Spain: A Mood of Unease

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I beg you to pay attention to the tensions that manifest themselves in different sectors of our national life.

-Madrid Archbishop

Casimiro Morcillo Gonzalez Let no one, from without or within harbor the least hope of being able to alter in any respect our institutional system.

-Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco,

Spain's Vice President These statements recently electrified Spam, where protest is still a tentative testing affair. The speakers, representing the church and the armed forces earned the force of two powerful arms of the political triad that has supported the rule of Generalissimo Francisco Franco for 32 years (the third being the aristocracy). One man is a usually conservative cleric, pleading with the government to be more liberal; the other is the officer who administers Spain on a day-to-day basis, warning the country against liberalism. Both addressed themselves to the same phenomenon: the mood of questioning, dissatisfaction and anxiety that has come over today's Spain.

Though the country's spreading sense of unease began long before De Gaulle's present troubles, and goes to the very core of Spain's Establishment, the upheaval in France has served to sharpen and intensify it. Spain has never been exactly a contented country—it has always had too many inequities, too much passion for that— but at no time in recent history has it been beset by such a sense of frustration.

Modern Hero. The frustration is felt t almost every level of Spanish life and has taken particularly deep root among Spain's 12 million workers, whose labor syndicates are creatures of Franco's government and easily bend to its will. In hopes of lobbying for labor gains, Spain's workers have boldly launched a grass-roots organization of their own as a rival to the syndicates. Called the Workers' Commissions movement, it has spread rapidly iow has chapters in factories all over Spain; it has also reached some white-collar employees, such as bank clerks and office personnel. In theory, the commissions are illegal, but in fact they are tacitly tolerated by the government, though one of their organizers, ex-Socialist Marcelino Camacho, is now on trial in Madrid on charges of leading an illegal demonstration. As a result, Camacho has become something of a modern Spanish hero.

At first the commissions' tactics were cautious, involving in-plant petitioning agitation and brief work stoppages. But as the movement grew, it acquired the support of students, churchmen, and political groups ranging from liberal Monarchists to the Communist Party . Non- violence remains its credo, but the threat of more audacious and aggressive action is always there. Some plant executives leaving the factory parking lot at day's end now prudently check to be sure that their brake-fluid lines have not been cut or their tires slashed. On May Day, the Workers' Commissions turned out such a huge crowd of marchers that the government nervously called full "red alert" and positioned police and riot squads all over Madrid.