Word: franco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
...Price. Unmistakably, the army-generated outpouring of support was not much more than a veiled warning to Franco that he could be in deep trouble if he did not publicly review his sponsorship of Spain's neglected right. But how would he respond? The answer came when Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco's vice president and surrogate strongman, went to a special session of parliament. Speaking for "the Caudillo of Spain and the Generalissimo of our armies," the admiral told the delegates that he was there "to render the homage which the armed forces of the nation deserve...
...strain on Spain's economy, which is in a lingering recession. But the main cost of last week's crypto-coup will be political. The military won an informal but all-important endorsement from parliament as the chief guarantor of the regime's "continuity" when Franco, now 78 and ill, dies and Spain reverts to a monarchy under the youthful and unseasoned king-to-be, Prince Juan Carlos...
...strength of that endorsement should become apparent in the next couple of months, when Franco is expected to respond to the military's demands that he reshuffle his 19-man cabinet. Among those likely to be shuffled out are the more liberal Opus Dei ministers who have been pushing the pragmatic, outward-looking foreign policy that-as the hard-liners see it-has led to permissiveness and the emergence of troublesome dissenters at home...