The secret plan of Franco and the Falange to reconquer the lost territories of the Spanish Empire in America

2023-08-08 08:14:08

There are times when Their Eastern Majesties don’t hit the nail on the head; things of distributing millions of presents in a single night, and without Amazon. Christmas 1943 brought to the United States Government the resurrection of a cramp in the spine that they had not felt for decades: the fear of the old colonialism started by the Habsburg monarchy five hundred years ago. In the middle of December, with the Second World War at its peak and the Allies orchestrating the Normandy landings, the FBI prepared a report in which it argued that Francisco Franco and the Falange had pulled their strings in America with two objectives: to spread their tentacles through the (not so) New World and recover the lost territories of the Spanish Empire.

The document was not made public; Nor was it a matter of stirring up society and starting a witch hunt against the ghost of a Francoism that had made efforts to remain neutral in World War II. They already had enough with Adolf Hitler and the German army on the other side of the Atlantic. The content, however, was alarming. To begin with, the ‘bureau’ compiled the activities of the party founded by José Antonio Rivera’s cousin and offered advice to his agents to steer clear of his deceptions. And then he confirmed that the Falange had done everything possible since 1939 to win followers throughout the American territory – North, Central and South – in order to overthrow the Stars and Stripes state.

rare activities

Few have been the experts who have shed light on ‘Totalitarian activities. Spanish Falange in the western hemisphere today’, the document that Edgar Hoover himself, director of the North American intelligence service, signed as author in 1943. But boy do they exist. One of those who has studied the report the most has been Daniel Lvovich, a professor at the National University of General Sarmiento. In his essay, ‘The eagle and the bundle of arrows’, he maintains that the FBI’s conclusions were highly exaggerated, but that they allow us to describe the activities of the Falange Exterior, the party delegations abroad, and the fear they aroused in potential enemies of Spain.

«The text was based on the information provided by the network deployed by the FBI throughout the continent, as well as by other diplomatic sources, and clearly demonstrated the vocation of knowing in depth the action of the agents of the party and of the Spanish State in the new continent”, reveals Lvovich.

It wasn’t all bad news though. In the prologue, the authors made it clear that the different fascist nuclei that had settled throughout America had been dissolved and their headquarters closed. Therefore, and as it was written, the objective was nothing more than “to briefly present the background of the Spanish Falange, its program, its main methods of operation in the Western Hemisphere and the history of its activities in North and South America.”

The FBI was not wrong. According to the report, the Falange’s diplomatic machinery had started in 1937; the same year that Franco merged the party with the Traditionalist Communion. Throughout that period, and until 1941, the group promoted the birth of a long list of propaganda newspapers throughout Latin America. The names number in the dozens: ‘Arriba España’, ‘Occidenti’, ‘La Discusión’, ‘Amanecer’, ‘Nueva España’, ‘Unidad’… Most of them disintegrated when the group lost part of its power in the peninsula, but some continued their journey in the warmth of the Hispanic embassies abroad. The same thing happened with several radio stations lit on the other side of the pond and destined to broadcast Primo de Rivera’s maxims over the airwaves.

Spanish Empire

Most of the subversive activities did not start, according to the FBI, until Hitler’s panzers crossed Poland in September 1939. Hoover was in favor of the fact that it was then that the Third Reich used the Outer Phalanx to achieve its own ends in the Americas. To begin with, the American was convinced that Germany and Italy had used the Spanish diplomatic bag – the secret and confidential correspondence of embassies – to distribute “secret materials” in Latin America without the local authorities being able to oppose it in any way. They were unaware of the content, but it could include anything from weapons to information about possible key targets for the German army.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ABC

But that wasn’t what worried the FBI the most. After tracking down various clues, like breadcrumbs, the ‘bureau’ had discovered that Ramón Serrano Suñer –former Minister of Foreign Relations and Secretary General of the Falange– had facilitated the departure of spies to Latin America. And not with one hand in front and the other behind, but by providing them with Spanish passports. «Except in Argentina, where the Axis countries kept their embassies in 1943, the Spanish diplomatic missions in America represented the interests of the Axis, and the FBI suspected that they had also assumed the tasks of espionage and German propaganda, working under the direction of the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin»reveals the author in his essay.

For the United States, the ultimate mastermind of this entire framework was the former German ambassador to Spain, From Faupel. After being transferred to the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin due to some differences with the Nazi command, this controversial character would have dedicated himself to training and dispatching German agents to Atlantic lands with very clear orders: “Stimulate the riots as much as possible, by means that included coups d’état and incitement to border conflicts, and promote internal disputes. The task, always controversial, would have been carried out with the help of outer phalanx and the Spanish diplomatic framework. All conditional, yes.

Hoover put the icing on the cake with an outlandish theory. He was in favor of the fact that, since the time of the diplomat Francisco Gomez-Jordana Sousa, the Falange yearned to destroy the influence of the United States in Latin America and to lay the foundations for the recovery of the days in which Spain never set the sun. And so he left it blank in the report: «Falangism is to Spain what Nazism is to Germany and what fascism was to Italy. General Francisco Franco and the Falangists have dreams of world conquest that are now fading fast as prospects for an Axis victory do the same. The ambition of the Falange was to reconquer for Spain its lost overseas empire.