2023-12-02 23:15:40
1953. Franco’s dictatorship was consolidated in Spain after three decades of absolute power since the end of the civil war, the murders were no longer massive but selective and human and constitutional rights had been hidden and falsified by Fundamental Laws, but every effort It was useless to achieve the desired respectability of international society. The fascist and violent character of Francoism, the absence of freedoms and the original sin of having been imposed by the weapons lent by the defeated, Hitler and Mussolini, kept Spain in the rotten place of History and on the margins of the reconstruction and organization of the society of nations after World War II.
The attempts to realign in favor of the Allies in the throes of the world conflagration and to reorient the original fascism towards anti-communism had also not given the desired results for the regime, although, thanks to Churchill, they had served to avoid military intervention and the overthrow of the tyrant who advocated Stalin’s Soviet Union.
And it was the foreign policy of the Soviet Union that, paradoxically, opened the doors of integration to the Franco dictatorship. The events of 1948 – the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Mao’s revolution in China, the proclamation of the People’s Republic of North Korea and the beginning of the Berlin blockade and Moscow’s separation from Tito’s Yugoslavia – , they progressively deactivated what was notable international influence of the Spanish republican exile to give way to the new situation, to pragmatism. The conferences of the Allied leaders in Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 to collaborate in the post-war reorganization became a kind of virtual borders for a war that was never declared – if the NATO constitution in 1949 is not considered a formal declaration – but real: the Cold War between the West and communism led by the USSR. And on that battlefield, where there was room for right-wing dictatorships, like Salazar’s in Portugal, and left-wing dictatorships, like Tito’s in Yugoslavia, Franco’s could make room for it, despite its antecedents.
In 1950, the United Nations General Assembly annulled its 1946 resolution, which vetoed Spain’s access to the UN and advised the withdrawal of ambassadors – only those from Argentina and Switzerland remained, in addition to Ireland, Portugal and the Vatican, that were not members of the UN–, and the door was closed for him to enter six purely technical international organizations in 1951 –from the Universal Postal Union to the International Civil Aviation Organization–. A preliminary and trial step to achieve entry into a UN agency with a markedly political nature, the Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), among whose purposes is the safeguarding of human rights.
The foreseeable admission of the dictatorship of “a friend of Himmler, who was the alma mater of the concentration camps and gas chambers,” as Albert Camus and Salvador de Madariaga said in Le Monde, revitalized anti-Francoism in Europe, but the Parliamentary initiatives, street demonstrations and personal attitudes – Pau Casals resigned from his position in the Music section of UNESCO – were useless to distort the agenda designed by Churchill’s sympathy for Franco and accepted by President Truman despite his Antipathy for the dictator: Spain joined UNESCO in February 1953.
The blessing of the Vatican
President Truman was aware of the controversy of his decision to begin negotiations with Franco in order to establish military bases in Spanish territory. It was “the biggest fraud in American foreign policy,” The New York Times editorialized (“Do we need Franco?” [“¿Necesitamos a Franco?”]August 30, 1951), “and implies a problem [la ‘cuestión española’] that for 15 years has divided American public opinion like no other has done in our history.” But the pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the North American armed forces left him no choice: we do not need Franco, but the bases in Spain are essential in case of conflagration with the Soviet bloc.
But since he did not want to be the first to wash the ugly face of the Franco dictatorship, he pressured the Vatican to be, as the supreme Catholic authority in the world, the one to validate the Spanish ultra-Catholic regime. Franco had pursued this papal recognition since the Spanish episcopal hierarchy had done so during the war and that is why he had made various concessions in four bilateral agreements since 1941 that granted the Church control of education – from primary to university through the Opus Dei–, mandatory religious teaching in all centers and grades and the right to supervise teaching, the prohibition of books and school supplies and the exercise of censorship to “oppose the malignancy of men who try to pervert the spirits of the faithful and corrupt their customs, or, when the publication, introduction or circulation of bad and harmful books must be prevented”, as well as the freedom of ecclesiastical appointments, the inviolability of ecclesiastical premises and real estate, the recognition of the jurisdiction of the “ecclesiastical jurisdiction” – which required the acquiescence of the ordinary so that the civil authority could act against clerics in both civil and criminal cases (those sentenced to prison sentences would have to serve them in special prisons or, preferably, in “religious houses”). – and requiring a license from the Apostolic See when it is a bishop or equivalent in Law.
In addition to the exemption from taxes and military service, the obligation to hold public office, financial endowments to cover a wide range of chapters, from the congrua or parish income to the military vicariate and the constitution of an ecclesiastical patrimony; the recognition of the civil effects of canonical marriage and its exclusive jurisdiction in causes of separation and annulment; rights in educational matters comparable to public rights.
