Word: madrid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Spanish Premier Carlos Arias Navarro huddled with his Cabinet three times last week. After Friday's session, the government announced a shake-up of the army command, naming a tough new head of the Guardia Civil and new commanders for four military regions, including Madrid. The next day, the government released eleven Basques being held for terrorist acts. Four Basques remain in jail, awaiting sentences for cop-killing; under a law enacted last August, a mandatory death sentence faces anyone convicted of killing a policeman...
...Madrid's freeing of the eleven prisoners may be an attempt to placate Western Europe, which was enraged at the executions earlier this month. Yet last week there was growing evidence that Europe's anti-Spanish passions were cooling and that reaction by foreign officials to any new executions...
...Madrid might be muted. The ambassadors of Switzerland, Britain and West Germany, who had originally been withdrawn, were all back on the job in Madrid. The French leftist daily Quotidien de Paris reflected the serious second thoughts about Europe's earlier outburst. In a front-page article, it noted: "The reprobation against Franco's excesses gives a good conscience to other nations at a time when political torture [exists] in 70 countries. Tass denounced 'Franco repressions,' but how do the Russians deal with their political opposition...
...remain loyal to Franco and are fiercely antiCommunist, leftist ideas-perhaps as a result of the Portuguese experience -have apparently taken root among some younger officers. Last week three middle-ranking officers in Barcelona were arrested; they are suspected of having links with the Basque terrorists and with a Madrid underground cell of nine leftist dissidents who were charged with sedition and jailed three months ago. That kind of radicalization, if it spreads, does not promise an orderly political succession in the post-Franco era. Said a high government official last week: "I used to think the chances...
...Basques want restoration of the right to set their own tax and economic policies that they lost after the Civil War; they are also seriously underrepresented in Madrid's government councils. The fundamental grievance of the Basques is symptomatic of Spain's political malaise: too much control from the center...