The magic 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 this unusual event that had such political significance. Despite this, paradoxically, what happened remained in the informational twilight, almost forgotten, except for anniversaries.
No one had much interest in bringing it to the fore. Neither the Franco regime itself, nor the post-Francoists, because it denounced a chapter of resounding inefficiency and lack of professionalism of the dictatorship’s security apparatus. A dying dictatorship with eleven information services – eleven – that were waiting for progressive workers, students and chaplains, while they let their top deputy head be killed in the center of Madrid. The executor commando, 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 spies and incredible incidents, and ended up murdering the number two of the regime of a way that shocked the world: by blowing up his car, weighing almost two tons, five stories by the explosion of 80 kilos of dynamite. The explosive, stolen months earlier from a powder store in Hernani (Basque Country), was placed in a tunnel below the street. Tragic film.
But the Spanish left, mainly socialists and communists, and also the rest of the opposition, were also not interested in highlighting what happened in that attack, because the unexpected entry of ETA into the story of the transition remained protagonism to the worker, student and citizen movement that was advancing in its struggle to achieve democracy. This was, decidedly, the driving force behind the arrival of freedoms.
In any case, the death of Carrero – the marine 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 on the side of Germany and Italy – it was clearly an accelerator of that process. The admiral was to be Franco’s extension, as his political executor, for another three, five or ten years. The dictatorship would have ended anyway, because it was unsustainable, with a growing opposition and it was already very isolated in Europe. In fact, four months later democracy came to Portugal through the Carnation Revolution, and eight months later the Greek dictatorship fell. But the disappearance of Carrero accelerated the process. “A victim of Francoism who became a victim of terrorism”, as defined by the historian José Antonio Castellanos.
That day there was not only a massacre in Spain. The attempted coup led by the head of the Civil Guard was also neutralized hours later. And what’s more, a large-scale repressive wave was stopped. Three in one A fateful day that could have been even more tragic.
In that massacre of December 20, 1973, three people died: the president, his driver and the police escort. But everything was ready for dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of unionist and communist militants to die that same day and the following days at the hands of the repression of the Francoist bunker, enraged by the unexpected attack. This was the second objective of the operation: to generate a “night of long knives”. “Genoveva Forest (Eva) and Alfonso Sastre believed that in this way the democratic opposition that was looking for a peaceful way would be left out of the game, something that would strengthen the option of armed struggle”, remembers Eduardo Sánchez Gatell of those conversations prior to the attack
With the attack, the first objective was fulfilled, to the general shudder of the country: to execute the president of the government. But the second goal, indiscriminate repression, was not miraculously achieved, because the regime was so ineffective with its eleven information services that did not even have basic technology and, moreover, were in permanent competition with each other. However, it had some elite leaders with great professionalism. We think of the chief of the Army General Staff, Manuel Díaz Alegría, and his assistants, among whom General Gutiérrez Mellado stood out, and we think of the then vice-president of the government, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, who become interim president after Carrero’s death.
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, or agents from another country, as suggested by conspiracy theories with appreciable media coverage in some books, publications and even in some television productions.
It is sad to see there the statements of journalists who try to intoxicate public opinion with unheard and impossible stories, such as that the night before foreign agents entered the tunnel to reinforce the explosives with anti-tank mines.
Everything points to the fact that the intellectual co-authors of the massacre – Eva Forest and Alfonso Sastre – scheduled the date of December 20, coinciding with the trial against the leaders of the underground trade union Comissions Obreres, in order to generate a great repression.
“They both deeply hated the Communist Party of Spain, which had expelled Alfonso Sastre a few years before,” confirms lawyer Lidia Falcón, who shared nine months in prison with Genoveva. Lidia was imprisoned in Yeserías prison after the subsequent attack on the Rolant cafe, but she was not charged with any crime: “What they didn’t achieve with Carrero, they tried again, looking for a generalized repression”.
At 9:28 a.m. the attack took place. At 10:16 a.m., just 48 minutes later, the ANSA correspondent in Madrid sent the news to its head office in Rome that President Carrero had been “killed by that explosion”. Much earlier than other international agencies present in Spain and, of course, much earlier than the Spanish agency Efe, subject to government information control. Finally, at one o’clock in the afternoon on December 20, 1973, all the country’s public and private stations, compulsorily connected to Ràdio Nacional de España, broadcast the news of Carrero Blanco’s death as a result of an explosion Without more or more.
