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Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices
So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. How did you get 30, 30, how did you get 30, how did you get 20, 20, 20, how did you get 20, 20, how did you get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month? Sold! Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. It's July 2018. Just outside the Spanish city of Valencia.
The sun beats down on a group of people gathered around a hole in the ground. At the bottom of the deep square trench, men and women in masks and hard hats are on their hands and knees. Sweating in the heat, they sift earnestly through the sandy colored earth. As they work, probing deeper and deeper downwards, they start to find what they're looking for. Small fragments of bone give way to bigger and bigger pieces, until soon, the diggers begin to unearth hundreds of tangled skeletons.
Rope from where the bodies were bound is still strung around the skeleton's wrists. Holes in the skulls indicate that they were executed at point-blank range. Automatic rifle shells litter the surrounding area. These grim discoveries are, alas, unsurprising, because this is the site of a mass grave. This excavated burial ground is barely 20 minutes from the bustling center of Spain's third largest city.
It's less than an hour's drive from multiple havens of sun and sand on the Mediterranean coast. Each summer foreign tourists flock to this country en masse. Unbeknownst to most of them, the land on which they recline, sip cocktails, and forget their problems actually contains untold dark secrets. This site, in Paterna, on the outskirts of Valencia, is just one of thousands of mass burial grounds strewn across the Spanish landscape.
In fact, after Cambodia, Spain contains the highest number of mass graves in the world. The vast majority of them are the result of the White Terror, a campaign of repression orchestrated by Francisco Franco, which killed around 200,000 Spanish people. This was no distant medieval war, lost to the mists of time. It happened in living memory, in the 1930s and 1940s.
If you've never heard of Francisco Franco or the White Terror, there's a reason for that. For decades, a code of silence has shrouded them from public view. Only within the last few years has the true extent of the horror been literally unearthed. My name is Paul McGann, and welcome to Real Dictators, the series that explores the hidden lives of tyrants. In this episode, we'll uncover the story of the man who rose through the ranks of the military to become the strongman leader of Spain.
This is the hidden history of General Francisco Franco. And this is Real Dictators. In July 2018, just as the mass grave in Paterna is being excavated, some 250 miles away, a group of people gather at a very different tomb. One hour outside of the Spanish capital, Madrid, tucked amidst the verdant hills of the Guadarrama Mountains, lies a monument. Set atop a rocky outcrop,
An enormous 150-meter high cross rises into the air. Below the cross is a glistening white arcade. It seems to jut organically out of the rock itself. Walking along a path and up some steps, you're led right into the hollowed-out center of the hill. Here lies a crypt. This ornate complex is known as the Valley of the Fallen. The sheer scale of the place makes you think of kings and queens. But this is not the resting place of royalty.
Inside this mountain lies the body of Spain's departed dictator. Well, for now at least. Francisco Franco has lain at the Valley of the Fallen ever since his death in 1975. But by 2018, growing public pressure has led the authorities to begin the process of exhuming Franco's remains and moving them somewhere else, to a location rather less reverential than the spectacular surroundings of this valley.
This move has been met with a considerable backlash. On this summer's day in 2018, hundreds of protesters have gathered outside the doors to Franco's tomb. They want his body to stay here, to remain a site of pilgrimage for fascists across the land. The gathered demonstrators raise their arms in the fascist salute. Many of them smile for the cameras while doing so. They break out into chants like "Franco, Franco, Franco" and "Spaniards, yes. Refugees, no."
These far-right enthusiasts look rather different from what you might expect. They are fresh-faced college students, affluent housewives, elderly grandparents. They are proof that even today some Spanish citizens continue to venerate their departed despot. When you think of European dictators, two names usually spring to mind. Hitler and Mussolini. The name Francisco Franco, however, is consistently forgotten.
This general turned tyrant rose to power during the bloody Spanish Civil War, which claimed 500,000 lives. Franco ruled Spain from 1939 all the way until 1975. While other countries struggled to come to terms with their disturbing pasts, Franco remained in place. How was it that long after Hitler and Mussolini left the stage, Franco remained in power and died an old man, warm in his bed?
And why did this murderous dictator's body remain in a national monument for decades? Let's travel back in time and find out. Once Francisco Franco rose to power, he, like all dictators, worked closely with propagandists. Together they meticulously crafted an image of Franco the strongman, Franco the fearless general, Franco the leader. But as a child in the small Galician town of El Ferrol, Franco has a very different reputation.
