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Silent Majority. Though most of Spain's 2,000,000 Basques—prosperous, Catholic and deeply conservative—care little about the E.T.A.'s fuzzy vision of "a socialist Basque state," the provinces fell in behind the Burgos 16. Unsettled by stories of police torture and by the fact that two of the defendants are priests. Spain's complacent and pro-Franco bishops united in a plea for "maximum clemency." Even more distressing to the regime were leaked reports that high Spanish officials, among them Foreign Minister Gregorio López Bravo, were grumbling privately about the trial. When 300 prominent artists and intellectuals began a 48-hour sit-in at the Abbey of Montserrat near Barcelona, the center of Spain's Catalan autonomy movement, officials demanded that Abbot Cassia Mauro just throw them all out on grounds that the protest was "a provocation." Replied the burly abbot: "So was the Burgos court-martial."
Last week, though, it was the turn of the "ultras"—Spain's hard-liners—and they struck back in force. Under strong pressure from army officers who filled newspapers with open letters denouncing "outrages committed by minorities," Franco called an emergency Cabinet meeting. The Cabinet invoked emergency powers that allow suspected troublemakers to be jailed for up to six months without trial. Meanwhile, the streets were taken over by what one pro-Franco newspaper, not very originally, called "the silent majority." In Burgos, where the five-man military court was still pondering the case—their decision may not be announced until after Christmas—demonstrators paraded through town chanting "Long live the army!"
Hard-liners v. Technocrats. Never in Franco's rule had Spain's divisions been so deep or so public. The issue was not so much the Basques as the shape of post-Franco Spain itself. A rash of campus protests in Madrid and Barcelona nearly two years ago was all the excuse the generals needed to demand that Franco scuttle his five-year experiment in "liberalization" of state controls on the press, the labor unions and the universities—or face a military coup. There were signs last week that the hard-liners had summoned up the fading Falange to battle a new target: the "technocrats." These are mostly members of the secretive but apolitical Catholic lay organization Opus Dei, whose adherents control much of Spain's commerce and communications.
The Opus Dei technocrats are credited with the financial savvy and discipline that has pulled Spain out of the economic Dark Ages over the past 13 years. Partly as a reward, partly because Franco recognized that they alone could lead Spain into Europe and the Common Market, Franco last winter ceded to them the commanding voice in the government. The ascendancy of Opus Dei has deeply wounded the once supreme Falangists, who fought beside the Caudillo in the '30s. They vented their rage last week in front of the royal palace, shouting "Franco sí, gobierno no!"—"Franco yes, the government no!"