even more enthusiasm. The first high point of the fight had been reached. A general strike took place for the first time in all Navarre. There were a large number of arrests. Those who could not be fitted into the police cells were taken to the bullring and other public buildings!
During the night leaflets were distributed calling for the continuation of the strike until Monday.
The second declaration of the civil government openly warned the business owners that the severest sanctions would be imposed in the event of another closure. Offices and big stores opened, but the strike continued in the factories and small businesses and many shops stayed closed until midday.
The grises and Civil Guard blocked off the city and access roads. Non-stop assemblies were held, overwhelming the Super Ser factory with more than 1,200 workers.
17 June – There was a stultifying calm on Sunday. All the streets were deserted with the Civil Guard and the grises patrolling them. A helicopter continually circled overhead. In churches sermons were read calling for a ‘flexible dialogue’.
The Civil Government outlined the setting up of special means to restore ‘order’. A complete stoppage continued in the large and medium-sized factories. Workers continued the strike. Some of the smaller businesses and sweatshops went back to work, but not all.
Twelve youths were sent to the provincial prison. A delegation from the Executive Committee of the trade union met with the management of Motor Ibérica to discuss it. About a hundred businessmen from Pamplona (who had been affected by the conflict) also met to propose a legal solution.
19 June – The strike continued in all the industries. The Motor Ibérica personnel manager announced that the firm would take back 195 workers; the remaining seventeen had to await the court decision. These workers waived legal channels and recourse to the courts. In Landaben, confrontations with the armed police resulted in two wounded workers. An extraordinary assembly of 200 workers at Motor Ibérica rejected the bosses’ offer and decided to continue the strike. The strike extended to a whole number of towns in the province.
20 June – In a statement issued by the civil government of Navarre, the ludicrous explanation was given that “several factories in Pamplona and its industrial area had been invaded by groups of outsiders on the pretext of solidarity with the workers of Motor Ibérica. They invited the workers to come out and demonstrate publicly, going so far as to threaten those who didn’t want to support the movement.”
Impact of the Pamplona Strikes
News of the Pamplona strikes spread like wildfire, despite the press censorship. Lessons were being drawn from the struggle. The UGT report concluded:
The conflict extended outside the limits of Navarre province with solidarity strikes in Irún, Guipúzcoa, involving 1,000 workers at La Palmera. In Beasain, where the CAF [Compañía Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, a big railway company] strike had already run for a month, the workers sent messages of solidarity to Motor Ibérica and Navarre.
A rash of strikes also broke out in Barcelona, Zaragoza and many other cities. In all these strikes the methods developed by the Pamplona general strike (blocking traffic, improvised workers’ action committees), were eagerly taken up.
The defiant courage and determination of the workers acted as a beacon to the shopkeepers, tradesmen and students. The active support of the middle class for the workers was of great significance. All these signs indicated clearly that great events were being prepared.
The workers of Navarre brilliantly displayed the capacity to struggle and organise. A definite change in mood and awareness had taken place inside the Spanish working class during this time. What was particularly significant about these events is that Pamplona was traditionally a stronghold of reaction. It was one of the first towns to go over to Franco in the Civil War.
Rural Navarre was the centre of the Carlist movement, which supported a rival royal dynasty to the Bourbons. The profoundly religious and conservative Navarrese peasants provided Franco with his best and most courageous crack troops, the Requetés. Wearing their distinctive red berets, they were always first into battle. Now the Carlists, in an extraordinary turn, moved into opposition to the regime.
Between 1970 and 1972, under the leadership of Carlos Hugo, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, the Carlist Party swung sharply to the left. It proclaimed itself a “federal, democratic class party of the masses”, which aimed to establish a “socialist-based monarchy” on the lines of the Yugoslav model of workers’ self-management (autogestión). As they say, truth is frequently stranger than fiction!
Dialectics tells us that, sooner or later, things can turn into their opposite. The case of Navarre expresses this dialectical law in laboratory fashion. The church was also beginning to distance itself from the regime. The Archbishop of Pamplona issued a statement of support for the strikers, which was read out in every local church. It is also a striking fact that a whole layer of the priesthood in Navarre broke from the church and swung over to Maoism, setting up a new party, the ORT (the Revolutionary Workers’ Organisation) together with its own trade union, the SU (Sindicato Unitario, Unitary Trade Union).
These changes showed very clearly that the preconditions were maturing for a fundamental change in Spanish society.
Walking on a Tightrope
The rumblings of these events continued in Barcelona until 1 May 1974 when, once again, things erupted, this time in Madrid. Small demonstrations, organised on a hit and run basis, took place in many cities. On one of these a police inspector was stabbed. Immediately a cry went up from the ranks of the regime’s police and the Falange against the government, which they saw as largely responsible for this death as it had forbidden the use of firearms. Big demonstrations took place in Madrid calling for the expulsion of the Minister of the Interior, Garicano Goñi from the government. He was later dropped from the new cabinet.
There were big strikes of the Asturian miners, the SEAT car workers in Barcelona, in Michelin factories, in Ferrol, the Madrid building workers and others. A common factor in many of these disputes was the refusal of the workers to submit their demands through the Sindicato Vertical.
A challenge to the state-controlled Sindicato was a challenge to the state itself. Thus, the strikes, which were apparently over economic questions, immediately took on a political and revolutionary colouring. This, despite the control of the police state, clearly marked the beginning of the end of the dictatorship. As a totalitarian system, it had already cracked.
What was the government to do? It was in danger of losing support from the ranks of its own police apparatus, which was by now its only reliable base of support, given the level of hostility of the mass of workers and other sections to the regime. The government feared a renewal of the previous upheaval which would have had even deeper repercussions and would pose the real danger of a national general strike.
The government resembled a tightrope walker who has begun to lose his balance and desperately tries to right it by veering to one side. Move too fast and it is necessary to swing in the opposite direction in an attempt to correct the mistake. But finally, he finds it impossible to maintain equilibrium.
