Oh my… Sorry for resurrecting this ages-old thread! But I chanced upon it, and I thought I had to contribute to it.
I am Spanish, born in the city of Albacete, my early childhood took place under Franco (born in 1967, I was 8 when the dictator died), and my father was an “enemy of the regime”. I want to contribute with the perspective of someone who, as sailor mentioned, was related to “dissidents”.
I am a late child – my father, a doctor, had me when he was 59. He had been born in 1908, and he fought in the Spanish Civil War, in the Republican side. I think that some backstory will be needed. I apologise in advance for the length of this post.
When the Civil War started, a LOT of old scores were settled. Lots of people were “taken for a ride” everywhere. Albacete remained firmly in Republican hands, and lots of sympathisers of the rebellion were shot. On the night of July 19, 1936, someone knocked at my father’s door. It was an acquaintance of his, a local right-winger, more or less well known, Navarro by name. “Pepe, please, help me! Do something! Your people are looking for me!” (my father, at that time, was actually a member of the Communist party). My father took him in and hid him in his home. About an hour or so later, a posse came calling to my father’s door, a mixture of anarchists, communists, and guys looking to settle scores. “Comrade, have you seen Navarro?” “No, I haven’t.” A short conversation ensued at the door, with my father convincing them in the end that he really hadn’t seen him (they knew that my father and Navarro were acquainted; they took time persuading. The status of my father as bona fide member of the Communist party helped convince them though.) They left, but said they would be back later on, and that if he saw Navarro, he should let them know.
After that, my father went to Navarro, hidden in a back room, and told him: “I won’t be able to keep you here much longer. Come along, I’ll take you out of the city, and with any luck you’ll be able to find your people if you go north”. He smuggled him out of Albacete, took him to another town, gave him some money and pointed him north as the likeliest direction to find “his” people.
Fast-forward to 1939. The war is over. My father made his way back to Albacete. At the time, immediately after the war, it was definitely unhealthy to be caught if you had been an officer in the Republican army. My father had been officially a medic (and had seen quite a bit of action in Aragón as well, when he had to fight), and had ended up with an officer rank. So he went into hiding. He spent from 1939 to 1942 in hiding in a small, windowless attic, arranged by some true friends of his (doctors as well, who knew him from before the war, were living in Albacete, and were in reasonable terms with the regime).
In 1942 somebody betrayed him (never found out who it was), he was arrested, and was tried for “sedition”.
Remember Navarro? By that time he was the top man for the Phalanx (Franco’s Party) in Albacete. He was the guy who moved the strings and arranged everything.
When my father was arrested, he moved everything he could to make sure that, (a) my father was given a beating while in custody that broke I don’t know how many of his ribs; and (b) my father was sentenced to death.
My father spent one month expecting every day to be his last. Fortunately, one of his doctor friends had very good contacts with the authorities in Madrid and managed to use his connections to arrange for a review of the sentence, having it finally changed to 30 years in jail. Were it not for that extremely fortunate circumstance, had it not been for Dr. Molina, I wouldn’t be here typing this.
He was in jail until 1948, when there was a general amnesty. However, although he was freed on that date, he was blacklisted: He was not allowed to work as a doctor in anything even remotely related to the government (public hospitals, etc… and the “etc.” could be interpreted VERY widely.) He was good enough that he was able to build himself a 100% private practice, but I think that it took a toll on his health. I think that it was more a case of pure bloodymindedness: “oh, so they don’t want me to be a doctor, eh? Let’s see who is more stubborn here”.
It was only in 1973 that he was allowed to begin working in a hospital, as an X-ray technician (again, thanks to the help of another doctor friend of his who was in good terms with the regime, Dr. Gotor).
OK, fast-forwarding to my childhood… I know for a fact that our telephones were bugged (and I remember my father speaking on the phone and, suddenly, leaving some “choice remarks” for whoever might be listening to the conversation). And sometimes I noticed some weird guys loitering near our home. A couple of them, I ended up recognizing them.
Digression: Later on, when I grew up, I got to befriend one of them. And the story in itself is funny… He was a policeman (he ended up becoming head of police in Albacete). He had been assigned to surveillance detail on our place – my father was a “notorious red”, after all. He was more or less well known in our city (Albacete was a small place. Still is, in many respects.)
By the late 1970s, after Franco was dead, during the turmoil of the early years of the democracy, we began receiving weird phone calls and death threats at home. After duly denouncing the thing, my father was afforded protection at his workplace. The guy who was assigned to guard him was the same guy who had been keeping tabs on him 5 years before. When my father asked him, “well, how do you feel about this? That you are now told to protect someone that you had been told before to spy on?”, he answered: “Well, I am a professional, and these are my orders, which I fulfill as best as I can.” They became very good friends in the end.
Well, the point of this meandering, rambling post? That, if you had the misfortune of being a “dissident”, or of having fallen afoul of the regime, the amount of horrid stuff that could happen to you was mindboggling.
And, to tie a couple of loose ends…
(1) Navarro died in 1982. He was buried “with his coffin wrapped in the flag of the Phalanx”, as the article in the local newspaper said. We still keep the newspaper clipping in question at home. My father in person cut it out, saying (and I quote): “Now I can die in peace”. My father died in 1983.
(2) When I say that the regime and its police could be nasty, it really could. “Desaparecidos”? Hmmm… I don’t think that this particular case counts, but… OK. A cousin of mine in the second degree, who was 24 in 1974, was taken away one day by the secret police. His family heard nothing of him for 3 weeks. He simply vanished in thin air. Finally, 3 weeks after having been taken, he is left in front of his home. A broken shell of the man he was. Also, he was some 5 cm shorter than he was when he was taken. To this day he refuses to speak about what happened during those 3 weeks.
Oh, I almost forgot! sailor wrote this in an earlier post:
[QUOTE=sailor]
So, yes, there are many instances of the courts ruling against the government and the number increased as the years went by. A famous case was that of newspaper Madrid which was closed down in 1971 for publishing an editorial which, when reading between the lines and with huge doses of imagination, suggested it might be time for the old man to retire. The courts, after taking forever, ruled the closing was not according to law and ruled the newspaper should be compensated for the loss they had suffered.
[/quote]
Eeeehhh… Yeeeeeeah… That is the first part of the story.
The whole thing was as follows: In 1968, after Charles de Gaulle resigned, Calvo Serer (editor of the newspaper) wrote an op-ed article mentioning the fact and making extremely subtle allussions to the fact, by comparing the statesmanship of de Gaulle and Franco. Franco went ballistic and the newspaper was closed for two months.
Indeed, it was re-opened, but Franco was an expert in getting his revenge served cold and in humongous heaping platters. In November 1971 (to be precise, November 25), trumped-up charges of financial misdeeds were thrown at the publisher of the newspaper, and were used as an excuse by the government to cancel the publication of “Madrid”. Then, the trials were so expensive that the publisher was forced to sell all the printing machines and everything valuable in order to cover the expenses. Finally, on April 24, 1972, the building that had hosted the newspaper offices was demolished with a controlled explosion.
Moral: You didn’t piss off Franco, especially by trying to imply that maybe, perhaps, it was time to begin considering the off-the-wall possibility of stepping down.
