(Manuel Campo Vidal is a Journalist. Author of the book The keys to information in the assassination of President Carrero Blanco, 2023)
The magical number of 50 years since the assassination of President Luis Carrero Blanco, dictator Francisco Franco’s number two, has revived debates, publications and audiovisual productions about that unusual event that had such political significance. Despite this, paradoxically, what happened remained in the information darkness, almost forgotten, except on anniversaries.
Nobody was very interested in putting it in the foreground. Neither the Franco regime itself, nor the post-Francoists, because it denounced a chapter of clamorous inefficiency and poor professionalism of the dictatorship’s security apparatus. A dying dictatorship with eleven Information Services – eleven – that were looking out for workers, students and progressive priests while they allowed themselves to be killed by the top deputy chief of all of them in the heart of Madrid. The executing command, belonging to the Basque terrorist organization ETA, circulated through the capital of Spain for at least half a year without being detected, even with various clumsinesses and incredible incidents; and ended up assassinating the regime’s number two in a way that astonished the world: by blowing up his car, weighing almost two tons, five stories due to the explosion of 80 kilos of dynamite. The explosive, stolen months before from a powder magazine in Hernani (Basque Country), was placed in a tunnel under the street. From a tragic movie.
But the Spanish left, mainly socialists and communists, as well as the rest of the opposition, were not interested in highlighting what happened in that attack either because the unexpected entry of ETA in the story of the transition took away the prominence of the labor, student and citizen movement that He was advancing in his fight to achieve democracy. That was, decidedly, the driving force behind the arrival of freedoms.
In any case, the death of Carrero – the sailor who owed his promotion to the fact that in November 1940 he had delivered a report to Franco recommending that he not enter the Second World War alongside Germany and Italy – was clearly an accelerator of that process. The admiral was to be Franco’s extension, like his political executor, for three, five or ten more years. The dictatorship would have ended the same, because it was unsustainable, with growing opposition and was already very isolated in Europe. In fact, after four months democracy arrived in Portugal through the Carnation Revolution; and eight months later the Greek dictatorship fell. But Carrero’s disappearance accelerated the process. “A victimizer of Franco’s regime who became a victim of terrorism,” as historian José Antonio Castellanos defines him.
Conspiracy theories still refer, fifty years later, to “The Shadow”, a mysterious character who in the Mindanao Hotel in Madrid could have passed on essential information to Argala, or to another militant of the command, already in 1972: Carrero attended on time. every day to mass at the Jesuit Church, a few meters from his home, at the same time and with a minimal, if not ridiculous, escort.
Gathered fifty years later in the same Jesuit Church, in whose courtyard the crashed car fell, some perpetrators and some arrested for those attacks, the conversation was very clear about what happened. In case there were any doubts. The lawyer Lidia Falcón, who spent nine months in jail for a subsequent attack by ETA (thirteen dead in the Rolando Cafeteria on Correo Street, in September 1974) emphatically cleared up the supposed mystery: “The shadow, what they call the mysterious shadow, it was Genoveva (Eva) Forest. She guided the ETA commando.” Genoveva, with the support of her husband, the playwright Alfonso Sastre, implicated quite a few people in her obsession with violently ending Francoism. Lidia was also close to that network for a while and that is why she speaks with all the knowledge.
This is corroborated by Eduardo Sánchez Gatell, who was seventeen years old at the time and was recruited to that organization by the Forest-Sastre couple. “At his house I met Argala, the head of the commando that ended Carrero’s life. We met several times.”
That day there was not only an assassination in Spain. Hours later, the attempted internal coup d’état carried out by the head of the Civil Guard was also neutralized. And, furthermore, a large-scale repressive wave was aborted. Three in one. Fateful day that could have been even more tragic.
In that assassination of December 20, 1973, three people died: the president, his driver and the escort police officer. But everything was prepared for dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of union and communist militants to die that same day and later at the hands of the repression of the Francoist bunker, enraged by the unexpected attack. That was the second objective of the operation: to generate a “night of long knives.” “Genoveva Forest and Alfonso Sastre believed that this would leave the democratic opposition that was seeking a peaceful path out of the game, which would strengthen the option of armed struggle,” recalls Eduardo Sánchez Gatell of those conversations prior to the attack.