This explains the ferocity with which the regime lashed out, panicked by the swiftness of events and clearly split within its own ranks. The liberally-inclined journal Cambio 16 was closed down for three weeks on 3 March and its editor fined for “attacking Government institutions and national unity”.
The government made concessions to the Falange and police – who were again authorised to use weapons and promised new, up-to-date riot equipment such as CS gas and rubber bullets. Two strikers were shot dead in Ferrol and one in the building workers’ strike. The SEAT and Ferrol workers were threatened with conscription.
Many workers were arrested. Massive round-ups of the left and worker militants took place. Over eighty of the 145 arrested on May Day suffered prolonged detention and, along with many others, were subsequently thrown in jail. They suffered the full fury of the security police with torture and beatings that spared neither pregnant women nor children.
The change in the government, the consolidation of the ‘ultras’ in the cabinet and the shift away from Opus Dei (which considered a certain amount of liberalisation necessary to broaden the social basis of the regime and the capitalist class) must be seen as a further concession to the frustrated and embittered right wing, the Falange and the police.
Despite all the dangers and hardship, the Spanish workers were pressing on with their demand for the right to strike, the right to organise their own trade unions, freedom of assembly, speech and the press. Then, in the midst of all this, a sudden explosion occurred in the neighbouring country of Portugal. It had lived under a dictatorship for even longer than Spain, a regime that seemed so solid that it would last forever. But in a few hours, it was swept into the dustbin of history.
Revolution in Portugal – 1974
At the time, the winds of revolution were blowing strongly throughout Europe. The fall of the regime of the colonels in Greece opened the way to a powerful revolutionary movement. In France the pendulum was swinging sharply to the left. Britain was in the grip of a mighty strike wave. There was civil war in Cyprus. Italy was also torn by class struggle. But the most explosive developments were being prepared just over the border in Portugal.
On 25 April 1974 the world was shaken by the news of the overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship in Portugal.2 After nearly half a century of fascist dictatorship the regime was overthrown by a bloodless coup. The revolution began as a coup organised by the Movimento das Forças Armadas (the MFA or Armed Forces Movement), composed of low-ranking left-wing army officers opposed to the regime.
At 10.50 pm on 24 April 1974, the Rádio Alfabeta dos Emissores Associados de Lisboa broadcast the song Grândola Vila Morena by Zeca Afonso. This probably did not cause much of a stir. Although the Estado Novo regime had banned a number of Zeca Afonso’s songs from being played or broadcast, as they were considered to be associated with communism, Grândola Vila Morena was apparently not one of these. What the authorities did not know was that this song served as a secret signal to a group of dissident captains and soldiers to launch a coup.
Within hours the insurgents had taken control of strategic parts of the country. The Portuguese Revolution had begun. The ease with which it succeeded was astonishing. Despite the controlled radio, TV and press, church and schools, the totalitarian system had fallen like an overripe fruit. The corruption and oppression, aggravated by interminable colonial wars in Africa, had undermined the regime completely. News of the downfall of the regime immediately brought the masses onto the streets. After decades of dictatorship, the Portuguese masses moved into action. They marched to the jails and released hundreds of political prisoners, who were carried through the streets shoulder high in triumph by cheering crowds. Overnight, the communist and socialist parties became powerful mass organisations. The revolution was bloodless because the overwhelming mass of soldiers came over to the side of the people. The demonstrators fraternised with the soldiers, placing carnations in the muzzles of their guns. An apparently powerful state collapsed like a house of cards in this moment of truth. The only section of the state apparatus on which the regime could rely was the secret police, bound by fear to the regime, because of their bloody crimes against the people. In the following months several attempts were made to reverse the tide of revolution. But on every occasion, the counter-revolution was defeated and the revolution swept forward. The reactionaries followed Marcelo Caetano and António de Spinola3 into exile. The workers moved from below to take control of their workplaces and the peasants took over the land.
When I arrived in Lisbon in the summer of 1975, the revolution was in full swing. In the streets of the capital there were permanent mass meetings. Every wall was plastered with posters, political slogans and graffiti of different political groups. The whole city was buzzing with life. After so many decades of enforced silence, the people of Portugal had found their voice and all started speaking at the same time. Heated debates and discussions were taking place from morning until night in Lisbon’s majestic central square, the Praça do Rossio, with socialists and communists arguing with Maoists and Trotskyists about which route the revolution should take.
On 14 March, 1975, in response to a counter-revolutionary attempt, the bank employees occupied the banks and forced the ruling MFA to nationalise them. Over fifty per cent of the economy was nationalised and a major redistribution of land was carried out. The rulers of Europe were looking on in horror. The London Times published an editorial with the headline ‘Capitalism is dead in Portugal’, and that should have been the case. A socialist revolution in Portugal could have been carried out peacefully, without civil war. The rank and file of the armed forces supported the revolution. The workers would have undoubtedly responded to a call from the workers’ parties – especially the Communist Party – to take power. But that call never came.
The leaders of the Communist Party and Socialist Party dedicated all their energies to manoeuvring for positions, and made no attempt to base themselves on the masses and take power. In the end, that is what shipwrecked the Portuguese Revolution.
Impact of the Portuguese Revolution in Spain
The events in Portugal had a tremendous impact in Spain, although the regime made use of the censorship to prevent news of the revolution being widely reported in the press. Ana Muñoz recalls:
I remember it was very difficult to get information about what was happening in Portugal. There was next to nothing in the papers, and we had to rely for information from the ‘grapevine’ – comments we learned verbally transmitted by people in the underground.
The nervousness of the dictatorship was understandable. As in Portugal, the regime had long since lost its mass base and become purely a military-police state. This was being undermined by the struggles of the working class, which increasingly had the sympathy and support of the bulk of the middle-class professional people, small shopkeepers and small businessmen. The danger was that this discontent would find an expression in the armed forces themselves.
