The shocking resignation of this military minister served as a pretext for Franco to appoint a new Cabinet in June 1973, in which, for the first time, Carrero Blanco took the official role of prime minister. The rest of the ministers responded to the preferences of the Admiral and there was no great change from the political orientation of the previous Cabinet. The most notable appointment was that of Torcuato Fernández-Miranda – adviser to the Prince and successor, as well as being the secretary general of the Falangist movement – who was promoted to deputy prime minister. The only imposition of Franco, influenced by his family circle, was the new minister of the interior, considered a ‘hardliner’ and very different to his reformist predecessor: Carlos Arias Navarro, the former military prosecutor during the Civil War, former head of security and ‘dear friend of Doña Carmen Polo de Franco’.176
According to the intention of its president, the political work of the new government was to prepare for the future continuity of the regime once its founder had gone. It was fraught with difficulties, an almost insurmountable task. Spain was a devoutly Catholic state, where the Church itself condemned the regime and demanded its reform; it was a state which banned strikes but where labour disputes proliferated in their thousands despite fierce repression; an authoritarian state opposed to liberalism yet looking anxiously for some similar form of democratic legitimacy; a state which guaranteed morality and traditional customs where the most modern and avant-garde social attitudes and ideas were spreading. Moreover, since the beginning of 1973, the old formula of exchanging prosperity for democracy was increasingly unworkable in view of the severe energy crisis that precipitated the international economic downturn.
In any case, the Cabinet chaired by Carrero Blanco would only be effective for six months. In the early hours of the morning of 20 December 1973, its president was brutally murdered when a bomb planted by ETA exploded in the heart of Madrid. It was the work of a cell active in the capital; it did not involve any of the implausible conspiracy theories that saw the hidden hand of the American CIA, the Soviet KGB or other foreign espionage organizations. The success of the operation was instead the result of a combination of successful moves by ETA and patent errors by the Francoist security services: the secrecy and novelty of the terrorist unit (ETA had not acted outside the Basque country until then and its attacks had been limited to those on local police officers) and the token protection measures around Carrero Blanco (a person of fixed daily movements, routine habits and with a minimal security escort).177
The unexpected death of Carrero Blanco led to the most serious political crisis of all for the Francoist dictatorship and spread fear among the civilian population and the opposition forces. With Franco stunned by the great personal and political loss (until the afternoon of 20 December he did not acknowledge that it had been a deliberate assassination and continued to believe that it had been an accident), Fernández-Miranda took immediate charge of the presidency and was able to maintain official calm and public order. In any case, Carrero’s murder eliminated the loyal, designated guarantor of the survival of the Franco regime after the death of the Caudillo: ‘It was a tremendous trauma. Politically, I realized that his death put an end to Franco’s regime,’ wrote López Rodó. Indeed, the effect of that assassination was well noted by Luis Suárez Fernández: ‘On 20 December 1973 Franco’s era ended and a little later what would be called the “transition” began.’178
Following his long-standing practice, Franco did not attend the funeral of the Admiral, which was held on 21 December. However, he attended the memorial Mass that was held the next day and this revealed the intensity of the crisis of the regime in some detail: the aged Franco, weak and hesitant, wept profusely in front of the television cameras on greeting Carrero’s widow; a ‘hardline’ minister was allowed to offend Cardinal Tarancón, archbishop of Madrid and officiant of the ceremony, publicly by refusing to shake hands with him. The Cardinal had to withstand the hostile shouts of far-right demonstrators in the street.179 Undoubtedly, by then the terminal crisis of the Franco regime had entered its decisive and dying phase.
Franco felt the moral and political coup which meant the loss of his most loyal collaborator deeply, but he took the decision to dispense with Carrero’s partners and, in particular, Fernández-Miranda (whom the inmovilistas feared due to his pragmatism and his closeness to the Prince). Instead, he decided to appoint a new prime minister, Carlos Arias Navarro, by virtue of his reputation as a hardliner, despite his undeniable responsibility for the failures of the security services. Arias Navarro formed his Cabinet in January 1974, again with representatives of all the Francoist ‘families’ and, surprisingly, of all political persuasions, whether inmovilistas or reformistas.180 However, very soon the reformism of Arias Navarro showed its internal and external limitations.