Dr. Antonio Casola Sanchez is an historian and author of Franco: The Biography of the Myth. Franco was not a very imposing figure. He was short, skinny. He had a voice that was not exactly very manly. So I think he overcompensated with being rather distant and cold. He was a man who did not open easily to others. And he will be like that the rest of his life.
Born on December 4, 1892, Francisco is the second of five children. His father, Nicholas, is an officer in the Naval Administration Corps. He exhibits clear favoritism to his other sons, Nicholas Jr. and Ramon. Nicholas Sr. is, at the best of times, an absent father. He prefers card games and drinking at the officers' club to spending time with his family. He also has a penchant for young, beautiful women. He regularly cheats on his wife, Pilar.
During his brief stints at home, Nicolas is an angry authoritarian figure who flies into unpredictable rages. He views Francisco with disdain and taunts him mercilessly. During his 36-year reign, Franco will be known by many names: El Caudillo, the leader, and even the savior, to name but a few. But to his father, he is Paquita.
The diminutive of Francesca, or Marika, a homophobic slur, Nicolas and Ramon will inherit their father's rebellious nature. Young Francisco will acquire only his coldness. As a boy, Francisco's sisters call him a little old man. He's quiet and reserved. When he's eight years old, one of his sisters heats a long needle to the point that it is red hot and presses it to his wrist. It's a cruel joke amongst siblings.
But rather than crying, young Francisco remains stoic, or so the story goes. He sets his small jaw and grits his teeth. When the ordeal is over, he simply remarks upon how shocking the way burnt flesh smells. Francisco really only shows emotion with his mother, Pilar. She is a pious and conservative Roman Catholic from the upper middle class. In contrast to his father's disinterest, Franco's mother coddles him.
She is a gentlewoman who treats her children with kindness and endures her husband's infidelities by throwing herself into her faith. Of all her children, Pilar is closest with Francisco. He inherits his mother's piety and cries upon receiving his first communion. This inspires a lifelong devotion not only to his mother but to her beliefs. Conservative Roman Catholicism will be central to the future Franco regime.
The relationship between mother and son becomes even closer when, in 1907, Franco's father abandons the family for another woman and starts a new life in the capital Madrid. As a young boy, Francisco dreams of the sea. His hometown, El Ferrol, is a port city in the Spanish region of Galicia. Galicia is in Spain's northwest. El Ferrol faces out into the Atlantic Ocean. It's where the Spanish Navy dock many of their warships.
For 400 years, from the 1400s on, Spain laid claim to one of the largest global empires in history. At their height in the mid 1700s, Spain's imperial holdings included swathes of South, Central and North America, including territories that now form the US Southwest. But by the time of Franco's childhood, in the late 1800s, Spain has undergone a painful period of transition. After losing the vast majority of their overseas territories,
the country finds itself in a much reduced position. Like four generations of Franco men before him, young Francisco is destined to become a naval officer. But Spain's devastating loss in the Spanish-American War of 1898 crushes the boy's dreams of continuing the family tradition. Dr. Peter Anderson, historian and author of Franco's Famine, explains:
Spain suffers a terrible military defeat in a war, a very ill-judged war with the United States over Spain's last remaining colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. I say ill-judged because the Spanish at this time had a very weak navy, largely made up of wooden vessels, whereas the United States was a rising imperial power with an increasingly formidable navy.
The Spanish Navy suffers a catastrophic defeat in Manila, where the Spanish fleet is annihilated by the steel ships of the United States fleet. A similar disaster overtakes the Spanish fleet in Cuba, where only one boat or one vessel that the Spanish have is made of steel, the others are made of wood, completely sunk. The Spanish admiral is captured, taken prisoner.
Now this is a complete shock to the Spaniards. The Spaniards had thought that they had a much older civilization, a much more powerful reputation. They thought of the United States as an up-and-coming power. They'd been expecting, perhaps inadvisedly, or some groups had been expecting, a dramatic victory. Spain's crushing loss demoralizes the country as a whole. But it hits El Ferrol particularly hard.
The town is home to one of Spain's largest naval bases, as well as a shipyard. The majority of its citizens, including most of the Franco family, are employed by the navy. Now, in the aftermath of defeat to America, they lose their jobs.