A key feature of the Portuguese revolution was the involvement of the mass of the lower- and middle-officers – and even some of the generals and admirals. The revolutionary government was headed by General Vasco Gonçalves, a sympathiser of the Communist Party who defined himself as a Marxist; António Rosa Coutinho, who was known as ‘the Red Admiral’ (almirante vermelho); and on the extreme left, Colonel Otello Saraiva de Carvalho, who played a leading role in the first Portuguese Provisional Governments and, if anything, stood close to the positions of the Maoists. The lower ranks, it goes without saying, were overwhelmingly left-wing and revolutionary in their outlook.
This was what caused most alarm in the ruling circles in Spain. The bulk of the Spanish army, as in Portugal, were conscripts, the sons of workers who were open to the idea of revolution. But the Spanish officer caste was not analogous to the Portuguese, which had been undermined by years of colonial war. It was a more or less solid bulwark of reaction. Nevertheless, the Spanish regime lived in dread of subversion spreading to the armed forces – the final prop left to rest upon.
The ‘Spanish Spinola’, Díaz Alegría, was sacked on 14 June, 1974. General Ángel Campano López, the captain-general of the Madrid military region gave a significant warning to the army:
In recent years we have witnessed a moral decay and the upsurge of underground revolutionary and subversive sentiment… We must recall that the army is of the people and for the people, but not for the people in a state of subversion.4
Unfortunately for the general, the Spanish people were in a “state of subversion”; and the army could not insulate itself from the moods and pressures of society. Feeling the ground tremble under their feet, the Spanish ruling class was groping like a blind man in a dark room, in search of a way out. The example of Portugal showed them that under sufficient pressure the army could break in pieces.
They would then be faced with the uncontrolled movement of the masses, who would demand an account for the innumerable victims of Francoism both during and after the Civil War. Any incident of police repression of strikes or murder of workers threatened to act like a spark alongside a powder keg.
When the ruling class is threatened with losing everything, they will always be inclined to give at least something. The decisive sections of the ruling class were afraid that if they did not remove the Franco regime from the top, the masses would remove it from the bottom. If the movement of the workers led to a general strike and barricade fighting, could they rely on the army? Could they depend even on the loyalty of the lower officers?
The dilemma of the ruling class was whether to move from the top to prevent the deluge, and try to funnel it into harmless channels or to take steps that, as in Portugal, would open the floodgates to mass action. The revolutionary wave, unintentionally unleashed by the coup, was an object lesson in the dangers for capitalism of such a development in Spain. In Spain more than in Portugal, there was a line of blood between the workers and the fascist regime.
The Spanish liberals were inclined to the idea of a ‘controlled liberalisation’. The problem in Portugal, they concluded, was that the regime had left it too late. But the Portuguese experience also provided the reactionaries with a convincing argument. In their view, it proved that the path of reform – however well managed – was fraught with danger. Prior to the 25 April coup, General Spinola and others were arguing for a ‘liberalisation’, in which the excesses of the old fascist regime would be eliminated, but fundamentally society would not change. That idea was the essence of the Spanish ‘democratic transition’. But opinions on this were sharply divided.
To Invade or Not to Invade?
The events in Portugal caused panic in Spain’s ruling circles. There were signs of unrest in the Spanish Army. Two days after General Campano had delivered his speech, two officers were arrested in Barcelona and sentenced to prison for defending a fellow officer who refused to assist security police in compiling a list of suspected illegal trade unionists. Later, twenty-five officers in Barcelona signed a protest letter and 2,000 army officers from all over Spain signed a petition demanding democratic rights. Reports like this caused such alarm in Spanish ruling circles that they were contemplating taking desperate action.
Secret documents, which were only declassified in 2008, revealed that Franco’s government was “deeply concerned” by events across the border. So great was their fear of revolution, that they were ready to declare war on Portugal. The Spanish prime minister, Carlos Arias Navarro, met with US officials to get support for such a move, according to documents held in the American National Archive. The Telegraph cited a secret report in which Arias had privately assured the Americans that “adequate precautions” were being taken to prevent “the events in Portugal from spilling over the Spanish border.” That was six months before Franco’s death.
The diplomat Robert Ingersoll wrote to the then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in a report on the March 1975 meeting:
Portugal posed a serious threat to Spain, not only because of the way the situation there was developing, but because of the foreign support it might ultimately receive, which could be hostile to Spain. But it hoped that it would have the co-operation and understanding of its friends, not only in the Spanish interest but in the interest of all who thought the same.5
It is not known how the Americans responded to Ingersoll’s request, but presumably they were not enthusiastic about being drawn into such a war. They had burned their fingers badly in Vietnam, and anyway, they had their own plans for derailing the Portuguese Revolution. Helping a tottering dictatorship to invade clearly did not form part of them. Such a desperate move would have been very risky given the growing revolutionary movement in Spain and the unrest in the Spanish army.
This was clearly shown by the emergence of the Democratic Military Union (UMD, Unión Militar Democrática), which indicates the extent to which the Portuguese revolution did have an effect in the ranks of the Spanish Army. In August 1974, a group of Spanish officers set up an organisation that had as its aim the restoration of democratic rights in Spain. They were mainly men with a conservative outlook but they were opposed to the dictatorship. Two of these officers, Luís Otero Fernández and Julio Busquets, travelled to Portugal to receive first-hand information from the Portuguese military.
They also contacted politicians of the Spanish opposition, such as the Catalan socialist leader Joan Reventós and Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, the ex-minister of Franco, now turned liberal. The UMD also had contacts with Juan de Borbón, Juan Carlos, and with the main leaders of the clandestine opposition, including Felipe González and Santiago Carrillo. These contacts were naturally carried out with the utmost discretion, but they would not have escaped the attention of the secret police.
The intention of the UMD was not to launch a coup d’état as in Portugal, but to gather together the democratic elements in the army. At a meeting held in Barcelona on 1 September 1974 they decided on a basic document and a name and appointed a leading committee made up of four captains, one for each branch of the armed forces. Among their declared aims were the convening of a constituent assembly to work out a constitution comparable to that of other Western European countries, the restoration of democratic freedoms and human rights, to fight against corruption and finally socio-economic reforms, aimed at the improvement of living conditions.