The president of the last Franco government, perhaps because of his age, character and training, while recognizing the inviability of the Francoist regime without Franco, was not able or willing to endorse the necessary democratic change requested by reformers and other moderate opposition forces. Ultimately, Arias Navarro, like the majority of the Francoist political elite, was aware that any in-depth reform would have to wait for the death of Franco and the coronation of Don Juan Carlos. In the words of a minister of the last Franco government: ‘While the protagonist of an era in the history of Spain lived, it was impossible to consider substantial changes.’181
The government’s disarray was immediately exacerbated by a crucial international event: on 25 April 1974, the Portuguese dictatorship (presided over by Caetano since the death of Salazar in 1970) collapsed in a coup staged by an army tired of fighting an endless colonial war in Africa. The sudden Revolución de los Claveles (Revolution of the Carnations) across the border (and the almost immediate fall of the military regime in Greece) greatly deepened internal differences within the Francoist political elite, fuelling a siege mentality in some, while others became more aware of the patent anachronism of the dictatorship.182
The situation worsened at the beginning of the summer of 1974 with Franco’s first serious illness. Due to an attack of thrombophlebitis (precipitated by the many hours spent watching television, especially the World Cup), the Caudillo had to be admitted to a Madrid hospital on the morning of 9 July on the decision of his personal physician and despite the reservations of Franco himself (‘This will be a political bomb’). Anticipating a possible loss of consciousness, Franco told doctors that his care and treatment was entrusted to the person most near and dear to him: ‘If I am not in a fit condition, look to my daughter.’ Although the medication for the phlebitis proved a success, complications from the long medical treatment of Parkinson’s caused gastrointestinal bleeding that provoked severe despondency and almost cost Franco his life. He even received the last rites from the hands of his confessor, Father Bulart, against the advice of the Marquis of Villaverde, who felt that ‘the presence of a priest makes one nervous’. Given the seriousness of the disease, on 19 July, Arias Navarro urged the Caudillo to sign the decree provisionally delegating his powers into the hands of a reluctant Don Juan Carlos.183 Despite the hopes raised in reformist sectors and that of the opposition by the temporary disability of Franco, the interim period of the Prince as head of state emphasized throughout the summer the sense of institutional paralysis and the expected end of Franco’s reign. Even though the Caudillo was discharged and on 30 July returned to El Pardo, his situation continued to be very serious, as his new personal physician, Dr Pozuelo, remembered: ‘Franco’s voice was then extinguished, with virtually no timbre; the voice of a Parkinson’s sufferer, with an inclination to bronchial failure. He remained quiet but his eyes still had that peculiar vividness.’184
To combat this physical decline and the signs of misery in an 82-year-old (Franco confessed that he only wanted to retire to a Carthusian convent), Dr Pozuelo launched an intensive programme of diet, therapeutic exercises and rehabilitation. Among other things, in order to allevia
te anxiety and the depression of his patient, he made Franco perform exercises to the sound of military music (amongst others, the march ‘Soy valiente y leal legionario’) and urged him to speak of his youth and glory days (his talks were recorded on audio tapes).185 Thanks to the effectiveness of this medical programme, Franco continued to recover from his illness. On 2 September 1974, without previously warning anyone apart from his family, the Caudillo decided to resume his office, thus extinguishing the possibility of a final retirement from power within his lifetime.
