A New Visit from the Old Demons

The assassins came late in the evening, two men in their 20s wearing green topcoats. In third-floor offices at Calle Atocha 55 in downtown Madrid, eight young lawyers employed by the Communist-dominated labor-federation comisiones obreras (workers' commissions) were still in their offices when the pair burst through the door. Brandishing automatic weapons apparently equipped with silencers, they herded a male receptionist and the lawyers, one of them a woman, into a semicircle and ordered them to hold their hands in the air. One of the team of killers ripped out telephone lines, while the other demanded the whereabouts of a union official who was not there. Then, without further speech, the two men opened fire on the huddled captives. "My companions fell before me," a survivor recalled later from his hospital bed. "One on top of the other, their bodies riddled."

When the assassins left, three men lay dead. Of the other victims, all critically wounded, two died within hours after the shooting.

The methodical massacre in the lawyers' office was one of several grisly episodes in a savage spasm of violence in Spain last week, the worst in recent memory. It claimed a total of ten lives, including those of three policemen who were shot down by unidentified gunmen in working-class suburbs of Madrid. A purportedly leftist terrorist group called GRAPO (an acronym in Spanish for Oct. 1 Antifascist Resistance Groups) claimed responsibility for the police killings, but the initial bloody attacks of the week, including that against the Communist lawyers, were evidently the work of right-wing extremists. Said one Western analyst in Madrid: "The ultras on the right want to provoke the military into a coup d'etat in order to save Spain from the 20th century." There was no indication that any such extreme solution was at hand. But the outburst of violence posed the most serious sabotage threat yet to Spain's step-by-step transition under King Juan Carlos from dictatorship to representative democracy.

The crisis began with two random killings and a kidnaping. Early in the week, during a left-wing demonstration in support of amnesty for political prisoners (170 still remain in jail, although at least 400 others have been released since Franco's death), a student on the edge of the crowd was suddenly shot dead by an unidentified civilian. Most observers blamed the shooting on an extremist right-wing group calling itself the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (Guerrillas of Christ the King). Next day, at a hastily called rally to protest the student's murder, a young woman's skull was crushed by a smoke-grenade canister fired by riot police, who have gained a reputation for brutality in their handling of left-wing demonstrators.

Identical Abduction. Exacerbating the climate of crisis was another shock the same day: Lieut. General Emilio Villaescusa Quilis, 64, head of the special military tribunal that was used in Franco's days to try major political offenders, was kidnaped in broad daylight. The general was grabbed by unidentified gunmen in front of his apartment house, bundled into his Mercedes and whisked away into captivity. The operation was almost identical to the abduction Dec. 11 of right-wing Industrialist Antonio Maria de Oriol y Urquijo, president of an advisory council to Spain's head of state. Oriol's kidnaping, still unsolved, was claimed by GRAPO, which is demanding amnesty for the remaining political prisoners in return for Oriol's freedom. Sure enough, GRAPO also identified itself as the grabber of Villaescusa. The kidnaping of the prestigious general was an unprecedented affront to Spain's powerful military, but its leadership appeared in no mood to retaliate outside the law. Said Army Chief of Staff Lieut. General Jose Vega Rodriguez: "The army has demonstrated that it is nonpolitical, calm and confident."

Right-wing extremists, however, evidently had no such qualms. In a phone call to a Spanish news agency, a member of yet another extremist group, the ultra-rightist Apostolic Anti-Communist Alliance of Spain, better known as "the Triple A," boastfully admitted carrying out the murders of the Communist lawyers. If Oriol and Villaescusa were executed by their captors, he warned, a "night of the long knives" would follow.

Even in a capital now accustomed to political tension and frequent street demonstrations, the new surge of violence was chilling. Many political and labor leaders among the opposition took refuge away from their homes, despite promises of police protection. Christian Democratic Leader Joaquin Ruiz Gimenez likened the violence to Argentina's wave of political terror. Declared Vincente Cardinal Enrique y Tarancdn: "The Spanish people's voice of peace and hope should not be throttled by violent and anti-Christian machine guns."

Premier Adolfo Suarez canceled a long-planned visit to the Middle East. Promising to combat violence "without regard to persons, groups or ideologies," the government at first banned demonstrations, and later suspended, for one month, two articles of Spain's Bill of Rights that protect against arbitrary search and assure the right to be charged within 72 hours of arrest. Police arrested more than 30 people, including Mariano Sanchez Covisa, a leader of the Guerrilleros (who was later released), 15 non-Spaniards and several members of extreme left groups. The government deported another 70 foreigners, many of them from among the hundreds of right-wing fanatics who had found a haven in Spain during the Franco era.

Meanwhile the opposition, composed of officially illegal parties of the center and the left, wisely refrained from any street demonstrations that might lead to further violence. Simon Sanchez Montero, a leader of the Spanish Communists, charged that rightists hoped to rekindle the hatreds of Spain's bloody Civil War of 1936-39. "We will not fall into that trap," he said. Labor leaders cautioned against any general work stoppage to protest the murders but sanctioned dozens of individual strikes.

The same kind of iron discipline prevailed when more than 50,000 mourners assembled in a vigil outside the Palace of Justice, where the bodies of some of the slain lawyers were allowed to lie in state. Though the government at first had sought to ban any funeral ceremony, the crowds were kept in order by efficient left-wing marshals wearing red armbands. While helmeted riot police looked on from a distance, the demonstrators stood in silence, many with clenched fists in the air, uttering an occasional shout of "Assassins!" quickly hushed by the marshals. It was an impressive display of organization and control on the part of the Communist Party. But the week of bloodshed and disorder that occasioned it was proof to Spaniards that their country's old demons still linger, imperiling what had been a measured march toward democracy.

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