In the military sphere, they advocated a reform of military justice and the Military Service Law and the reorganisation of the army, navy and air force. Despite the moderate views of its leaders, the UMD represented a mortal threat to the dictatorship. In an army where the mere fact that a soldier studying in university was regarded as suspicious, the opinions and actions of the UMD supporters would have been seen as treason and subversion of the worst sort. No sooner was its existence known, the UMD was mercilessly crushed.
In the summer of 1975, the main leaders of the organisation were arrested. At the time of their arrest, the UMD was estimated to have between 200 and 400 firm members, and about 600 collaborators, although, for obvious reasons, the exact figure was never known. The leaders were sent to prison and seven of them were expelled from the army. The wave of searches and arrests that followed was intended to intimidate anybody who might have been tempted to follow their example. The UMD was disbanded following the general election of June 1977, and the Spanish army remained under the control of the reactionary pro-Franco officers who were later to organise the coup of 23 February 1981.
Morocco and the Sahara Question
A crisis on the external front now threatened to fatally undermine the new government. To the dangerous instability at home was suddenly added a threatening situation in Morocco. This was yet another irony of history. Franco’s revolt against the Republican Government in 1936 was launched from Morocco, and the use of Moroccan troops in the Nationalist army was one of the factors which contributed to his victory.
The Spanish Sahara (now known as Western Sahara) was a Spanish colony and one of the last relics of imperialist rule in Africa. But King Hassan II of Morocco’s seizure of the Sahara did not signify any improvement for its people – merely the exchange of one form of tyranny for another. He was chiefly motivated, not by the interests of the people, either of the Western Sahara or of Morocco, but by greed and the desire to possess the large deposits of phosphates in Bou Craa.
The death agony of Franco encouraged King Hassan II to organise a march (called the Green March) of 350,000 Moroccans into the Western Sahara in an attempt to seize control of it. A flurry of panicky diplomatic activity followed. In Spain, as Franco was in a fatal coma, and the cabinet in disarray, military action was suggested but rapidly discounted. The lesson of Portugal was not lost on the men in Madrid. It was too risky to send troops to fight an unpopular colonial war in North Africa.
Juan Carlos’ visit to the army in the Sahara was partly an attempt to boost his image and thus propel him closer to the throne, but from a military point of view it meant less than nothing. The leaderless Spanish cabinet feared that a messy colonial war with Morocco would be the result. Given the growing unrest in Spain, the prospect of a military conflict in the Sahara would have been a very dangerous step.
The rulers of Spain were well aware of the fatal consequences of the wars in Africa for the Portuguese dictatorship. They had no desire to follow their Portuguese friends down the same road to ruin. They therefore decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and surrendered. Spain was forced to relinquish its hold on the Sahara without a fight.
If the regime did not feel strong enough to intervene against Morocco, how could it contemplate an act of aggression against revolutionary Portugal? If the regime had ordered the Spanish army to move against Portugal, far from isolating the revolution on the other side of the border, it would have invited it to cross over. The Spanish troops would have been immediately affected by the revolution.
A Hated Regime
The Spanish ruling class behaved like the astronomers of old when faced with the proof that the Earth was no longer the centre of the Universe. In its decrepitude, the regime was utterly detested by all layers of the population. Everyone sensed that an overturn was imminent. The hot breath of approaching revolution penetrated the Archbishop’s palace, the boardroom and the stock exchange. The reactionary monarchist paper ABC growled: “There is a stench of rot in Spanish society. The house where the average citizen has lived in calm and tranquillity has begun to totter.” But the average Spanish citizen had not lived in anything resembling calm and tranquillity for a long time. And what was tottering was not the average household but the regime itself.
In 1974, 5,000 workers were fired and 25,000 temporarily suspended for political reasons. The Tribunal of Public Order was working overtime, holding about 2,000 trials, affecting around 5,000 people, but by this time repression was a policy of diminishing returns. There was still a lot of fear, but it was growing weaker by the day. Social upheaval was unfolding against a background of a crisis-ridden economy. The press at that time were full of warnings about the slowdown in income from traditional sources that had given Spain a balance of payments surplus. Germany and Switzerland put an embargo on the influx of foreign workers – which put an end to the traditional escape valve for unemployment in Spain, and reduced the inflow of capital from Spanish workers abroad.
Foreign investment was also beginning to fall off. The cost of living rose by 16.6 per cent and was expected to reach twenty per cent by the end of 1974.6 But unofficial sources put the rise as high as forty per cent in relation to basic necessities, which the poorer workers found increasingly difficult to purchase.
Even more important, however, was that many of the strikes were not caused by wage demands, but by solidarity action with workers at the same firm who had been dismissed, or in solidarity with workers from other firms who were in dispute. Thus, even under the rifles of the armed police, and despite the network of informers, police spies and agent provocateurs, the workers were acting as a class. Solidarity with fellow workers had become as important, or even more important, than industrial action for higher wages.
All the simmering discontent of society had burst out onto the surface, but at every step the search for a solution to the problems of society came up against the resistance of the dictatorship. Practically every level of Spanish society was opposed to the regime. Not only the students, whose militant demonstrations led to the closing of the University of Valladolid in February 1975, and demonstrations of solidarity in Madrid, but also lawyers, doctors, university lecturers and newspaper editors opposed the regime. Under the influence of the workers’ mass strikes, theatre people, film directors and playwrights entered the fight, and, imitating the workers, refused to submit their demands through the Sindicato.
The list of labour disputes was growing ever longer. In 1975, half of all labour contracts were imposed without the consent of the workers compared to a mere 6.5 per cent in 1972. According to the official figures, the number of labour conflicts had risen to 3,156, a thousand more than the previous year, and with a participation of 650,000 workers. The year began with a big strike in Potasas de Navarre, which culminated in a week-long general strike in Pamplona.
A conference of Spanish bishops proposed a public penance for the activities of the Church in the Civil War. After 2,000 years of skilful manoeuvring to preserve their position, the good shepherd knew what was necessary to keep up with their flock. At the local level, increasing numbers of young worker priests were being drawn into the workers’ struggle, placing their churches at the disposal of strikers and suffering arrest in consequence. When even the Catholic Church was affected, the regime really had grounds for alarm.
