SPAIN: Pomp, Prayer and Protest

"He is obviously a man with a lot on his mind," explained a government official in Madrid. He was accounting for the solemnly noncommittal look on the face of King Juan Carlos I last week as he received the cheers of a crowd almost three times bigger than the one that had seen off Franco's funeral cortege the previous Sunday. Although Queen Sofia seemed to enjoy the adulatory crush of those gathered in Madrid's Plaza de Oriente, the King remained impassive. In the supportive presence of French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, West German President Walter Scheel, U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Britain's Prince Philip, Spain's new King had just decorously assumed power during an official anointing ceremony at the Church of San Jerónimo in Madrid. The façade of an orderly transfer of power from Francisco Franco to his designated heir was persuasively preserved, but a hundred questions were left hanging over the elaborate ritual of pomp and prayer.

Candid Warning. Among the things the King had to mull over was an unexpectedly candid warning from Vicente Cardinal Enrique y Tarancón, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Madrid. In a televised sermon delivered during the accession ceremonies, Cardinal Tarancón announced the church's intention to speak out "and shout if necessary" to protect human rights and liberties in Spain. The church would demand, he added, that Juan Carlos' government "promote the exercise of adequate freedom for all and the necessary common participation in all the problems and decisions of government."

As a kind of promissory gesture toward the liberalization demanded by opponents of Francoism, Juan Carlos last week granted a general pardon that will affect some 70% of Spain's prison population. The royal pardon, however, will apply to only about half the estimated 2,000 prisoners who are serving sentences or awaiting trial for political offenses. Among those the decree explicitly excluded were 250 or so prisoners who have been charged with crimes of terrorism, propagandizing for terrorism or membership in Communist and separatist groups condemned under the draconian legislation approved last July by the Franco regime. The death penalty will not be imposed upon anyone convicted before Juan Carlos' accession, but that was the only concession that the King made to opposition demands for immediate release of all prisoners arrested under the July decree.

To protest the limits on the pardons, 3,000 demonstrators — perhaps the largest crowd the outlawed Spanish Communist Party has dared muster since the end of the Civil War in 1939 — gathered outside the Carabanchel Prison in the southwest outskirts of Madrid. As the Te Deum mass for Juan Carlos was scheduled to begin at San Jerónimo, the protesters marched on the sprawling prison, where a number of prominent leftists, including Trade Union Leader Marcelino Camacho, were incarcerated. Mounted police charged the crowd and dispersed them with tear gas, clubs and a water cannon. There were no injuries, and the 23 people arrested were released within 24 hours.