SPAIN: Uninterested General

Major General Antonio Aranda Mata is still honored in Spain as the stubborn and victorious commander of the Franco forces in the bloody Civil War siege of Oviedo (1936) which lasted 91 days. But one night two years ago Franco police arrested Monarchist Aranda in a brewery where he had been meeting fellow members of the Comité Imperio de Coordination, a clandestine coordinating committee of anti-Franco underground groups. Aranda's civil war record bought him his freedom. He went into retirement, dividing his time between the reading room of the Club Casino de Madrid and his apartment. Police kept an...

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