An Angry Ex-Resident Looks—Angrily

Spain this summer celebrated her fifth season of Democracy; and what the Romans and the Habsburgs and Sir Francis Drake and the Bourbons couldn’t do to destroy the nation over its two thousand years of turbulent history, Democracy has done in just five.

Comillas, Santander, Aug. 8— Lives aren’t worth a plugged nickel here. Political assassinations since the death of Franco run upwards of six hundred; the incidence seems to have decelerated slightly, so that with any luck maybe only a hundred or so mostly retired functionaries, or cops on the beat, will be blown up in their cars or cut down by submachine guns in front of their wives and children in 1981. Pillage, riots, arson, and general devilry are the order of the day. The Province of Vizcaya may be without power tomorrow; a campaign of terrorist bombings that began in January and that has so far demolished two billion pesetas’ ($20 million) worth of installations culminated in mammoth explosions this past weekend that totally wrecked the remaining transformers.

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F. Reid Buckley

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Spain this summer celebrated her fifth season of Democracy; and what the Romans and the Habsburgs and Sir Francis Drake and the Bourbons couldn’t do to destroy the nation over its two thousand years of turbulent history, Democracy has done in just five.

Comillas, Santander, Aug. 8— Lives aren’t worth a plugged nickel here. Political assassinations since the death of Franco run upwards of six hundred; the incidence seems to have decelerated slightly, so that with any luck maybe only a hundred or so mostly retired functionaries, or cops on the beat, will be blown up in their cars or cut down by submachine guns in front of their wives and children in 1981. Pillage, riots, arson, and general devilry are the order of the day. The Province of Vizcaya may be without power tomorrow; a campaign of terrorist bombings that began in January and that has so far demolished two billion pesetas’ ($20 million) worth of installations culminated in mammoth explosions this past weekend that totally wrecked the remaining transformers.