Word: franco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dual struggle raged in Spain last week. While Generalissimo Francisco Franco fought to stay alive, his government struggled to keep functioning in a power vacuum. At week's end, as the old dictator still clung to life with characteristic tenacity, the government literally gave up waiting for him to die. It resolved a growing crisis of authority by pressuring a reluctant Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, Franco's heir designate, to become his country's temporary Chief of State. Only after Franco's death or a complicated legal process declaring...
...Palace outside Madrid, where a 24-man team of doctors attended him round the clock. The medical bulletins that streamed from the sickroom told of "cardiac insufficiency," "gastric hemorrhaging," "intestinal paralysis," "blood clotting" and at least five heart attacks over a 13-day period. Yet the 82-year-old Franco, who a week earlier was believed to be only hours away from death, hung on-just as he had hung on to absolute power for nearly four decades...
Healing Powers. Franco frequently became quite lucid, occasionally chatting with his family and even discussing with Premier Carlos Arias Navarro the lineup of military forces that might confront each other in the Spanish Sahara. At one point the Archbishop of Zaragoza, Pedro Cantero Cuadrado, spread across Franco's bed the gold-embroidered cloak that usually adorns the wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in Zaragoza's Basilica of Our Lady of Pilar. As the archbishop described it, the dictator opened his eyes, wept and kissed the cape-which is reputed to have healing powers...
...economic miracle also created a new middle class that began to murmur about the need for social freedoms and political privileges to accompany the economic advances. Franco, determined to maintain firm control over all aspects of Spanish life, would not sanction such reforms and indeed did not understand the need for them. Students demonstrated for educational reforms at universities in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santiago, Valencia and Seville and doggedly battled police who sought to stop them. Liberal priests and moderate bishops changed the Roman Catholic Church from a staunch supporter of the regime to an independent and often critical force...
...Franco had no faith that his mercurial people might possibly learn how to govern themselves. Ultimately, the kind of apolitical serenity that he wanted for Spain has proved to be an unattainable ideal. Nonetheless, it is a tribute of sorts to his dictatorial skills that he was able to maintain a façade of peace for so long...