With the attack, the first objective was achieved, to the general shock of the country: executing the president of the Government.
But the second objective, indiscriminate repression, was not achieved by a miracle, because the regime, so ineffective with its eleven information services, which did not even have basic technology and were also in permanent competition among themselves, nevertheless had some elite leaders with great professionalism. We think of the Chief of the Army’s High General Staff, Manuel Díaz Alegría, and his assistants, where General Gutiérrez Mellado stood out; and we think of the then vice president of the Government, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, who became provisional president when Carrero died. They were able to control the situation, to restrain public order and the security forces, and even to neutralize the attempted internal coup d’état promoted by the director of the Civil Guard, Lieutenant General Carlos Iniesta Cano.
The coup attempt, which was announced via telex to the provincial commands of the Civil Guard throughout Spain urging them to take control, and which deactivated another subsequent telex, was very serious. But it lasted only 45 minutes due to the resounding intervention of the authorities. Díaz Alegría, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, Carlos Arias Navarro, Minister of the Interior, and Admiral Pita da Veiga, Minister of the Navy and acting Minister of the Army that day, were employed in dismantling the attempt.
In case the police repression after the ETA attack was not initially directed towards the Workers’ Commissions and the Communist Party, “someone” left forgotten on the ground floor of Claudio Coello Street that gave access to the tunnel where the explosives were placed, a medicine box with a handwritten phone number. The Police went to the address to which the number corresponded at dawn and it turned out to be a PCE safe house. To everyone’s surprise, the top communist leader in the interior of the country, Simón Sánchez Montero, was found sheltering there, and was arrested and spent several months in jail. They barely asked him during the interrogations about the attack because by that time there had already been an unusual telephone contact between the regime and Santiago Carrillo himself, who was exiled in Paris, in which it was made very clear that the PCE was seeking political change. , but not by violent means.
Fortunately, on that occasion the desired repression did not occur. That is why it was attempted again nine months later with another attack, this time even bloodier, which, due to the coincidence of the responsibility of the ETA commando and its supporters, seems to be a continuation of the previous one: the bomb in the Rolando cafeteria in Madrid, a few meters from the General Directorate of Security, the heart of repression under Franco. He looked for victims among police officers: the result was thirteen dead, among them only a police officer, a couple on a honeymoon, and ten other citizens.
In addition, 70 injured; a butchery. Once again, ETA as the executor and Genoveva Forest in the shadows, as Lidia Falcón denounced in her book Friday the Thirteenth on Calle del Correo. Eduardo Sánchez Gatell, who was arrested and spent two years in prison after the attack, even without having participated, certifies this connection between the two actions. Note that it took ETA years to recognize responsibility for the attack, which even led to an internal split; but finally he did it.
Fifty years after that December 20, 1973, there is no doubt about the authorship: it was the Basque terrorist organization ETA, and only ETA, that executed President Carrero. Without technical help from Americans, nor agents from another country as conspiracy theories suggest with noticeable media echo in some books, publications and even in some television production.
It is sad to see the statements of journalists there trying to intoxicate public opinion with unprecedented and impossible stories, such as that the night before some foreign agents entered the tunnel to reinforce the explosives with anti-tank mines.
Everything indicates that the intellectual co-authors of the assassination – Genoveva Forest and Alfonso Sastre – scheduled the date of December 20, coinciding with the trial against the leaders of the clandestine union Comisiones Obreras, to generate great repression.
“The two of them deeply hated the Communist Party of Spain, which had expelled Alfonso Sastre a few years before,” confirms the lawyer Lidia Falcón, who shared a cell with Genoveva for nine months. Lidia was imprisoned in the Yeserías prison after the subsequent attack on the Rolando Cafeteria, but she was not charged with any crime: “What they did not achieve with Carrero, they tried again seeking generalized repression.”
At 9:28 minutes the attack occurred. At 10:16, only 48 minutes later, ANSA’s correspondent in Madrid sent the news to his headquarters in Rome that President Carrero had been “killed by that explosion.” Far ahead of other international agencies present in Spain and, of course, long before the Spanish Agency EFE, subject to the Government’s information control. Finally, at one in the afternoon on December 20, 1973, all the country’s stations, public and private, necessarily connected to Radio Nacional de España, broadcast the news of Carrero Blanco’s death as a result of an explosion. Without further ado.