Overnight, the regime had become a leper. No one wanted to touch it. Now began a period of miraculous conversions, compared to which the experience of Paul on the road to Damascus pales into insignificance. Former fascist ministers resigned or were removed from the government for their flirtation with the opposition. The upper classes were frantically seeking party cards: Christian Democrat, Liberal, Carlist, Social Democrat – anything, so long as it was not the Falange.
In the midst of all the labour and student disturbances, Arias threatened that the government would crush the movement of subversion with all the force of authority at its disposal. Yet the Supreme Court, which re-examined the case of Marcelino Camacho and nine other underground trade union leaders in mid-February 1975, reduced their sentences and four were released.
The Roman Catholic paper Ya hoped that this “magnificent example of temperate application of existing law might be a good starting point for moderation which is needed so much at the moment”. The answer to their prayers was soon provided by bloody repression in the Basque Country.
The nervous shifts of policy from above daily increased the sense of weakness of a government, which no longer shaped events but merely reacted to them. A petition signed by 500 civil servants demanding democratic rights indicated that the rot had spread to the very heart of the regime.
My first visit to Spain
I first met Felipe González at the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the PSOE that was held in the French town of Toulouse in August 1972. At the time, Felipe González, an ambitious young lawyer from Seville, was striving to propel himself into a leading position in the underground Socialist Party in Spain. Having established himself as a ‘left’ leader of the Socialist Party, he tried to use his image to gain an advantage over the PCE, which in terms of organisation, numbers and weight was vastly superior.
By criticising the PCE from the left, he succeeded in attracting a significant layer of radicalised young people in the interior who were repelled by the bureaucratic and Stalinist image of the PCE. But the verbal radicalism of the leaders of the PSOE was really nothing more than a pose, disguising their weakness on the ground through spurious left-wing rhetoric that was dropped like a hot brick the moment the opportunity presented itself.
As one might expect, González was very anxious to get the support of the leaders of the Socialist International, including the British Labour Party. Since I was the only member of the British delegation who could speak Spanish, I had to act as translator for the conversation that Felipe had with Tom Driberg, a left Labour MP who headed the British delegation. Felipe insistently urged him to visit Spain in order to see for himself who had majority support of the Spanish Socialist Party.
Tom Driberg replied in an embarrassed tone that he was very old and almost blind (which was true) and therefore, regretfully, was unable to accept this kind invitation. González was visibly disappointed by this response and I quickly intervened to offer to go to Spain myself. Without giving the matter a second thought, Felipe immediately accepted. And so, my first visit to Spain was organised by Felipe González himself.
Shortly after this conversation, plans were made for my visit to the Spanish Socialist underground. Felipe arranged everything in a short space of time, putting me in the hands of a youngish member of the party, who I believe was based in the town of Hendaya (in French, Hendaye) on the French side of the Pyrenees. The only reason I have this supposition was that he was known in party circles as Pepe de Hendaya, although I guess his name was not Pepe, and he might have been from Timbuktu as far as I, or anybody else, knew. What I did know – or at least soon discovered – was that he was not the best man to accompany me, or anyone else, to Franco’s Spain.
In the underground, the old saying holds good that speech is silver, but silence is golden. The less you talk, the less chance you have of making a mistake and compromising yourself or somebody else. This man, however, was a serial chatterbox. His most astonishing blunder (there were more than one) occurred in a bar in the Basque town of Portugalete, where we had gone to visit the leader of the socialist trade union, the UGT, Nicolás Redondo.
We were drinking a cup of coffee in the bar, which was full of Basque workers quietly talking, drinking wine or playing cards and generally minding their own business, when suddenly my companion stood up and in a loud voice pronounced the words: Gora Euskadi Askatuta (in Basque language: “long live free Euskadi”). I do not know what reception my guide was expecting, but it was certainly immediate and unequivocal. Somebody whistled, and there was a general murmuring, or rather a growl, it was not at all of the friendly character, whereupon everybody got up and walked out of the bar. Evidently, they had concluded (not unreasonably) that we were a couple of police provocateurs!
We left the bar in more of a hurry than when we entered it, and were very lucky that our little adventure did not have more serious consequences. I did meet Nicolás Redondo later, and he struck me as a very honest and dedicated worker. I was glad to have met him. I was even more pleased to see the back of Pepe de Hendaya, who went back to France. I heard nothing more about him until several years later when I was informed that he had been expelled from the party as the result of a heated row he had with Pablo Castellano, a prominent party leader, during which he apparently hit him on the head – with a (smoking) pipe. I travelled to other parts of Spain, including Seville, Barcelona and Madrid, and met with leading members of the Socialist Party. I noticed that, with the exception of the Basque Country, I hardly met any workers. Mostly the party activists seemed to consist of lawyers and other kinds of intellectuals. But there was no doubt whatsoever that the González wing had the majority inside Spain, and the exile faction represented by Rodolfo Llopis and the históricos had scarcely any presence in the interior.
I returned to Britain, where I sent a report of my trip to Spain to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. Whether it had any bearing on the decision of the Labour Party to recognise Felipe González’s PSOE or not, I cannot say. Far more decisive than anything I could have written was the attitude taken by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which effectively controlled the Second International. But more on that later.
The Underground in Barcelona
My first direct experience of the underground struggle was in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a solid working-class municipality on the outskirts of Barcelona in 1972. I was staying in the house of an old anarchist, a wonderful old proletarian who spoke Spanish with a thick Catalan accent. He had passed through many difficult and tragic experiences, and was no longer active in the movement, but whenever he spoke of his revolutionary past, his eyes would light up with enthusiasm. He once told me a story about his experience following the defeat of the uprising of the CNT workers in Barcelona in May 1937. He spoke as if these events had taken place only yesterday. The defeated rebels, ragged and exhausted, were lined up with their hands in the air, as one by one, they were disarmed by the soldiers of the regular Republican army. As he stood there, humiliated in defeat, he was confronted by an officer with a fresh young face, dressed in an immaculate uniform and brandishing a revolver in his face. He was probably a member of the Spanish Communist Party:
“Give me your rifle!”
