SPAIN: Outside, Inside

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Relief. A greater tale of woe was brought back from Spain to the U. S. last week by Alfred Cope, regional director in southeastern Spain of the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker relief organization. Mr. Cope believed that some 500,000 Loyalist supporters were in concentration camps; he thought that at least 70,000 Italian troops remained in Spain, despite stories of withdrawals; he told one story of 20,000 Loyalist troops imprisoned in a bullring in Ciudad Real for 20 days with little food and not much water.

More serious and more detailed were Mr. Cope's charges that the Franco regime had seized six or seven shiploads of food that the Quakers sent to Spain for 100,000 half-starved children. As far as he could find out, the food went to the Army. In Murcia, he said, he turned over to the Spanish Social Auxiliary, the official Spanish relief organization, enough food to last the 1,000 children they were feeding there a month and three days. It was all gone in ten days.

"While the food lasted, moreover, the official orders in the clinic were that the children had to sing the Franco Nationalist songs before they were fed," said Mr. Cope. "We never asked them to sing Loyalist songs when the Loyalists held that territory, and we do not now like to ask them to sing Nationalist songs in thanksgiving for our food."

Upshot of the difficulties in Spain, Mr. Cope announced, was that the Quakers were pulling out. "It would simply be dishonest to continue in Spain to spend the money being collected abroad for this children's relief," he said. "Franco has assured us he would like to have us continue the work until we are ready to retire, but it is evident that he wants the food, not us. There is no way of being sure where the food is likely to go."

Oath. Meanwhile, in Burgos, Generalissimo Franco moved to set up a "corporate state" on the model of Fascist Italy. A $70,000,000 subsidy was set aside to build up a merchant fleet to "display New Spain's prestige in America and the Far East." Curtailment of imports of gasoline, motor cars, machinery, motion picture films was announced. Syndical labor laws were ordered written, with labor unions being organized on the approved Fascist model. Strikes will be outlawed, the unions will be controlled by the Government. New contracts will be written for tenant farming, and the Spanish Phalanx's program for redistribution of some large estates will be carried out.

That the state will be a strictly authoritarian one could not be doubted after the oath which was sprung last week on the members of the Grand Council of the Falange Espanola Tradidonalista, the new Fascist substitute for Parliament. Raimundo Fernandez Cuesta, secretary general of Spain's only party, demanded "blind obedience" to Generalissimo Franco, ended by proposing an oath: "We proclaim our inflexible will to obey unconditionally the orders of our Caudillo. As proof of that sacred promise, let the Councillors of the Falange swear with me before God always to obey the Caudillo and those who receive from him the power of commandment." The Councillors swore.