<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>On November 23, 1975, the Valley of the Fallen was the site of the funeral for dictator Francisco Franco, who had died three days earlier after ruling Spain with an iron fist for almost forty years. The burial was witnessed by a large crowd, but, unlike what happened two days later at the coronation of Juan Carlos I, the attendance of foreign heads of state at the funeral of the man who had come to be known as the “sentinel of the West” was negligible.</strong></h4> In fact, the international representation was limited to three “minor lights,” according to the expression used by the then United States ambassador to Spain, Wells Stabler, during his report to the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger: King Hussein of Jordan, Prince Rainier of Monaco, and the dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet. Also in attendance were Imelda Marcos, wife of Ferdinand Marcos, dictator of the Philippines since 1965, and US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. This limited international presence likely reflects, to a large extent, the international trajectory of a regime that, as we will see later, was born and practically died isolated from the international stage—the same international stage that was hostile to Franco after World War II but allowed him to survive politically during the Cold War. [caption id="attachment_130822" align="alignnone" width="750"]<img class="wp-image-130822 size-jnews-750x375" src="https://thediplomatinspain.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Franco-Pinochet-750x375.jpg" alt="" width="750" height="375" /> Pinochet with Imelda Marcos at Franco's funeral.[/caption] Francisco Franco, who had grown up in a military atmosphere of indignation and impotence over the losses of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, developed, as a soldier, obsessed with the idea of restoring Spain's international prestige, a prestige that, for him, was inextricably linked to the recovery of its empire, however minuscule, while the other Western powers divided the world among themselves. Influenced by his personal demons and the expansionist ideas of the Falange, Spain's first fascist party, Franco readily blamed liberalism, Freemasonry, and communism for the "loss of Spain." It was within this framework, and in the context of the military conspiracy against the Republic, that the general became drawn to the New World Order created by Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. As is well known, it was to them that he turned for help in 1936, when a military uprising against the Republic began, in which he was not yet the supreme leader. While the democratic powers, particularly the United Kingdom and France, opted for a Non-Intervention Pact to appease fascism and prevent greater evils (which, obviously, they not only failed to prevent, but actually reinforced), Hitler and Mussolini decided to disregard the Pact (which they had signed) and send Franco the Condor Legion and the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie, in addition to weapons and vital supplies. With that decision, the two Axis powers not only clearly determined the outcome of the Civil War in favor of the Nationalists but also helped elevate Franco, the military officer who had arranged that aid, to the position of supreme leader of the rebellion. “If I hadn't decided to send him our first Junkers aircraft in 1936, Franco would never have survived,” the Führer declared years later. Moreover, Franco had access almost from the beginning to support that would prove invaluable: it is estimated that 90 percent of the Spanish diplomatic and consular corps abandoned their posts, and the Republic was forced to resort to left-wing intellectuals and politicians to replace the disaffected diplomats in key locations such as Washington, Moscow, and Paris. In contrast, the Nationalists were able to count on a large contingent of professional diplomats in London, Berlin, and Paris itself. <h5><strong>World War II</strong></h5> Once the Civil War ended and World War II broke out, Franco began maneuvering to participate in the benefits of the New Order. In 1939, Spain joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, launched by Germany and Japan against the USSR of Joseph Stalin, and in 1940 it decided to move from Spain's initial "neutrality" to declaring the status of "non-belligerent" (not recognized in international law), especially when, after the offensive in France, everything pointed to a victory for the Axis powers. [caption id="attachment_130818" align="alignnone" width="750"]<img class="wp-image-130818 size-jnews-750x536" src="https://thediplomatinspain.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Franco-Hitler-750x536.jpg" alt="" width="750" height="536" /> The meeting between Franco and Hitler in Hendaye.[/caption] It was in this context that the famous and fabricated Hendaye meeting took place in October 1940, in which, according to subsequent Francoist propaganda, Franco "stopped" Hitler by refusing to intervene in the war. In reality, as evidence and testimonies demonstrate, Franco offered Hitler entry into the war in exchange for the surrender of French Morocco (which would have forced the Führer to confront his ally Philippe Pétain), among other territories, as well as a series of essential supplies. Ultimately, Hitler preferred not to rely on such an expensive and weakened ally who, besides demanding unacceptable conditions, would have been of no help. All of Franco's assistance was limited to sending the Blue Division to Russia, supporting German espionage from Spanish territory, and sending supplies such as food (from a starving Spain) and tungsten, with which he also paid off the enormous debt incurred with Germany for its military aid during the Civil War. Meanwhile, British intelligence bribed high-ranking Francoists to distance the regime from the Axis powers, and the US continued to pressure Franco through oil supplies. "Before going through this again, I'd rather have three or four teeth pulled," Hitler told Mussolini. With the war's