Franco's hometown, this naval town, very dependent on the navy for employment and status, I suppose. Catastrophic loss of the navy. This leads to a complete sense of Spain as a defeated nation, as a second-rate power. A country that had once ruled large parts of the world, had a huge empire in South America, now seemed to be reduced to just the homeland, if you like.
So it was a tremendous shock, led to a tremendous sense of pessimism, but also a kind of desire to settle accounts with those who were considered responsible and a desire to regenerate Spain. And I think that's also going to be at the heart of Franco's thinking and the way in which he saw the world.
As Franco grows up,
This desire to reboot Spain and exact revenge on her foes will dominate his thinking and his policies, especially after further ill-fated ventures by the Spanish overseas.
He came to blame a lot of politicians for the loss of Morocco, and he came to think that the army in particular would be able to overcome this sense of disaster. So what we can see here, even though Franco is very young, we can see the start of another really important trade
in Franco's character, which is that he starts to see a division, if you like, between the military and the armed forces, who he sees as being capable and the best representatives of the nation, and politicians who he blames for defeat and disaster. That's all to come. At the time of defeat of the United States, young Francisco has a front-row seat to the carnage left behind.
Sir Paul Preston is an historian and author of the biography, Franco. El Ferrol was the port where many of the wounded and the corpses were brought back. El Ferrol is a very small town and the family home was very near the docks.
So for a child who was used to playing on the docks, he and his pals, you know, the kids of his age were traumatized by what they saw. And that was one of the very strong influences in his life, the sense that why did Spain get defeated? As a result of this downturn in Spain's fortunes, entrance examinations for the Navy are cancelled.
So instead Franco enrolls in the Toledo Infantry Academy in 1907 at the age of 14. Once again the boy who will one day mercilessly exterminate his detractors is bullied. His classmates mock his size, calling him "Frankito" or "Frankie-boy". He endures malicious taunts and ruthless initiations. Standing at 5 feet 4 inches, he is forced to drill using a rifle with 6 inches sawn off the barrel.
To escape his daily humiliations, Franco throws himself into the idealized military history of Spain that the boys are taught at the academy. Franco exhibits no interest in the partying and sexual exploits of his classmates. Instead, his young mind is focused on tales of grand military victories, and on mythic Spanish heroes like El Cid. El Cid was an 11th century warrior. He is a hero in parts of Spain.
Known for defending the region of Castile from invasion by the Moors of North Africa, El Cid will remain a central figure for Franco throughout his life. It's at this tender age, during his time at Toledo, that Franco begins, in his own mind, to construct his own mythology in the vein of El Cid. It's a mythology which will grow and grow as he gets older. Eventually, the myth will consume all memory of the small, frail boy from El Ferrol.
I was interviewed many years ago by an Italian journalist. At the end of the interview, she asked me which fictional or real figure of history Franco reminded me most of. And virtually without thinking, out popped from me the Wizard of Oz. And that's my idea of Franco, someone who in a way, particularly in his younger days, related to the world from behind a mask. You know, he had to pretend to be someone that he wasn't.
When Franco graduates from the Infantry Academy in June 1910, he begins making grand plans. He doesn't just want to be a soldier. He wants to be the best soldier. A general. A leader. He wants to be a hero. But there's one major obstacle in his way. Franco graduates 251st out of 312 cadets in his intake. This mediocre posting means that he has a long way to go before receiving a promotion.
If Franco remains in Spain, he's set for a long period of mundane and menial positions. There is, however, an alternative. To maintain some semblance of colonial power, the Spanish government is desperate to exert influence in North Africa, specifically in northern Morocco. Young soldiers feel incentivized to station in Morocco, because here they can be promoted more rapidly. That's if they survive.
Fighting in Morocco is highly dangerous, and many young soldiers perish long before they can rise through the ranks. It's often said that junior officers can expect to receive either "la caja" or "la faja" - a coffin or a general's sash. Franco is undeterred. For him, it's a chance to realize his dreams of military heroism. After languishing for two years at a garrison post at home in El Farol, he finally gets his shot. On February 6th, 1912,
Franco and two companions are posted as reserves to Melilla, a Spanish protectorate on the coast of Morocco. After a grueling three-day journey over the sea, Franco reports for duty at Fort Tifasor. It's part of Melilla's outer defenses. For the first time, this young man of just 19 lays eyes on a Spanish colonial town. The streets are covered in rubble and horse manure, baking in the unrelenting desert sun.
