The Mutter of Discontent

For years Dictator Francisco Franco's most powerful weapon in preventing revolt was the memory of the 1936-39 civil war in which a million Spaniards were killed--twice as many as in the American Civil War. Spaniards might be plagued by inflation, corruption, heavy-handed authority and inefficiency; they were willing to accept almost anything rather than more bloodshed.

A new generation, for whom the horrors of the civil war are only stories, has begun to fight bitterly against the dictator in student riots and strikes. So concerned was Franco that during the past fortnight his ubiquitous secret police arrested more than a dozen men, mostly young, of good families which earlier supported the Caudillo. Among them were some big names: Millionaire Basque Businessman Antonio Menchaca Careaga, Lawyer Valentin Lopez Aparicio, University Student Ignacio Soleto, nephew of Liberal Leader Dionisio Ridruejo (Franco's propaganda director during the civil war), and Francisco Herrera Oria, widely known liberal Catholic layman and younger brother of the liberal Bishop of Malaga.

They represented a diversified opposition forming among groups that separately had long supported Franco: the Monarchists, the right wing of the Falange Party, the church and the army. Faced with the country's growing popular discontent and exhausted, inflated economy, they were trying to pressure the Caudillo into staving off revolution at his death by accepting a gradual evolution into a liberal constitutional monarchy with a relatively free press and an effective rather than a puppet Cortes. Most of them favored a constitutional monarchy with Don Juan or his son Juan Carlos on the throne as figurehead and real power at least temporarily in the hands of an army junta. Hitherto they had been concerned only about post-Franco Spain. Now increasingly there was talk that Franco himself, if he did nothing to relinquish some of his authority, might not last in power until his death.

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