Word: barcelona
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Spain's sleepy provincial town of Reus, Judge Alfredo Fournier has spent most of his 15 years on the bench settling peasants' disputes over stray pigs. Last week, nervous Judge Fournier had a much bigger job; he auctioned off the $56 million Barcelona Traction, Light & Power Co., Ltd., which controls Spain's biggest public utility. As everyone expected, it went to crafty old Juan March, onetime tobacco smuggler who has become Spain's biggest businessman...
...Barcelona Traction was developed by an international electrical syndicate long headed by North Carolina-born Dannie Heineman, 79, a globetrotting engineer who has built electric and street car systems all over Europe and South America. At the end of Spain's civil war, during which all currency exchange was blocked, March began grabbing for Barcelona Traction. He got his great & good friend Francisco Franco to continue the ban on the export of the company profits to its Canadian headquarters. Without the profits, Heineman could not pay the interest on Barcelona's bonds, which are all held outside Spain...
...Comité Imperio, surviving the brewery raid, had made contact with exiled Spanish socialists in France. Three months ago in Toulouse the socialists held a convention attended by delegates of the American Federation of Labor. The deteriorating economy of Spain, recent strikes in Barcelona and other cities, the reported illness of General Franco (he is expected soon to undergo an operation for a bladder ailment) spurred hopes of a new regime in Spain. The A.F.L.'s European representative, able Irving Brown, made a careful roundup of information available in Toulouse. Brown's conclusions, as reported last week...
...wanted for their money was not bulls, but beef. The ruckus at the ring, in defiance of Franco's rule, was another symptom of Spain's rising anger with the Franco administration. Its chief causes: high prices, black marketeers and official corruption. The strike wave began in Barcelona (TIME, March 19) and Pamplona (TIME, May 21). Last week Madrid followed with a mass demonstration, its first since the civil war. Chain letters and clandestine pamphlets touched off 300,000 to 400,000 workers on a buyers' strike. They stayed away from buses, subways, shops, bars and cafes...
Generalissimo Francisco Franco was good & mad, according to reports seeping from his Madrid palace. Why, he angrily demanded of his advisers, had they kept him ignorant of the people's impatience over the soaring cost of living? The Barcelona protest strike (TIME, March 19) had come as a shock. The dictator's underlings lamely explained that they had not bothered him with details because they had hoped to clear the situation up before news of it reached his ears...