Reluctantly he handed over his rifle.
“Now give me that pistol.”
He handed over the pistol.
The young officer’s gaze settled on the bomb, which all anarchists in those days carried proudly in their belt. As much as a weapon, it was a symbol of their revolutionary honour.
“Now give me that bomb, the officer shouted.”
At this point, the man’s indignation and anger boiled over.
“I will not hand it over,” he shouted back in the young man’s face.
“See this pistol? I’ll shoot you.”
The anarchist, without lowering his hands, looked down at a large knife in his belt.
“See that knife? Let’s see whether you can pull the trigger before I stick it in your guts.”
The young officer decided that discretion is the better part of valour and walked away to the next man in line. My anarchist friend kept his bomb and his honour. It was a small victory, but ultimately it signified nothing. There was no future for this man, with or without his bomb. There was no future for the heroic revolutionary workers of Barcelona who had done so much for the cause of the Spanish Revolution, except long years and decades of suffering hardship and oppression under the Franco dictatorship.
The ferment of the nationalities extended to Catalonia. On 2 March 1974, Salvador Puig Antich, a twenty-five-year-old Catalan anarchist, was executed by garrote after being tried by a military tribunal and found guilty of the death of a Spanish policeman. He was the last person in Spain to suffer that gruesome method of execution, and it caused outrage in Spain and internationally. The old Catalan anarchist, in whose house in Barcelona I was staying, was in tears as he handed me a small wooden memento for tourists with the Catalan inscription Déu vos guard (May God preserve you) onto which he had carefully carved the name “Puig Antich”.
I remember he watched the television news reports of Franco’s final illness with eager expectation. He would dance around the room chanting: Que muera él antes de que me muera yo (I hope he dies before I die). He was a lovely man, a living representative of that class of heroic proletarians who risked their lives to defeat the fascist uprising in 1936. I had enormous respect and love for this old man who was so impatient to see the end of a hated regime and the birth of a new social order.
Explosive mood
I vividly remember the explosive mood that existed at that time. The spirit of revolt was strongest among the youth, as one might expect. The political organisations in the underground embraced only an infinitesimal minority of the activists of the working class. But in their ranks were to be found the most heroic and self-sacrificing elements. They gave a conscious expression and a form to the spontaneous, combative but inchoate movement of the masses. It is thanks to this generation of nameless heroes and heroines of the workers’ movement, and not to the middle-class political parvenus, that we owe the rights which were won through struggle at that time.
The pre-revolutionary atmosphere created favourable conditions for the rapid growth of small revolutionary groups, some of which succeeded in building an impressive base among a layer of radicalised workers and youth. On the margins of the mass parties, the pre-revolutionary atmosphere that reigned in society created the conditions for many small ultra-left groups, without any tradition, to experience an astonishing growth of support among many workers and youth seeking revolutionary ideas.
There were, for example, three sizeable Maoist or ex-Maoist parties: the PTE, the ORT and the MCE. The first two named had their own trade unions: the CSUT and the SU, which was very strong in Navarre. The Mandelite LCR had a few thousand members, partly as a result of a split in ETA that resulted in a left-wing organisation (ETA- Sixth Congress). Parties such as the PTE, the ORT, the MC or the LCR grew to the size of several thousand-strong each, and succeeded in conquering several important trade union positions, particularly in the CCOO.
On the walls of every town and city in Spain graffiti appeared denouncing the dictatorship in the name of one or other of the workers’ parties and revolutionary organisations. Virtually every wall in Santa Coloma was filled with graffiti from different left-wing groups – communists, Maoists, anarchists and Trotskyists. Brave young people – many of them no more than teenagers – went out at night, risking their necks in order to give expression to their rebellious ideas.
The police had their time cut out attempting to eradicate the voice of the revolution graphically expressed on the walls. The police attempted to cancel out the messages of the graffiti by painting over the revolutionary slogans or joining up the letters to make them illegible. But it was impossible to blot out the message of defiance or conceal the revolutionary spirit that was behind it. Slogans that were wiped out one day immediately reappeared overnight. The voice of the revolution could no longer be silenced.
The young people expressed their hostility to a hated regime in many different ways. The old songs of the 1930s made a comeback, sometimes with new words added, usually with offensive and rude references to Franco and his wife Carmen. The words of these wonderful old songs were always sung with great gusto. There was an amusing verse from an old Civil War song called Si me quieres escribir (‘If You Want to Write to Me’):
Si a Franco no le gusta,
La bandera tricolor,
Le daremos una roja,
Con un martillo y una hoz.
If Franco doesn’t like the tricolor flag
We’ll give him a red one
With a hammer and sickle.
I attended a school organised by the Young Socialists in Barcelona. It was held in complete secrecy at a remote location in the mountains near an abandoned farmhouse. These youngsters were dedicated, enthusiastic and absolutely fearless. But I was surprised by a certain lack of discipline. It reminded me of something Napoleon once said about the Spaniards at the time of the Peninsular War. He said that they were good warriors but bad soldiers. This judgement was excessively harsh.
In underground conditions the element of discipline is absolutely necessary to avoid arrest. In this field, undoubtedly the communists were supreme. The people I was with were very young and most of them fairly inexperienced. They were not expecting to attract the attention of the police in such remote surroundings and that probably explains a certain laxity in their conduct. As it happened, they underestimated the extent of the long arm of the law.
The night before the school was due to start the comrades stayed up late, arguing heatedly about politics, singing revolutionary songs to the accompaniment of a guitar and generally enjoying themselves. I confess that I went to sleep long before they did. The next morning the scene was lit by a watery sun. The place resembled a battlefield in its disorderly aspect. Boots, sleeping bags, empty bottles and an abandoned guitar provided evidence of the previous night’s activities.
