|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Spain's Democratic Transition
| Article
# : |
18854 |
|
|
Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
|
| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
3,074 Words |
| Author
: |
Stephen Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, is
author of the forthcoming Strange Silence, an account of the
election of Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua (ICS Press). |
In July 1991, 23 heads of state from 21 Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations met in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the first-ever Ibero-American summit. Those present included the leaders of the two former colonial powers, Spain and Portugal. King Juan Carlos and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez represented the former, while Present Mario Soares and Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva spoke for Lisbon.
A significant high point of the meeting came when Gonzalez rose to denounce Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, also present, stating, "We should allow parliaments and people to write their own sovereign history and relegate the feats of guerrillas to the imagination of novelists."
If a historical spirit was present at the summit, it was less that of the Iberian conquest of the New World in the 15th century than of the Iberian conquest of democracy, beginning in the 1970s--and symbolized, above all, by Spain's democratic transition.
Spain's transition began on November 20, 1975, with the death of dictator Francisco Franco y Bahamonde. This even marked, necessarily, the end of an era in the country's history. Although largely unperceived at the time, the event also heralded the opening of a democratic epoch that would prove significant for the entire Hispanic world.
When Franco died, Spain seemed highly polarized between an authoritarian, "fascist" Right that had ruled through a single state party for nearly 40 years with varying degrees of repression, and a radical Left that, nurtured in clandestine traditions under the dictatorship, retained a "revolutionary" allure.
To many on both sides, political violence seemed inevitable in the post-Franco era. In the last years of the old regime, leftists were executed--in the last usages of capital punishment in Western Europe--or simply "disappeared." Demonstrations were violently broken up, as rightist hardliners continued dominating the police and army. For its part, the Left cleaved to the terrorist elements among the Basque nationalists, giving the boarder radical intelligentsia and even the labor movement a tinge of such influence.
Meanwhile, the European ultraleft that had dreamed of a grand upheaval since the heady days of 1968 looked to Spain as a historic field of battle, on which the brutal principles of revolutionary extremism would once again be brought to play.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