Ancient city walls block the view of the Mediterranean's deep blue waters, as well as its salty breeze. Soldiers huddle around white tents in search of shade. Others wipe sweat from their eyes while performing drills in the oven-like heat. Franco's commanding officer is a man called Colonel José Villalba Riquelme, a highly decorated and grizzled army gentleman. Riquelme is everything Franco aspires to be.
His first order to the young soldier is to cover his scabbard in matte leather to stop it glinting in the sun, and providing a target for snipers. This is Franco's first hint that his time in Morocco will be nothing like the academy, or the garrison duties he completed in El Ferro. Unlike other empires, the Spanish do not possess technological or logistical superiority. Their equipment is largely obsolete, decision-making is weighed down by the distant bureaucracy in Madrid.
The embittered local population view the Spanish troops with a deep hatred. The Spanish counter this resistance with utterly brutal tactics of colonial suppression.
The tactics of the Spanish army were not very sophisticated. The Spanish army in Morocco doesn't move big units. The level of technical equipment, etc., is pretty low. So it's basically take positions, occupy positions, and quite often practice terror on the civilians. I mean, the Spanish army eventually will use toxic gas in Morocco.
Right up until 1926, the Spanish will languish in this expensive and largely pointless conflict. But for Franco,
Morocco will be vitally important. It will harden him and shape him into the man he is to become. Indeed Franco will go on to use the very same tactics he learns in Morocco on his fellow Spaniards during the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish soldiers also set up their own interrogation centers where they're arresting large numbers of local people. They use torture quite often in these centers. And they develop the whole idea that maybe you have to clear areas of opponents.
All of these methods, these very brutal colonial methods, are later going to be transferred to the Spanish mainland, where Spanish soldiers start to treat ordinary Spaniards, political opponents as they see them, rather like colonial tribesmen, if you like. And they start to carry out the same kind of tactics with bombardments, executions, torture, and so on.
In 1938 Franco will tell a journalist: "My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force. There was born the possibility of rescuing a great Spain. There was the idea which today redeems us. Without Africa, I can scarcely explain myself to myself, nor can I explain myself to my comrades in arms." Franco develops a contempt for the decision-makers in Madrid, whom he sees as incompetent bureaucrats.
He becomes convinced that it's the army who should lead Spain, and that he is the man to command them. It's in Morocco, far from those who bullied him in El Farol in the academy, that Francisco Franco is able to reinvent himself as the hero he so desperately wants to be. But to get there, he must rise through the ranks as quickly as possible.
This is a man obsessed with promotion. He's pestering the king the whole time. He's pestering his peers, particularly his superiors, for promotion, for recognitions, for medals. He's obsessed with getting the equivalent of the Victoria Cross in the Spanish army.
Later on, he will pretend that he achieved all his promotions only because of his own merits and often with the opposition of people above him. That tells you more about his character, way more than about reality. In reality, Franco is a beneficiary of the vast network of patronage that exists in the Spanish army. By charming certain superior officers and winning them over,
Franco makes sure his name is brought up in the conversations about promotion that take place higher up the chain of command. Franco's first promotion comes just four months after he arrives in Morocco. In June 1912, the 19-year-old receives the rank of First Lieutenant. Then, in 1913, Franco transfers to the recently formed native police, the Regulares. This is a strategic move on his part. The Regulares are always at the forefront of military action.
With them, he can put his bravery on display. But life in the Regulares is no walk in the park. The conditions that a lot of the soldiers found themselves in were truly testing. One of the ways in which the Spaniards tried to exert military control was by building a series of block houses spaced at particular distances, one from another.
Soldiers would be taken to these blockhouses and for an extended period of time would have to defend them. It's obviously very hot in Morocco, there's often shortages of water, people experiencing quite strong levels of deprivation. And then, I suppose, long periods of boredom followed by periods of intense violence.
They also fight in quite brutal ways and there's a kind of cycle of violence going on here that we can see. One incident happens where a large number of Spanish soldiers are killed. Some of them are castrated, some have their heads cut off. Franco faces these atrocities with a dogged coldness. Much like the time all those years before when his sister burned him with a needle. He keeps calm and observes.
For his bravery, or rather his lack of fear, he is promoted once again in April 1915, this time to the rank of captain. But fear can be an important asset for a soldier, and Franco's risk-taking will almost cost him his life. In June 1916, the Spanish army in Morocco receives word that guerrilla tribesmen are massing in the hills surrounding Ceuta, a Spanish-held city. The guerrillas' stronghold is a small mountain top village called El Butz.
