2024-07-10 02:19:16
ABC, September 23, 1962. ‘The organizers and perpetrators of the recent terrorist activities have been arrested’, announced the title. The news article then explained: “Using all its means of struggle, the secret system of the Communist Party, strongly assisted by the wall, has planned and carried out, throughout the spring and summer, acts of terror whose purpose “put an end to the public conduct, inhibit the growth of our economy and weaken the prestige of our country abroad, to exclude tourism and foreign capital investments.”
This newspaper refers, above all, to the bomb placed in the valley fell by two members of the Defensa Interior, the anarchist terrorist group that tried to end the dictatorship and the life of Francisco Franco himself in the years of opening the kingdom. . With this aim, they carried out other attacks in Spain and other parts of Europe between 1962 and 1963, although their history was on paper until 1965. died, and thirty-five were injured, although there were others there, like this. which we will tell you below.
The aforementioned bombs in the Basilica of the Fallen Valley were released on Sunday, August 12, 1962. According to ABC, the device was hidden “under one of the seats intended for the faithful, who are near the High Bar and near the church of the Blessed Sacrament. Two later, the authors of the sabotage were the electrician Antonio Martín Bellido and the French anarcho-syndicalist Paul Desnais.
However, the person arrested for those events was not two members of the Interior Security, but Francisco Sánchez Ruano, who visited the site the same day with some foreign friends. The man who was arrested had the bad luck that the Police Force (FOP) found anti-Franco propaganda in his home. That was enough for him to be sentenced to 28 years in prison, in a police and judicial error that he still tried to correct 44 years later.
Innocent and guilty
Sánchez Ruano spent eleven years in prison after that innocent attack in the Valley of the Fall in which he did not participate in which he did not have the remotest idea that he would do it. It is true that he was a member of a dictator, something that was considered a crime during the dictatorship, and that he was in the Francoist Basilica on the day of the attack, but the most important thing he did in his life was to share a small book that is not dangerous. . However, the combination of those factors is a disaster for him, and he has to judge that injustice.
As reported ‘National’, in 2004 the real perpetrators of the attack appeared, Martín and Desnais, who lived in France, and accepted their responsibility. “We are,” they admitted to Sánchez Ruano during a meeting in Paris attended by Prisa newspaper. None of them thought of surrendering so that the innocent man could be free. “It didn’t fix anything. They wouldn’t have let him go. I don’t regret it. These are the things that happen in the war. At that time I was thinking about other actions,” Martín admitted.
The next year, in fact, he planted another bomb, this time at the General Directorate of Defense. He also managed to escape and others were also blamed for the attack: Francisco Granado and Joaquín Delgado. Both of them were not so lucky, as they were sentenced to death and executed with a garrote. Your time meeting in the French capital, the three asked the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to review the war council of the Franco government. Later, they even went to the military court of the Supreme Court, but they rejected it in the order they made on January 26, 2006.
anarchist bombs
As Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla explained in his article ‘Victims of Civil Defense. Anarchist violence against dictatorship and its aftermath (1962-1965) (Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism), the Civil War and Franco’s repression were devastating for the Spanish independence movement. At that time he belonged to the CNT, the FAI and the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). However, in the 1940s, they managed to organize and carry out some violent acts.
In the middle of the next decade, when it became clear that the communist regime had taken over, the CNT rejected “direct action.” Spanish anarchism is going through a deep crisis and is divided into two groups: one traditional and the other possible. « To put an end to the schism, between August and September 1961 the Second Intercontinental Congress was held in Limoges, France, where it was decided to restore the CNT and form alliances with the socialist party UGT and the Solidarity of Basque Workers (STV ) of the country. We also approved the concept that was in reserve: the creation of Internal Security,” recalled Fernández Soldevilla.
The interior defense relies on a council made up of the secretaries of the CNT, FAI and FIJL, but in fact it is promoted by the youngest, by the sons of the anarchists who have been taken into exile. They recovered old weapons and explosives that the French Resistance had hidden after World War II. Most of the equipment, however, is defective, so also buy weapons from dealers on the black market. And in May 1962, they agreed to carry out their first strikes.
Various objectives
Between that day and June 1963, nearly 40 devices exploded in and outside of Spain. Its targets are different: the General Military Vicariate, bank branches, transport buildings, the city hall of Valencia, representatives of the National Pension Institute, offices of the vertical union, power lines, the road to Ayete Palace, the company the newspaper Military Government of Guipúzcoa, Iberia and Valley flights have fallen, among others. The press blamed the DRIL for some of the bombs, if not communists, as it was with ABC, but they were planted by the Interior Defense.
“In fact, the attack in the Valley of Falle is nothing more than a way to divert the attention of the authorities while, in San Sebastián, another authority has made a more ambitious plan: to kill Franco,” Fernández Soldevilla warned in it. article. From a liberal perspective, it is an action that can be determined. Members of ETA carried explosives across the Spanish-French border, but their role ended there in an operation designed and carried out by the Internal Security.
The anarchists placed a bomb weighing about twenty kilos in the ditch of the Aldapeta slope, on the road from San Sebastián to Hernani, to detonate it when the clown went up to the palace where he was spending his vacation. However, that year Franco delayed his arrival in the city and the battery was exhausted, so the command decided to release the device on August 19. According to the ABC report, “the damage to the equipment was reduced to the breaking of some windows in the private and novitiate village of the nuns in the area of solitude.”
The arrests
Hours later, explosions occurred at the headquarters of the newspapers ‘Ya’, ‘Pueblo’ and ‘La Vanguardia Española’. Two employees of the latter newspaper were injured. The police arrested members of ETA and FLP (Popular Liberation Front) who, really, had nothing to do with it. In September 1962, the FOP arrested the forces of the interior, who were accused of the bombs of the summer, although they made the serious mistake of including Francisco Sánchez Ruano in the bag. To strike a possible death blow against him and others imprisoned, on September 28, an Italian anarchist group kidnapped Spain’s vice chancellor in Milan. The arrests were released after four days and the sentence was, in the case of our oldest, the aforementioned 28 years.
This attack against the Valley of the Fall is what gave Antonio Ruibérriz to publish his recent book, ‘Operación Filisteos’ (Almuzara, 2024), in which he has stated the “black plan” to blow up the monument on the day of its inauguration, which took place in April 1959. « Apparently, the attack of 1962 was to attract the attention of the police and directly to Madrid, instead of San Sebastián, which is where Franco will spend the summer. This way he will be more safe to attack you. Apparently, they even planted a bomb on the road that had to pass on a certain day, but in the end it delayed his vacation and the anarchists had to let it explode because of the stopwatch time they set. finished,” said the writer to ABC a month ago.
«When the CNT planted that explosive in the basilica and destroyed the building in 1962, there were not even casualties. Francoist police arrested the man accused of the crime, a boy who went to visit the memorial with some friends, when the explosion occurred, he ran away and was arrested. In the subsequent investigation they discovered that it belonged to an anarchist cell, but it had nothing to do with the attack. In short, the poor man spent 11 years in prison innocently,” confirmed Ruibérriz.
#Spaniards #Franco #prison #ten #years #attacking #valley #fallen