I was lying on the grass, waiting for the day’s activities to commence and had my eyes closed. Suddenly I was aware of an unexpected presence standing nearby. I opened my eyes and caught sight of a pair of army boots and the green uniform of the Civil Guard. I immediately shut my eyes again and pretended to be asleep. A peremptory voice barked out: “What are you doing here?” A few sleepy voices delivered incoherent answers. But the scene apparently spoke for itself.
The officer concluded that we were just a bunch of young kids on a picnic and went on his way without further ado. Had he arrived half an hour later he would have found us sitting in a circle, surrounded by incriminating documents, discussing revolution. But on this occasion at least, luck was on our side.
On 3 April 1973 a building worker called Manuel Fernandez was murdered by the police during a strike near Barcelona. The strike took place in the building site for a new thermoelectric plant in Sant Adrià del Besòs by Fuerzas Electricas de Catalunya (FECSA), which is linked to the German Siemens combine, and which is controlled by the sons of the millionaire Juan March, who was one of Franco’s biggest supporters during the Civil War against the Republic.
On Friday 30 March the workers held meetings to discuss the refusal of FECSA to implement the demands made by the workers on 27 March. The company used the excuse that they would not discuss with the elected unofficial representatives of the workers, who had bypassed the official ‘sindicato’ and had set up their own democratic ‘asambleas’. Among the representatives elected by the workers were members of the construction section of the UGT, who had worked out a programme of just demands for the workers, but still they refused to discuss.
On Monday 2 April the workers went to work but stayed in the mess-rooms all day, refusing to work. The following day at 7 am they again arrived at the works and found the gates locked and a large number of police waiting. At that moment the train from Barcelona to Massanet arrived and was forced to stop because the lines were blocked by workers. The Police then fired into the crowd killing Manuel Fernandez instantly, with four bullets in the chest and seriously wounding Serafín Villegas Gomez, aged 25, with a bullet in the neck.
News of this incident spread throughout the working-class districts of Barcelona, Santa Coloma and Sant Adrià, leading to lightning demonstrations, strikes and leafleting. The offices of FECSA in Barcelona were stoned. Strikes occurred in numerous plants in Barcelona, Madrid and the Basque Country. The universities of Barcelona, the Autonomous University and Madrid University were closed down after demonstrations by students against the shooting.
A May Day march in Barcelona
I attended my first May Day demonstration in Spain in 1973. It took place in Barcelona in one of its most proletarian areas: Hospitalet. The serried ranks of the workers filled the streets with placards and banners and chanting Viva la Clase Obrera! (Long live the working class!) The demonstration lasted approximately fifteen minutes as far as I can remember. The sound of police sirens was soon heard above the chants of the workers. People rapidly dispersed, running at the side streets and bars to escape the truncheons and tear gas of the hated grises (armed police). I sent a report of that demonstration, which was published in Militant on 4 May. I republish it here in full:
The utter collapse of the authority of Franco’s regime has been decisively exposed to the world. First came the general strike in Barcelona, during which workers fought police in tens of thousands, and barricades were put up.
As reported in last week’s Militant, this was the answer of the workers to the murder of two of their comrades by police gunmen. Reeling from the shock of this revolutionary strike wave, the government issued secret orders that no fire-arms were to be used under any circumstances on May Day under penalty of court martial.
On 3 April, during a building workers’ strike in the Barcelona suburb of Sant Adrià del Besòs, thousands of strikers came into confrontation with the police. Fighting broke out, and two workers were shot dead. Sympathy strikes and demonstrations were immediately called in which tens of thousands participated (nine factories were brought to a standstill in the Barcelona area.) Realising the dangers of provocations in the actions of the unruly and vicious political police – the government gave specific orders that arms should not be used against demonstrators – at least for the time being.
For the workers of Barcelona, May Day 1973 was held in an atmosphere of tense expectation. Days in advance, secret meetings of representatives of factories and working-class suburbs laid careful plans for demonstrations. On the evening of Friday 27 April, as thousands of workers crowded the streets near the famous church of the Sagrada Familia on their way home from work, over a thousand people staged a lightning demonstration, marching boldly through the busy main road, while pickets armed with improvised weapons and Molotov cocktails guarded the front and rear and held up the traffic.
For a few minutes the street is filled with a great roar of chanting ‘POLICÍA ASESINA’ (police murderers!). Crowds of workers gather to watch the demonstration with a sympathetic response. Only one unfortunate middle-class lady, watching the advancing hordes from her balcony howls out in a panic-stricken voice: “Save us from these criminals!” Voices shout back “The criminals are your regime and your bloody police!” The demo passes on.
Then, suddenly, at a pre-arranged place, the demonstrators disappear in a flash down side alleys, amid the crowds, in the metro. Two petrol bombs thrown in the road by pickets hold up the traffic to allow everyone to get away. The glare lights up the street, as excited passers-by stand about discussing the event.
On the eve of May Day, in a working-class suburb, members of the Spanish Young Socialists, together with other groups, have organised a preparatory demonstration. This is San Adrian de Besos, where the main striking factories are situated. The atmosphere before the event is electric. The whole thing has been organised by word of mouth alone (leaflets warn the police). How many will demonstrate? Will the police be there? As the moment of action draws near, small groups of people stand around the small public square. It is a warm evening, so the people have come out for a stroll. So, it appears!
Girls and boys walking arm in arm, youths playing football, old men on benches. But you overhear snatches of conversation: “They killed him in the Civil War…” and you notice people looking out of the corner of their eyes; “Is he one of us?” Suddenly the quiet is broken. A car speeds past, blasting on the horn. As if moved by an unseen force, the whole square surge forward as one. Everyone is clapping their hands.
Then, suddenly, a red flag appears as if from nowhere. The chanting begins: POLICÍA ASESINA! DICTADURA ASESINA! Political rights for the people! Free all political prisoners!
Then, as if by magic, the whole thing melts away. We are lucky again. No police. No arrests.
These are only preparatory events before May Day itself. In another working-class suburb of Barcelona, the same sequence is repeated. Dozens of groups of people stand around and then suddenly start running into a side street. An enormous red flag is unfurled. This time we are out in force! An army of 5,000 people marching boldly through the streets of Barcelona.
