For the stocky little general with the impassive face, it was a day of memory and triumph. Exactly 25 years ago, with the Spanish Civil War not yet three months old, an army junta met in the Old Castile capital of Burgos and elected him Chief of Government of Nationalist Spain. Since then, the world and its leaders* have changed many times. The Great Depression was followed by world war, which was followed by agonies of reconstruction and the cold war; nations were born, others swallowed up. But Francisco Franco Bahamonde, 68, was still Caudillo of Spain—and for all anyone could tell, he might still be in 25 more years.
Franco last week returned to Burgos, a grey and Gothic city festooned with flags, flowers and triumphal arches. With him went almost everyone of importance in Spain: Cabinet ministers in frock coats, generals and admirals weighted down with medals, Falangists in blue shirts and white coats, and tens of thousands of Castilian peasants, stiffly dressed in their Sunday best. After High Mass and Te Deum in the 13th century cathedral, Dictator Franco went to the Plaza Mayor and told the crowd, in his reedy monotone, that he had defeated Communism and given his countrymen more than two decades of peace. He warned darkly that "liberal democracy easily ends in Communism."
Forced Unity. As Franco often says, the principal accomplishment of his long reign has been peace. From the civil war, he inherited a shattered, shell-shocked nation—without money, industry, food or spirit. On the battleground where brother gunned brother, where international fascism battered international Communism, and where a generation of Western intellectuals bitterly fought for their Marxist illusions, Franco built a regime characterized by greyness, apathy and public order.
Franco managed to keep Spain out of World War II, but his sympathies lay with the Axis (he even sent a division of infantry to fight Russia). In 1946, the new United Nations, determined to bring down the last fascist dictator in Europe, cut him off from the world by imposing a boycott which lasted five years. Spaniards, always resentful of foreign meddling, immediately united behind the Caudillo. From his palace at El Pardo near Madrid, Franco thumbed his nose at the West, saying that the West would eventually come around to him.
Abruptly, Franco was proved right. Looking about for places to put airbases, the U.S. in 1953 signed a ten-year alliance and aid treaty in Madrid, and Franco passed from international villain to member of the Western community. Ever since, Spain has been improving slowly, erratically, but noticeably.
"Organic Democracy." Political repressions, which had been both harsh and frequent at the end of the civil war (an estimated 100,000 enemies of Franco were shot), slowly became less frequent, milder, even playful. Criticizing Franco has become an intellectual exercise of the bored rich and their spoiled sons. On the rare occasions when they are jailed, they are treated like gentlemen, eventually released with sentence delayed—but revivable if they create new difficulties for the regime. Under such a mild eye, almost everyone now feels brave enough to brag quietly that he really hates Franco ("but there's no other choice").