tide turning, Franco, whose true interest was remaining in power, began to activate his entire survival apparatus. On May 8, 1945, the regime broke off relations with the Third Reich, and from then on, Francoist propaganda was responsible for disseminating the aforementioned image of Franco as someone who stood up to Hitler and saved Spain from World War II, replacing fascist rhetoric and aesthetics with the image of a Catholic and anti-communist regime more palatable to the Allies. “Our Catholicism, our anti-communism, and our strategic position”: these were the three “weapons” proposed by the then Undersecretary of the Presidency, Luis Carrero Blanco, to Franco to salvage the situation. The gamble paid off: while all the fascist dictatorships that emerged in Europe during the 1930s fell one by one by force of arms, those of Spain and Portugal, which did not enter the war, would survive for many decades. In fact, Portugal became, from those early years onward, an almost obsessive priority of Franco's first foreign policy. From the signing of the Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression in March 1939, Franco and the Portuguese dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, met seven times until 1963, always in border towns and always within Spain. Those were the only times Salazar left his country. In Franco's case, the exception was his visit to Portugal in October 1949. From then on, the Spanish dictator never left Spain again until his death. <h5><strong>The Post-World War II Era</strong></h5> Once World War II ended, the situation became very complicated for Franco because of his relations with the Axis powers. In the summer of 1945, the Allied powers, meeting at the Potsdam Conference, addressed the “Spanish Question” and condemned Franco's dictatorship. In 1946, the General Assembly of the newly formed UN recommended the withdrawal of Spanish ambassadors (only chargés d'affaires remained), a recommendation that was followed by all countries except Portugal, Ireland, Switzerland, and the Vatican, thus excluding Spain from the organization. In 1947, Spain was also excluded from the Marshall Plan. Nevertheless, for the regime's leaders, and despite international pressure, the idea began to take hold that the worst was over. Indeed, just as they had done nothing to prevent Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States also did nothing to truly defeat it once World War II had ended. In fact, neither did Stalin's USSR, which was far more interested in preventing a new source of instability in Western Europe and defending its "socialism in one country" than in exporting any "communist revolution" beyond its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In those early days, Franco sought the support of the Arab world and secured the backing of the Peronist regime in Argentina, which resulted in Evita Perón's emblematic visit to Spain in 1947 and the shipment of wheat to a country starving and devastated by the policy of economic autarky (clearly fascist in origin) imposed by Franco's regime. <h5><strong>The Cold War</strong></h5> However, the situation began to change in 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War, an event that became the true coming-of-age of the Cold War between the US and the USSR. It was in this context that the Franco regime definitively donned the mantle of “sentinel of the West” against communism to attract the interest of the United States, whose president, Harry L. Truman, expressly repudiated Franco, but had no qualms about welcoming him as an ally. In July 1951, Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations for the US, met with Franco in Madrid to discuss the strategic importance of Spain in Western Europe and its “dominant position in air and naval communications in the Mediterranean.” The result was the signing, in September 1953, of the Madrid Pacts, three defense agreements by which the United States committed to providing economic aid (financial, raw materials, and food) and military and technological assistance (valued at $226 million, including weapons and vehicles already used in World War II) to Spain in exchange for Franco allowing the installation of four military bases in Torrejón de Ardoz, Morón, Rota, and Zaragoza. These pacts had two outcomes: first, the massive influx of American funds. Between 1951 and 1958, Spain received $800 million in American aid, of which $300 million was in the form of loans and the remainder in grants. This amount was less than the Marshall Plan aid received by other countries, but it helped increase imports (40% of their value was covered by US aid) and facilitated the transfer of raw materials, industrial goods, and food to Spain. On the other hand, although Franco later boasted of having “fully” safeguarded national sovereignty, the Madrid Pacts placed Spain in the crosshairs of the USSR, especially with the opening of military bases near four major cities, with the inherent risks (the 1966 crash of a nuclear-powered aircraft in Palomares, Almería, was a grim reminder of this risk). Under the Pacts, US military personnel were exempt from Spanish jurisdiction regarding laws and taxes, and the power to decide on the use of the bases in the event of war rested exclusively with the US. In any case, the rapprochement with the United States was the first major step toward the international acceptance of the regime. In 1953, Franco signed the concordat with the Holy See, which allowed him to further consolidate the use of Catholicism as a source of national and international legitimacy, and, in 1955, Spain joined the UN and in subsequent years joined the IMF, the World Bank and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, now OECD). <h5><strong>The “Developmentalist” Era</strong></h5> In December 1959, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first US president to make an official visit to Spain and the first head of state of a democratic country to be received by Franco. That same year, the Francoist government was forced, in order to avoid an all-too-inevitable bankruptcy (the balance of payments was at rock