Word: franco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Vice President Itamar Franco would be sworn in as President with a mandate of up to six months and face the daunting tasks of cobbling together a government and reviving a paralyzed economy. Nonetheless, Latin America's biggest nation would display one sign of a mature democracy: for the first time resolving a government crisis by strict constitutional means, without military intervention. But it is too early for relief that "the system works." Collor might confuse matters by trying to exercise some authority as a shadow president while suspended. And there is a slim chance that he will beat...
...most prominent country in the early going, however, had been one that did not march but made its presence felt at every turn: independent-minded Catalonia, which is determined to cast these as the Catalan, not the Spanish, Games. A longtime enemy of Castile, delighting in a language that Franco had banned, Barcelona was eager not just to show off its faster, higher, stronger ^ self -- reconstruction is almost as trendy as deconstruction here -- but to emphasize its distance from the Spain of myth, and of Madrid. FREEDOM FOR CATALONIA signs (in English) were draped from balconies and shoulders, and buttons...
With the advent of the 1992 Olympics and the ensuing waves of athletes, delegates, and other official paparazzi, Barcelona--or its electronic image, at least--is now at the focal point of world concern. The city that El Caudillo--Francisco Franco--kept drab and grey until he (finally) died has been entirely re-tailored for the critical electronic eye. Word has it, in fact, that the Barcelonese spent close to $10 billion on their nothing-but-enormous urban renovation program...
Central to this sense of cultural and political uniqueness is the Catalan language. As Hughes observes, "In Catalunya, language and politics are entwined , interwoven, inseparable." During the dictatorship of Franco, in fact, one way of stamping out any leftover feelings of rebellion was to ban the public use of Catalan. When writers could not be published in Catalan, they used it as a gesture of political defiance...
...1970s and has been going on for the past 10 years under Barcelona's socialist Mayor Maragall: the refashioning and sprucing up of the city, from its infrastructure -- sewers, ring roads -- to the restoration of its huge deposit of historic buildings, most of which had decayed badly during the Franco years, through to new works such as the refurbished waterfront, the Olympic Village and the magnificent covered stadium on Montjuic by Arata Isozaki...