SPAIN: Outside, Inside
When Miguel Primo de Rivera was dictator of Spain from 1923 to 1930 many Spanish Leftist leaders cooperated with the dictatorship even though they fundamentally opposed it. Last week those opposed to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s regime felt safest outside the country.
Former Republican Premier Dr. Juan Negrin, Foreign Minister Julio Alvarez del Vayo, onetime Defense Minister Indalecio Prieto, General Jose Miaja and a whole host of lesser fry were in Mexico arranging for transfers of refugees. Communist Deputy Dolores Ibarruri («La Pasionaria») and Colonel Juan Modesto were in the Soviet Union. Famed Colonel Enrique Lister, onetime stonemason, leader of Madrid’s famed Communist Fifth Regiment, was thought to be in hiding in France; openly there were President Manuel Azana, onetime Premier Jose Giral, General Vicente Rojo, onetime Premier Francisco Largo Caballero, Catalonian President Luis Companys, Basque President Jose Antonio de Aguirre.
Whittling
Also in France still were 350,000 ordinary Spanish refugees encamped en the beaches in southern France. About 90,000 of the original 500,000 refugees who crossed over the border last February have returned to Spain, and last week about 400 daily were going back to their homes. Some 9,000 former soldiers of the Spanish Republican Army have joined the French Foreign Legion and have been sent to Morocco; aviators, antiaircraft gunners, mechanics, technicians and chauffeurs are being taken into French military organizations. French arms factories have been examining daily about 250 Spanish munitions workers, and giving employment to an average of 75. Two shiploads of 1,000 refugees apiece have gone from France to Mexico, and a third ship carrying several thousand is scheduled to leave this week. Mexico expects to take about 20,000 Spanish refugees this summer. The Basques have also chartered a ship to take their refugees to Mexico, Colombia and Chile.
Little by little the number of refugees was being whittled down, but not fast enough to suit the French Government, which last week announced that it had spent $20,000,000 so far on the care and feeding of the Spanish refugees. In that expense lies, incidentally, the reason why France has been reluctant to return to Generalissimo Franco the $200,000,000 in gold which the former Republican Government left in French banks. The French have let it be known that they expect the Spanish refugee problem to be solved by September in one way or another.
Justice
While France made every effort to persuade the former Loyalists to go back home, much of the news that filtered through the tightly censored French-Spanish frontier was not calculated to encourage mass reentry. Eighteen permanent tribunals were said to be working in Madrid trying Loyalists; there were said to be 500 arrests in Barcelona and Madrid daily; 2,000 awaited trials in Madrid alone; 688 have been executed; 20,000 were in a concentration camp near Alicante. Although there were accusations still outstanding against 1,000,000 persons in former Loyalist territory, the police appealed to the public for more denunciations of those guilty of crimes against Rightists. It was calculated it would take another year before the dockets were cleared and Spain could do without her military tribunals.
Relief
A greater tale of woe was brought back from Spain to the U. S. last week by Alfred Cope, regional director in southeastern Spain of the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker relief organization. Mr. Cope believed that some 500,000 Loyalist supporters were in concentration camps; he thought that at least 70,000 Italian troops remained in Spain, despite stories of withdrawals; he told one story of 20,000 Loyalist troops imprisoned in a bullring in Ciudad Real for 20 days with little food and not much water.
More serious and more detailed were Mr. Cope’s charges that the Franco regime had seized six or seven shiploads of food that the Quakers sent to Spain for 100,000 half-starved children. As far as he could find out, the food went to the Army. In Murcia, he said, he turned over to the Spanish Social Auxiliary, the official Spanish relief organization, enough food to last the 1,000 children they were feeding there a month and three days. It was all gone in ten days.
«While the food lasted, moreover, the official orders in the clinic were that the children had to sing the Franco Nationalist songs before they were fed,» said Mr. Cope. «We never asked them to sing Loyalist songs when the Loyalists held that territory, and we do not now like to ask them to sing Nationalist songs in thanksgiving for our food.»
Upshot of the difficulties in Spain, Mr. Cope announced, was that the Quakers were pulling out. «It would simply be dishonest to continue in Spain to spend the money being collected abroad for this children’s relief,» he said. «Franco has assured us he would like to have us continue the work until we are ready to retire, but it is evident that he wants the food, not us. There is no way of being sure where the food is likely to go.»
Oath
Meanwhile, in Burgos, Generalissimo Franco moved to set up a «corporate state» on the model of Fascist Italy. A $70,000,000 subsidy was set aside to build up a merchant fleet to «display New Spain’s prestige in America and the Far East.» Curtailment of imports of gasoline, motor cars, machinery, motion picture films was announced. Syndical labor laws were ordered written, with labor unions being organized on the approved Fascist model. Strikes will be outlawed, the unions will be controlled by the Government. New contracts will be written for tenant farming, and the Spanish Phalanx’s program for redistribution of some large estates will be carried out.
That the state will be a strictly authoritarian one could not be doubted after the oath which was sprung last week on the members of the Grand Council of the Falange Espanola Tradicionalista, the new Fascist substitute for Parliament. Raimundo Fernandez Cuesta, secretary general of Spain’s only party, demanded «blind obedience» to Generalissimo Franco, ended by proposing an oath: «We proclaim our inflexible will to obey unconditionally the orders of our Caudillo. As proof of that sacred promise, let the Councillors of the Falange swear with me before God always to obey the Caudillo and those who receive from him the power of commandment.» The Councillors swore.