As generals get six months for coup As generals get six months for coup bid Fascist threat grows in Spain

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Ever since the belated death of Franco in 1975 there have been daily indications, often of a dramatic kind, that his political heirs inside the Spanish state remained very much alive.

There have been 5 years of elaborate collaboration between the "democratic" sections of Franco's political elite (organised in Adolfo Suarez' Democratic Centre Union) and the leaders of the major workers' parties to set up bourgeois parliamentary democracy in Spain.

Success:

The exercise has been a considerable success in the sense that Spain's "peaceful transition from Francoism to democracy" has been officially accepted from Washington to Moscow and Peking and by the leaders of workers' organisations everywhere.

Also large sections of the political left in Spain, including Trotskyist parties such as the LCR, have accepted that the Spanish state has indeed undergone a qualitative democratic change.

Of course the present state system is significantly different from Franco's dictatorship in that like all bourgeois democratic. states it rests partly on the systematic collaboration of the apparatuses of the main workers' organisations with capitalist state power.

Also like all other bourgeois democratic states, capitalist state power rests ultimately on the armed might of the repressive state apparatus-the army and the police.

But in most bourgeois democracies, despite the daily use of that apparatus, despite the immense political power and influence of its high officials, it is constrained by the bourgeoisie's definitive though not unconditional decision to base its rule primarily on the political . control of the oppressed classes, granting them various degrees of legal rights.

In Spain today that situation is less clear cut.

Caution

Th e 'democratic' bourgeoisie have approached their democratisation plans with caution and uncertainty and have never made the definitive steps which were made, for example, by the Italian and German bourgeoisies after the defeat of their Nazi and fascist regimes.

Attacks

This is reflected in the Spanish laws which still involve more fundamental attacks on political and personal freedoms than do those of most West European states.

Büt more than anything else is reflected in the nature of army and the police.

These are in essence exacity in the form that Franco left them-still even dominated by the personnel he appointed.

And they retain many legal powers which are preserved directly from the Franço era and which are not even nominally sanctioned by the Cortes (parliament).

In particular the military can conduct trials and imprison civilians in their own courts without recourse to the main legal system of the country. This was done in the case of the "Els Joglars" theatre group in 1978.

3 months jail It has become evident recently in any case that the civil courts are themselves still manned by Franco appointees and in close liaison with the military.

Over the last two weeks the civil courts have summarily acquitted Franco's daughter of a smuggling charge and they have sentenced the editor of El Pais -the country's most prestigious bourgeois daily newspaper-to three months in jail for criticising two years ago the treatment of the Els Joglars group and other restrictions on the freedom of expression in Spain.

Since the trial El Pais has revealed the existence of a massive plot by the state secret services to frame the editor as a KGB agent.

At the same time a military court, after hearing the most rapid and superficial evidence, has sentenced two: officers involved in the "Operation Galaxy" attempted military coup two years ago to a derisory six-month sentence-the minimum for offence. the It is almost certain that the trial was rushed through in order to protect senior officers still in their posts who were implicated in the attempt.

These events led even the French bourgeois paper Le Monde to conclude on May 15 that "The political situation in Spain is worsening. Facts are accumulating which show that the police and the magistrature have hardly changed since Francoism."

In addition to the examples of Francoism within the state Le Monde also reported a sharp recent increase in fascist demonstrations and attacks against workers and left wing political militants.

On May 1 a demonstrator was knifed to death. One person was shot dead and a number wounded in a recent fascist attack on a cafe. And students of the Madrid law faculty were set upon with chains and iron bars.

CP leader Carrillo The new Interior Minister Juan Jose Rason. laughably dismissed these events as "unfortunate acts of emotion and passion"

But there is growing evidence that they are carefully planned and coordinated by forces within the state apparatus.

This series of alarming developments produced last week, the most heated debate of the present Spanish parliament.

Face-lift

Socialist and Communist Party MPs were not surprisingly furious.. Such obvious evidence of the unreformed nature of so much of the Spanish state apparatus exposes the criminal role that has been played in recent years by the reformists and Stalinists themselves.

At the head of the labour movement they have collaborated with the bourgeoisie in giving a "democratic" face-lift to a state which is still Francoist in so many fundamental respects.

The reformist and Stalinist leaders, for all their fury in the Cortes, still stand as mortal enemies of the needed establishment of independent work ing class self defence organisations against the growing peril of fascism in Spain.

PERU

As we go to press results of the Peruvian election s, are stil awaited. A full bi ickground article will appear in next week's Socialist Press.