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 execution team, 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 clumsiness and incredible incidents, and ended up assassinating the regime's number two in a way that astonished the world: causing his car, almost two tons, to fly five stories high 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, as 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 came to Portugal through the Carnation Revolution, and eight months later the Greek dictatorship fell. But Carrero's disappearance accelerated the process. “A victimizer of Francoism who became a victim of terrorism,” as historian José Antonio Castellanos defines him.
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 (Eva) 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.
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 made by journalists there trying to intoxicate public opinion with unheard-of 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 – Eva 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 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 government 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.