From then on, Franco’s regime continued under the shadow of total uncertainty and impermanence, with a much weakened octogenarian head of state, recovering from a recent serious illness and undergoing constant medical attention and rehabilitation exercises (for walking and even speaking). To make matters worse, despite being the protagonist in a chronicle of a death foretold, the Caudillo decided to put an end to the reformist inclinations of his government. His instinctive rigidity was endorsed on 13 September 1974 by a brutal attack by ETA in the centre of Madrid which resulted in 12 dead and 80 injured (including several policemen). Apart from the consistently repressive reaction against the whole of the opposition, Franco demanded and obtained from Arias Navarro a Cabinet reshuffle that eliminated his own reformist members.186 With their departure from the government, the sacked reformist elite opted to open negotiations with the anti-Francoist forces for a democratic reform that only waited for the succession of Don Juan Carlos to make it viable and effective. Ex-minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne would shortly afterwards utter an emphatic pronouncement: ‘Democratic legitimacy is to be recognized in an election of a representative chamber by universal suffrage.’187
Throughout 1975, the government of Arias Navarro used repressive measures to face the deterioration of the economic situation (with galloping inflation) and an escalation of labour disputes that tripled in number over previous years. In fact, the 931 strikes recorded in 1973 became 3,156 in 1975. The number of strikers grew from 357,523 to 647,100 and the number of hours lost rose from 8,649,265 to 14,521,000.188 There was a parallel increase in the terrorist activity of ETA (which killed 14 people in 1975) and the FRAP (the Revolutionary Anti-Fascist Patriotic Front), a new radical Marxist-Leninist group which commenced activity in 1973. The ineffectiveness of the government’s attempts at repressing these movements and its potential political and diplomatic danger was clear in September 1975, when military courts sentenced to death three ETA militants and eight FRAP activists (including two pregnant women). In the midst of serious internal tension (on 11 September there was a massive general strike in the Basque country in solidarity with those condemned) and multiple requests for clemency from abroad (from, amongst others, the Pope, Don Juan, and the queen of Great Britain), the Caudillo decided to exercise the prerogative of mercy on six of the condemned and approve the death sentences of the five others. As a result, on 27 September 1975 two ETA members and three of the FRAP were executed. Strong international condemnation was expressed in the form of massive demonstrations at Spanish embassies in European capitals and the withdrawal of several ambassadors from Madrid.
The regime’s response was a show of support for Franco, celebrating 1 October in the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid, with banners from hardline sectors that read ‘ETA, to the firing squad’ and ‘We don’t want openness, we want heavy-handedness’.189 Moved to tears, trembling and visibly haggard, the Caudillo gave his version of the facts to protesters in a very weak and plaintive voice:
Spaniards: thank you for your devotion and for the serene and strong public demonstration that you offer me in reparation […]. Everything is due to a Masonic–leftist conspiracy among the political class in collusion with the communist-terrorist subversion in society, which if we honour ourselves, they degrades themselves. […] The unity of the forces of the army, navy and air force supports the will of the nation and lets the Spanish people rest easy.190
In fact, no other event of the late Franco period revealed more clearly the gap between a society and economy that had modernized dramatically and a political system archaic in its caudillismo, ossified at the head and notoriously lacking popular legitimacy and any prospect for the future. Proof of these last shortcomings was the result of a survey of the Spanish citizenship in 1974 about their ‘attitudes to authoritarian and democratic principles of government’. Of the respondents, 60 per cent expressed their agreement with the principle that they should be governed by ‘people chosen by the electorate’, while 18 per cent favoured ‘an outstanding man to decide for us’ and another 22 per cent declined to answer.191 This obvious sociological and cultural reality in favour of a democratic political system was the incentive and spur for the reformist sectors of the regime which had put their hopes in Franco’s successor.
