Franco’s dictatorship

After Franco’s victory, Democrats and the Communists generally go to live in particular hard times. The Franco regime, completely undemocratic and anti-Communist, literally demonized the PCE, imprisoning, torturing and killing its members, subjecting some of them to summary trials that lacked any minimum guarantee for which the accused could be tried fairly. The Franco government applied the law retroactively, calling the insurgents who remained faithful to constitutional legality. Under these harsh conditions, the PCE had to reorganize in hiding (Basque Country, Galicia, Andalusia, Extremadura, Valencia, Navarra and Catalonia remained organization), in exile (Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, France and North Africa as well as the Soviet Union) and prisons (where they had leaders like Pigs or Ascanio).Shortly after World War II started, the Secretary General Jose Diaz died in Tbilisi, and was replaced by Dolores Ibarruri, “Passion”. The party was gradually reorganized and in 1943, Mundo Obrero, “Truth,” “Unity,” “The Worker” and “Our Flag” were published in various parts of Spain. In fact, for a long time the PCE was the primary, if not the only organized force against the dictatorship of Franco. Between 1944 and 1948 drives the guerrilla struggle, called maquis, in which the PCE overvalued or undervalued forces of the Franco government, and ended with the death of many Communist militants and a harsh crackdown on the civilian population in areas the acting is guerrilla warfare, which was losing support among a rural population also passing very serious economic and manipulated by a church, which like during the Second Republic and Civil War, was clearly aligned with the far right.Therefore, the party decided to abandon the guerrilla way in 1948, although some foci were maintained until 1952. In 1947 the metal produced in Madrid and Catalonia textile companies first protest movements, harsh repression by the Franco regime. From that moment the situation becomes worse for the communists, because the previous repression joins the Cold War, during which the dictatorial government becomes an important aid in the United States policy against the Soviet Union, that is who marks the line of PCE. Following Leninist tactics, the party chooses to combine the underground struggle with the exploitation of loopholes which allow the system: the Communists participating in the official trade unions and all existing mass organizations (Catholic Action brotherhoods, guilds .. .). In the elections of shop stewards are elected in 1950 and many Communists and other conscientious workers. This move will rise to the Workers’ Commissions.Meanwhile, Radio Free Spain from the Pyrenees, Spain issued to the vision of the PCE. On 12 March 1951 the PSUC called the General Strike in Catalonia. In Navarre and Madrid there are other strikes. The workers are joining them students and intellectuals, many of them representing a new generation growing up under Franco. In September 1954 marks the V Congress of the PCE. It sets the new tactic, in two stages. The first called for the creation of a broad front to liquidate the dictatorship and form a provisional government. The government should restore democratic freedoms, amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, and to take urgent action to improve the living conditions of the population. After this it should hold elections and develop democracy. In June 1956 the PCE designs its policy of “national reconciliation”.At that time, students have a growing force, the SEU has been settled and begin to emerge bourgeois democratic movements within Spain, some of whose members came from dissenting on the right sectors, and even of the Falange. Increasingly, thestruggle of the PCE represents more clearly the struggle for democratic freedoms. To get to ally with all democratic forces means that we must cancel responsibilities of civil war and its aftermath: “… The Communist Party is undoubtedly the party of the people that has suffered in the past twenty years, to the class workers, agricultural laborers, poor peasants, intellectuals advanced. If to the chapter on tort is involved, no one would have more than ours. We understand that the best justice for all those who have fallen and suffered for freedom is precisely that freedom is established in Spain. A politics of vengeance would not go to Spain for the situation where you are.

Comments are closed.