It's heavily guarded by trenches filled with riflemen. To take El Butz, the Spanish must make a frontal assault up the slope, taking heavy fire from the enemy above. It's an extremely risky proposition, one that is sure to result in heavy casualties. But as the men drop like flies around him, Francisco Franco will emerge triumphant. On the 26th of June, Franco is part of the leading company of Regulares at the forefront of the advance.
Bullets whizz past his head as he and his men run up the hill. Some dive for cover behind rocks, and the sparse Mediterranean shrubbery Franco forges on. The Spanish are already in an unenviable position, but the guerrillas have one more ace up their sleeve. Suddenly, from around the sides of the hill, other fighters begin flooding down and around the Spanish troops. Franco's battalion is now caught in crossfire.
With his superior officer badly wounded, Franco takes command himself. He manages to break through the enemy encirclement. His actions play a significant role in the ultimate fall of El Butz. But he does not leave the skirmish unscathed. Franco is shot in the stomach. In North Africa, this kind of injury is usually a death sentence. His comrades don't expect him to survive the night. For two whole weeks, the medical officer on duty battles to stop the bleeding.
Franco writhes in agony as his body fights off infection in the makeshift field hospital. But, astonishingly, he does not die. Had the bullet been a fraction of an inch off, it would have hit a vital organ, killing him instantly. Tales of Franco's incredible luck begin to spread amongst the soldiers. The Moroccan troops that serve under him in the Regulares believe that he is blessed with Barca, a divine protection given to those chosen by God.
Their assertions only confirm Franco's own belief that he has been chosen by the divine to lead Spain. Later, with the help of his propagandists, he will expand on this belief. He will weave an outlandish biblical narrative around his life.
since the moment of his birth. Even before his birth, actually. At some point, his propagandists were right that an angel appeared to his mother when she was pregnant. They create a whole religious mythology in which Franco is basically like the figure of the Christ sent by God to save Spain. So his whole life is going to be reread and reinterpreted as a life with a mission ordered by God.
So Franco was born to save Spain and everything he did in life was preordained by the divinity to achieve that. Already in 1916, important figures in the Spanish military are beginning to fall for Franco's self-styled mythology. The High Commissioner in Morocco, General Gómez Jordán, recommends Franco for promotion to the rank of Major. He also begins the procedure to give Franco Spain's highest military honor, the Laureate Cross of St. Ferdinand.
But not everyone is convinced by the precocious 23-year-old captain. Both of these proposals for honours are opposed by the Ministry of War. Some members of the jury believe Captain Franco is lying about or exaggerating his military exploits. Others cite his young age as grounds that he is yet to truly prove his worth. Franco is undeterred. He relentlessly appeals to the High Commissioner, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and even the Spanish King, Alfonso XIII.
Impressed by Franco's persistence, the King eventually gives his seal of approval to the promotion. Franco becomes a Major, but the jury still refuse to award him the Laureate Cross. To their minds, the evidence is inconclusive as to whether Franco's actions merit such acclaim. His promotion to Major will be one of the most critical points in Franco's military career. Many more promotions will shortly follow, culminating in his becoming the youngest General in Spanish history.
In the following decades, millions of Spanish citizens will come to believe in the myth of Franco. Some still believe it even today. But before he achieves his dream of becoming Spain's leader, Franco must convince the remaining doubters in the military of his self-proclaimed greatness. It won't be easy. In the next episode of Real Dictators, Franco returns to mainland Spain and takes command of an army battalion.
He starts attending a mass at a local convent, as he begins a courtship with his future wife. Separatist movements spring up across Spain, as different regions reject the central government. The country lurches between wildly different political regimes. As Franco continues to climb the army's ranks, Spain will spiral into a cataclysmic civil war. That's next time on Real Dictators.
Real Dictators is presented by me, Paul McGann. The story of Francisco Franco was written and produced by Addison Nugent. The show was created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Dodal. Editing and music by Oliver Baines, with strings recorded by Dory McCauley. Sound design and mix by Tom Pink, with edit assembly by George Tapp. Follow Noisive Podcasts on Twitter for news about upcoming series.
If you haven't already, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite shows or check us out at realdictators.com. Tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.