The executions of September and the speech of 1 October 1975 were virtually the last governmental acts of an exhausted Franco on the verge of death. The strong emotional tension caused by this crisis, along with the serious news about the situation in the Spanish Sahara generated by Morocco’s annexation policy, irreversibly affected the fragile health of an old man, nearly 83 years old. According to his personal doctor, thereafter, ‘Franco was another man, he lost weight daily, was constantly nervous and could hardly sleep normally.’192 In this condition, a slight case of flu, starting on 12 October, was followed by a heart attack three days later. On the evening of the 20th Franco suffered another heart attack and said to his aide de camp and his personal physician: ‘It is finished.’193 The next morning, a reassuring official note charted the progress of the ‘influenza’ of Franco and an episode of ‘acute coronary weakness’. Neither public opinion nor the political elite were deceived: Franco was dying.194 On 24 October he suffered another heart attack, complicated by intestinal paralysis and continual gastric haemorrhage (the product of his medication against Parkinson’s).
On 30 October 1975, aware of his fragility, Franco ordered the execution of Article 11 of the Ley Orgánica del Estado, transferring his powers to the Prince. Four days later, suffering from peritonitis, he had to be operated upon in a makeshift theatre in the palace of El Pardo. He barely survived and needed to be admitted to hospital in Madrid to receive dialysis treatment for kidney failure. On 5 November Franco underwent further surgery that removed two-thirds of his stomach. Kept alive by a wide range of technology and constant transfusions of blood (50 litres by the 13th), he suffered a long and painful agony and while semiconscious mumbled, ‘Dear God, how long it takes to die!’195 Finally, given his irreversible state, his daughter insisted he be allowed to die peacefully. The agony probably ended on the night of 19 November although the exact time of his death was set at 5:25 in the morning of 20 November 1975 by the large medical team that attended him.
Franco’s death was a symbol of the contradictions existing in Spain in his later years: a dying Caudillo was helped by all kinds of modern medical devices, yet on his deathbed he was holding the cloak of the Virgin of El Pilar and to his side was the relic of the hand of St Teresa of Avila. By coincidence, on 19 November, on the eve of the death of the most significant Spanish Africanista, the Francoist Cortes approved the Pacto Tripartito signed five days earlier in Madrid, under which Spain withdrew from its colony of the Sahara and gave the administration to Morocco and Mauritania, who committed themselves to respect the views of the Saharan population and to communicate its results to the United Nations. An even greater symbol of the closure of one era and the opening of another were two immediate consecutive ceremonies. As a sign of condemnation of the last executions he had authorized, no significant head of state attended Franco’s funeral or his burial in the retrochoir of the Basílica of the Valle de los Caídos on 23 November 1975, with the notable exception of the Chilean General Augusto Pinochet, Prince Rainier of Monaco and King Hussein of Jordan. In dramatic contrast, on 27 November – with the noticeable absence of Pinochet, who was not invited – the French President Giscard d’Estaing, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Vice President
of the United States and the President of the Federal Republic of Germany attended the Mass to commemorate the proclamation of Don Juan Carlos as king of Spain by the Cortes.
With the death of Franco and the proclamation of Juan Carlos as king, the political alternative to the regime ceased to be a dialectic between the continuity advocated by the inmovilistas and reform encouraged by the heirs of aperturistas. The Franco regime was so associated with its founder that it was impossible to prolong its existence beyond the death of the Caudillo. From then on, the crucial political dilemma would be to restore democracy either by reform from within under the auspices of post-Franco elites or by the total break from the regime favoured by opposition forces. In the end, and largely due to the omnipresent memory of the Civil War and the tacit will not to repeat it, the process of political transition contained elements of both: an agreed and gradual reform that would lead in the end to a break in form and substance from the previous regime. In fact, as was lamented by one of the most distinguished Francoist critics of reform, General Iniesta Cano, the small and inevitable changes that everyone expected after Franco’s death became a ‘brutal rupture with all that had gone before’.196 In effect, the speed of this transitional process and its own formal characteristics are an irrefutable proof of the marked anachronism of the Franco regime and of its noticeable lagging behind the peculiarities and dominant values of mid-1970s Spanish society. It also offers us an understanding of the rapid cloak of silence and voluntary amnesia surrounding the figure of Franco in the years after his death, an integral part of the durable and peculiar so-called ‘Pact of Forgetfulness’ that made possible the peaceful transition and consolidation of democracy.
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