The chanting echoes and reverberates against the workers’ tall flats. Surely this time there will be trouble? The noise can be heard streets away, and the armed police have been out in force all day on motorcycles in pairs.
But the thing goes on and on. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen. We have gone several streets. Then suddenly, there is a mad rush in front, people scatter in all directions, not in panic, but carefully seeking out the avenues of escape. “Don’t run! Just walk quietly!” (Easier said than done.)
Then from behind, a new sound, the dull roar of Molotov cocktails bursting into flame. This time there are ten or more (so it seems) as the pickets strive to draw off the police and turn the road into an inferno. Then a sound like a crack. Another. And another. They have opened fire. It is time to be off! Not to the metro (a police trap). A thousand groups go their different ways with one thought in mind: to get out of the area, before it is sealed off.
Later we get the news. No one killed or wounded (one picket had to climb two storeys of a block of flats, hammering on the doors, before he got in though). Arrests? Not many, at any rate. The police are playing it cool, by Spanish standards. The workers of Barcelona take a step back to contemplate the lessons of another May Day.
A hard school
The class struggle was becoming ever sharper in the months that preceded the death of the dictator. An employers’ lockout sparked off a big movement of the workers of the big SEAT plant in Barcelona. The strike ended with more than five hundred workers fired and 21,000 sanctioned. The workers at the SEAT plant in the Zona Franca had developed a proud tradition of struggle. On 18 October 1971, sacked workers managed to enter the factory and held an assembly with about 6,000 present. Management replied by sending armed police on horseback into the plant firing live ammunition against the workers in the different shops killing a worker, Antonio Ruiz Villalba. In 1975, strikers took their movement to the centre of the city. The following report from Barcelona, which was published on 7 February 1975 gives you a fair idea of the atmosphere of those times:
On Thursday 9 January, the people of Barcelona saw what was probably the biggest demonstration of workers’ strength in the city since the Civil War. Around 9,000 workers could be heard in different parts of the city shouting “SEAT, WE WANT WORK”. Armed riot police were confused by the fact that the cries were coming from many different parts of the city at once. They would charge one group of workers perhaps a thousand-strong only to hear that there was another equally large group of workers demonstrating in another part of town at the same time and yet more groups in other parts of the centre.
According to three SEAT workers whom I spoke to, the demonstrations were not previously planned as this was the only way of ensuring that the police would be taken by surprise. By 10 o’clock on the morning of 9 January some 3,000 workers had already gathered outside the official union building in Vía Layetana, about 15 minutes’ walk from Plaça de Catalunya – the main square. They were refused entry into the union building and the police didn’t take long in arriving, but the workers dispersed only to form numerous groups which were to appear in different parts of the town throughout the morning.
From this point began the gathering of strength, which rose to about 9,000 workers supported by students and onlookers by mid-day. At around 12.15 I followed the sounds of SEAT, SEAT; which rang through the town until I was able to catch up with what was probably the largest group of demonstrators, which was at that time proceeding around the Plaza de Catalunya and on towards the University.
The centre of the road was thick with workers and many of the on-lookers walking along the pavements stepped into the road to give their support and add to the cries of “SEAT, SEAT, WE WANT WORK”, which grew louder and louder and were followed by loud rounds of applause as greater confidence grew amongst the demonstrators.
As the group, which by now must have been well over 2,000-strong, passed the offices of Hispano-Olivetti, the slogan changed to OLIVETTI as an expression of sympathy with the struggle of the 2,150 Olivetti workers who it turned out were also staging a wildcat strike that morning, but had not been dislodged from the factory in view of the size of the protest that was already taking place in the streets.
The Seat workers appealed to the people working in the Olivetti offices to join in the demonstration. By the time the marchers reached Calle Balmes, the last intersection before reaching the University square, the police raced down the Balmes Road, breaking up the demonstration.
Many of the demonstrators rushed to the protection of doorways, and other kept on running as fast as they could. Directly across the road from where I was standing I saw a young man trying to stand up – two helmeted police either side. His head and hands were bleeding. A lady standing beside me had seen the two riot police battering the worker with their truncheons and cried out at the top of her voice “assassins!” “criminals!”.
But helmets and years of constant indoctrination had made the armed police deaf to such cries. The worker, who was led off by the police, was believed to be a worker of Diedesheim Cumbre, where workers have been given the sack. The concern and support of by-standers who were out doing their shopping or chatting to neighbours and who suddenly found themselves witnesses to such violent attacks upon peaceful demonstrators was invigorating.
While talking to the SEAT workers who were later to give me much of the above information, a middle-aged lady came up to us to let out her feelings: “they’re workers, they’re not drunkards or criminals, how can they do this to them?” […]
As police intervention had been so very fierce at this point the demonstration broke up, but later that evening SEAT workers held a meeting in the Clock Square of Santa Coloma de Gramenet to discuss the latest happenings. The meeting was broken up when armed police arrived. Demonstrations were also held that evening in the workers’ areas of Pubilla Casas and Bellvitge. There were confrontations with the police in the latter.
This was the hard school in which the Spanish working class was educated in the 1970s. But nothing could stop its irresistible advance. Workers were prepared to face meetings, sackings, imprisonment and even death to achieve their aims. It was this strength of will, this willingness to face all dangers and sacrifice everything, even life itself, that gave the workers’ movement a power that even the mightiest state could not resist.
[1] Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, op. cit. p. 155.
[2] Marcelo Caetano was dictator of Portugal from 1968 to 1974, when he was overthrown in the Carnation Revolution.
[3] António de Spinola was an army officer and member of MFA, who officially took over control of Portugal from Caetano in the Carnation Revolution 1974. However, he never really supported the revolution and tried to block the radical programme of the MFA government, for which he was removed from office in September 1974, preparing a further shift to the left.
[4] El Popular, 18 February 1975.
[5] Fiona Govan, ‘Gen Franco wanted to declare war on Portugal’, The Telegraph, 3 November 2008.
[6] See Cambio 16, 3 June 1974.