Spanish coup bid: the plot thickens

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DIA CONSTITUCION The wave of ultra-right wing activities in Spain in the last two weeks has also had its reflection in Portugal.

In the northern city of Oporto last Friday night several hundred armed, black-shirted fascist thugs marched through the streets attacking and setting fire to offices of the Socialist and Communist Parties and shouting for the return of the dictatorship.

This serious development reveals the acute dangers which have been produced by the deliberate demobilisation of the working class by the Stalinist and reformist leaders.

And the same thing is reflected in the nature of the new non-parliamentary government formed by the military President Eanes.

Reactionary, The composition of the cabinet announced last week by Premier designate Carlos Mota Pinto (former state industry official under the Salazer dictatorship) confirms the reactionary direction of recent political waves.

Mota Pinto's cabinet is a government of "technoState terror chief Villa crats", , not publicly known as members of any political party, but most of them with a solid reactionary pedigree.

In particular Sr. Vaz Portugal lingers on from the previous government. rejected by the National Assembly in October, as Minister of Agriculture.

. Return of land He has been responsible for trying to step up the return of land occupied by the peasants in 1974 and 1975 to its former owners.

This. counterrevolutionary policy was legislated by the Socialist government of Mario Soares which fell in July.

Attempts to implement it under the last Prime Minister were met by militant resistance from the peasants in the southern agricultural region of Alentejo.

While refusing to mobilise the whole working class against these reactionNumerous sedative statements by the Spanish government and army authorities have failed to solve the alarming mystery of last weekend's attempted coup d'etat.

Officially only two have been arrested.

The principal of these is Lieutenant-Colonel Tejero Molina of the Civil Guard (the provincial para-military police), who was dismissed a few months ago as Civil Guard Commander of Guipuzcoa province, the most militantly nationalist of the Basque provinces.

Notorious

Tejero Molina was notorious in Guipuzcoa for encouraging the men under his command into extreme examples of repressive zeal.

He was removed to merely bureaucratic . duties after publishing an open letter to the King in the fascist newspaper El Imparcial protesting against 'democratisation"

The official version CP leader Cunhal ary governments, the Portuguese Party has to a limited degree taken: the side of. the Alentejo peasants.

And once it heard the composition of the proposed Cabinet, the CP began to make critical noises, eventually announcing that it would weekend's plot is that it is the work of this well-known "dissident" and a handful of "crazy" and powerless friends who are supposed to have plotted "Operation Galaxy" in a cafe of that name.

But there is growing public suspicion that this "crazy" band is the officially revealed tip of a much bigger and more serious iceberg.

A number of reports speak of up to 200 military and police officers being involved in the plot.

It may also have been supposed to coincide with the demonstration of 125,000 Franco supporters who met in the Plaza de Oviente in Madrid the day after the arrest of the plotters to honour the third anniversary of Franco's death.

The size of the demonstration seems to have been deliberately exaggerated lto 300,000) by the Madrid police spokesman.

One of the main activities of the Francoist crowd was the cheering of the armed police sent to "control" the demonstration-an enthusiasm which was clearly reciprocated by oppose the government when' it was presented to the National Assembly for a confidence vote on December 9.

Undoubtedly this new oppositionist stance of the CP accounted for its surprise 53% victory in municipal elections in Alentejo last week.

Hollow threat

This was a profound shock to the government and makes military President Eanes' threat to call general elections if the new government is not confirmed in office look a little more hollow.

The CP, however, has just as much to lear in an election in which it might make gains, as one in which it might lose.

Election victories would enormously increase the pressure on the CP leaders to take action to defend the rapidly eroding gains of the many of the police:

in Barcelona the same weekend an army general was placed under house arrest for publicly attacking the Defence Minister Gutierrez Mellado.

And there were new reports of unrest among the armed police and Civil Guard especially in Euskadi (the Basque region) where last Monday ETA members shot a further tweive policemen in one raid on their barracks in Basauri (Bilbao), killing two of them.

The government seems reduced to near desperation over the growing success of ETA's present terrorist campaign against the police.

Repression

The Interior Minister, Francoist butcher Martin Villa has made a rush visit to Britain to consult Merlyn Rees and Roy Mason who are regarded as Europe's mentors when it comes to the repression of militant armed nationalist movements.

All these developments point to the growing danger of a new counter-revolution in Spain.

The man charged with reassuring the nation against this obvious danger is army Chief of Staff.

He is the man who in July made a public speech, while on an official visit to the military dictator Videla in Argentina, clearly implying that necessary the Spanish armed forces would not hesitate to assume power:

If some of the army generals were, as is rumoured, implicated in last weekend's plot, then they seem now to have decided to delay any further move until after the constitutional referendum on December 6.

The government has imposed a ban on all public demonstrations until after the referendum in an attempt to repress the growing opposition to the reactionary constitution, especially in Euskadi and Catalonia.

This reactionary ban has met with not so much as a whimper of protest from the Communist Party and Socialist leaders.

in fact both leaderships, having helped to organise the recent "anti-terrorist" demonstrations, have greeted the new warnings of the possibility of a military coup with new moves to demobilise the working class.

"Remote"

Socialist Party leader Felipe Gonzalez, greeted the news with a statement which echoed the line of the Suarez government: "The possibility of a military coup exists but it is very remote"

Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Communist Party, (whose newspaper Mundo Obrero last week went daily) as usual went much further.

The CP referred to the Galaxy Plan as "an attempt at military insubordination" and Carrillo added:

"In the event of a serious military coup the CP and the Socialist Party and the trade unions would put themselves on the side of the King and would call a genoral striko."

He added that the "Basque problem" could not be properly solved as long as France continued to give refuge to known terrorists.

There is evidently no limit to the lengths to which the Stalinist leadership is prepared to go to give unequivocal support to the successors of The CP leaders of course, wish to avoid a new Francoist military coup.

But their political plan is to avoid it by a totally subordinate alliance with the "democratising" Francoist bourgeoisie and by an uncompromising fight to prevent the working class from any expression of its independent interests.

In this way the Stalinists of Spain today, like the Stalinists of Spain or Germany in the 1930s, or the Stalinists of Chile in the 1970s pave the way for counter-revolution 2002602000 Portuguese SP leader Soares

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One of the most prominent bourgeois journalists the USA in has caused a storm by has caused storm by denouncing Britain's barbaric repression in HOTO: Derek Speirs, IFL victed under the law".

The bloodstained Labour