So many ‘rights’ – they were considered the greatest of the Catholic Church in the entire world outside of Vatican City -, with hardly any compensation, made it unnecessary for Pius XII to sign a concordat that sought to recover the privileges of that of 1851, which It included the medieval right of presentation granted to the Catholic Monarchs for the appointment of bishops. So, when his project was presented by the Spanish government in 1951, he had it floundering around the Vatican bureaucracy for two and a half years until, in 1953, the new administration of the United States, with President Eisenhower in the presidency, assured him formally that, the month following the signing of the concordat, he would consolidate the Franco regime with the signing of the agreement on the bases.
Once assured that the Vatican would not be left hanging with its support for the dictator, Pius or interested the Church without prior agreement with the Holy See – and sweetened the pill with distinctions for the dictator such as the collar of the Supreme Order of Christ and entering temples under a canopy.
On August 27, 1953, the pro-secretary of State of the Holy See Domenico Tardini and the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alberto Martín Artajo, signed the concordat in a discreet ceremony in Rome in which Vatican diplomacy controlled everything from the speeches to the photographs for the press.
The bases of Francoism
“Are the practical military advantages of an agreement with Spain greater than the political and military disadvantages? Having faced the greatest war in history to defeat fascism, is our situation so desperate that we should make a fascist regime one of our allies? (…) One of the clear facts that Americans have to face is that, if we continue with these negotiations, we will be helping to perpetuate Franco in power as long as he lives and wants to remain dictator of Spain. That will be our responsibility before history,” concluded the very harsh editorial of The New York Times cited.
General Eisenhower only paid attention to the military commands – “from a military point of view there are no alternative areas for equally satisfactory bases” – and the sentiment of the Republican Party, largely favorable to the agreements with Spain. In any case, after almost three years of arduous negotiations, economic reductions and abusive clauses, the North American president honored his word and on September 23, 1953, Martín Artajo signed again, this time with James Clement Dunn, ambassador of the USA in Spain, in the Santa Cruz palace, headquarters of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
They say that, when the minister confirmed the signature, Franco said: “I have won the war in Spain… My conscience is clear and I can rest.” With hundreds of thousands of deaths to his credit, a cruel exercise of authoritarian government and unimaginable cessions of sovereignty in the repeated imperial discourse and the everlasting demand for Gibraltar, the dictator must have been as easy a dream as his morals. ; for a handful of dollars – much less than the allocations of the Marshall Plan to any of the European countries, including Yugoslavia to ensure its distancing from the USSR – and, above all, the recognition and support of its dictatorial regime, a moody to the point of derangement Franco authorized the signing of mere bilateral agreements, without the status of treaty or agreement, whose technical annexes for the construction of the bases included the specifications of the minimum details and which, except for the amount of economic aid, evaded specific commitments for equipment. military and established American sovereignty over the bases, over the role of “joint use” and, in reality, multiple ‘gibraltars’, in the event of war. And in the trash can, the illusory recommendations of Carrero Blanco, then Undersecretary of the Presidency, to Franco: demand the return of Gibraltar as a prior condition to the transfer of the bases.
The North American press portrayed the agreements as “a game between a gambler and a child” and in the secret official correspondence of the American government they often carried the label “so advantageous for us”, which convinced the reluctant anti-Franco European governments that They were not trying to get Franco’s Spain into NATO through the back door.
But they served for the United States to present a request to the United Nations for entry into Spain, which, after reaching a package deala global agreement with the USSR by which neither of the two powers would veto the entry of any country proposed by the other, became a reality on December 14, 1955.
The respected Spanish Civil War correspondent of The New York Times, Herbert Lionel Matthews, wrote in The Yoke and the Arrows. A Report on Spain, in 1957: “Franco always said that he was right and that he was not going to change anything to satisfy the requirements and hopes of democracies. Immediately afterwards, we have proven that he was right, because, without changing one iota of his policies, we have come to him, treated him on equal terms and provided a very advantageous military and economic pact without the Caudillo having made the slightest political concession. (…) the mountain came to Muhammad (…) He has defeated his enemies inside and outside Spain; “He has refused to give an inch of ground to the liberalism he so despises, and now his efforts have earned him the highest sanction of the two greatest powers on earth, the religious and the secular, the Vatican and the United States.” .
Blessed by the representative of Christ on earth and supported by those of Mars on the planet, Franco secured 22 more years of dictatorship in Spain, thanks to the Cross and the Sword: Old God e In God we trust…
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