SPAIN: Repression stepped uf
Socialist Press1976 1976-12-01Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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Spain's Francoist regime secured a large majority in the fake parliament, the Cortes, for its "democratic" constitutional reform.
This will now be submitted to a national referendum of December 15th.
In this democratic referendum campaigning for abstention (the policy of virtually all the workers' parties, mcluding the Stalinists and retormists will be considered illegal and, ' Interior Minister Martin Villa implied, repressed without mercy.
Only officially registered political parties will have radio and television time: that excludes all parties except the few composed of Franco's ex-cabinet ministers.
The bourgeois parties of the Democratic Coordination, however, along with the small reformist ropular Socialist Party, have, with a predictable lack of principle, indicated that they will participate in the referendum.
This breaks previous agreements within the class-collaborationist opposition and probably marks the end of the Democratic Coordination.
The regime's "opening towards democracy" has coincided with the further stepping up of political repressive measures.
150 members of the LCR-ETA 6 (sympathising section of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International) were arrested while holding a clandestine meeting in a monastery near San Sebastian in the North.
In Madrid five members of the Communist Party were arrested for distributing leaflets.
Action against the striking building workers in Euskadi has continued, meetings of workers being violently broken up by armed police. Such actions can be expected to mount as the regime tries to suppress all signs of independent political or trade union activity during the referendum.
The last • two weeks it has brought militant demonstrations from a new source.