Word: franco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ended with the capture of Madrid by Franco's forces in early 1939. More than 500,000 Spaniards had been killed in the fighting; nearly 100,000 more were victims of wartime terror and firing squads. There were to be other victims. Franco's victorious forces took a bloody and merciless revenge on their political enemies. Between 1939 and 1942, nearly 2 million people were imprisoned by the Franco regime for supporting the Loyalists, and perhaps 200,000 of them were executed...
...brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, had their lives and work shaped irrevocably by their experiences in Spain. "As a militiaman," George Orwell later wrote in Homage to Catalonia, "one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between political theories." Albert Camus observed afterwards: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this...
...Franco had assumed command of the country's political forces as well as its army. He took over the program and rhetoric of the Falange, a fascist party dedicated to violence and armed revolution, and vowed to build "a totalitarian instrument" that would "reinforce the hierarchic principle, exalt love of country, practice social justice and foster the well-being of the middle and working classes." Franco integrated the Falange into his Movimiento Nacional, made a secular saint of the Falange's executed leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and used it to control rival political movements...
...nearly a quarter-century, Spaniards suffered along with the Portuguese as the most oppressed people in Western Europe. So abhorrent to Western democracies was Franco's regime that both the United Nations in 1945 and the Common Market later refused to let Spain join. A desire by the U.S. for air and submarine bases led to a military pact in 1953 that boosted Spain's standing in the international community. It did little, however, to reform Franco's cruel and backward rule...
Oppression began to ease in the early 1960s when Franco, aware that his country was missing out on Western Europe's mushrooming prosperity, gave a young group of pragmatic technocrats a chance to guide Spain's economic policies. Private industries were offered a five-year tax holiday, duty-free equipment imports, easy credit terms and attractive plant sites as incentives to set up shop in Spain's capital-starved provinces. Some 70 companies moved into the city of Valladolid within four years, bringing $75 million in investments and 8,200 new jobs. Similar boom towns sprang...