bottom, mainly due to Franco's obsession with overvaluing the peseta for the sake of “prestige”), to implement a Stabilization Plan that helped liberalize the economy. The new scenario of “developmentalism” or the “Spanish miracle,” which was greatly favored by the extraordinary international economic environment, forced the regime to look even more outward, not only because of the growing influx of foreign investment (which increased from $100 million to $1 billion between 1960 and 1970), but also because of the mass exodus of emigrants (it is estimated that two million Spaniards had to emigrate to France, West Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Belgium, or the Netherlands, leaving behind remittances in foreign currency that rose from $55 million in 1960 to $600 million in 1972) and the massive arrival of tourists to Spain (“Spain is different”), mainly from France, the United Kingdom, and West Germany. This latter circumstance forced the regime to soften its repressive policies regarding customs (for example, by authorizing the use of bikinis). In this same context, with the Cold War at its height, Western countries began to turn a blind eye to the lack of freedoms and human rights violations in Spain. Countries like France and Germany began signing technical agreements with the Franco regime, while the US systematically renewed bilateral pacts, culminating in the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1970. Against this backdrop, and amidst a global wave of decolonization, Franco agreed to betray himself and his past by accepting Spain's withdrawal from Morocco in 1956 (which did not prevent a fierce armed conflict in the Sidi Ifni region between 1957 and 1958, duly silenced by the regime's censorship, and which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of young Spaniards). To make matters worse, in 1973 Franco agreed to establish diplomatic relations with no less than two communist powers: East Germany and Mao Zedong's China. Where Franco could not make progress, despite the best efforts of his technocratic ministers, was in forging closer ties with the then European Common Market, which rejected his first application in 1962 and did the same with subsequent applications in 1964 and 1965 (at most, a Preferential Trade Agreement was signed in 1970). His attempts to join NATO and the Council of Europe were also unsuccessful. The Franco regime's pro-Nazi past and lack of democracy meant that the members of these organizations were still overly concerned. Obviously, as these rejections demonstrate, Western tolerance had its limits, as was made clear by the international protests against the Burgos Trials of 1970, in which nine ETA militants were sentenced to death, later commuted. <h5><strong>The crisis and the end of the regime</strong></h5> The definitive turning point, which would lead to the “three minor lights” at Franco’s funeral, occurred in 1973 due to two decisive events: OPEC’s decision to raise the price of oil, which triggered a global economic crisis that, in the case of Spain, exposed the severe imbalances and extreme external dependence (especially on investments and monetary flows from emigration and tourism) of the so-called “Spanish miracle”; and the assassination of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco by ETA, which generated enormous uncertainty among the regime’s major political factions about the future and resulted in a sharp increase in repression by the new government of Carlos Arias Navarro. The end of the "developmentalist" period thus coincided with a sharp increase in the international disrepute of the dictatorship, which was exacerbated by the executions of an anti-Franco activist and a German citizen in March 1974 and the firing squad executions of three ETA members and two FRAP members in September 1975. As a consequence of these latter executions, in which Franco even ignored Pope Paul VI's plea for clemency, the European Economic Community froze accession negotiations, 16 countries withdrew their ambassadors (the largest withdrawal of foreign ambassadors from Spain since 1946), and there were massive demonstrations outside Spanish diplomatic missions abroad, including the burning of the Embassy in Lisbon. In fact, the withdrawal of foreign diplomatic personnel was more decisive than that which had occurred in 1946. True to his eternal official rhetoric, Franco interpreted these reactions, in his last public address in the Plaza de Oriente on October 1st, as part of a “leftist Masonic conspiracy in collusion with communist terrorist subversion.” One exception, unsurprisingly, was Augusto Pinochet's Chile, who wrote a personal letter to Franco (dictator to dictator) to express “the absolute solidarity of the people and Government of Chile with the people and Government of Spain” in the face of the “infamous international campaign that Spain is facing.” [caption id="attachment_122342" align="alignnone" width="750"]<img class="wp-image-122342 size-full" src="https://thediplomatinspain.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/marcha-verde.jpg" alt="" width="750" height="500" /> The Green March[/caption] As if that weren't enough, just nine days after Franco's death, King Hassan II of Morocco launched his spectacular Green March against what was then Spanish Sahara. The Spanish Army, with all its forces deployed, offered no resistance, and the march concluded with Spain's decision to negotiate the handover of the territory to Rabat. In one of history's ironies, the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorial regime bore a certain resemblance to its beginnings, after a sinister interlude of almost forty years. If in 1946 he had suffered a mass withdrawal of ambassadors due to his undeniable ties with Hitler, just two months before his death he experienced another mass withdrawal, this time in protest against executions. And, adding to the irony, a dictator whose military and political career had begun in North Africa found himself, in his death throes, facing the occupation of the Spanish Sahara by the King of Morocco without firing a single shot to prevent it.
