Luis Carrero Blanco


Luis Carrero Blanco was a Spanish Navy officer and politician, who served as Prime Minister of Spain from June 1973 until his assassination in December of that year. He participated in the two major Spanish conflicts of the Interwar period: the Rif War in Morocco, and later the Spanish Civil War, in which he supported the Nationalist side.
Carrero Blanco, a long-time confidant and right-hand man of Francisco Franco, was one of the most prominent figures in the Francoist dictatorship's power structure, holding throughout his career a number of high-ranking offices such as those of Undersecretary of the Prime Minister's Office and Deputy Prime Minister. He also was the main drafter behind the 1947 Law of Succession to the Headship of the State. Carrero ended up succeeding Franco as head of government in June 1973, due to Franco's worsening health.
Shortly after his ascension to the premiership Carrero Blanco was assassinated in a roadside bombing on 20 December 1973 by the armed Basque nationalist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna while returning from Mass in his car. He was posthumously awarded the nobiliary title of Duke of Carrero Blanco.

Life

Early life

Luis Carrero Blanco was born on 4 March 1904 in the coastal town of Santoña, Cantabria to Camilo Carrero Gutiérrez, a lieutenant colonel in the Army stationed in nearby Santander, and Ángeles Blanco Abascal a local woman. He had his early schooling at the Colegio Manzanedo :es:Instituto Marqués de Manzanedo |es in Santoña and in 1918, at the age of 14, he followed the family military tradition by enlisting at the Spanish Naval Academy in San Fernando.
By 18, he had already achieved the rank of lieutenant, serving aboard the dreadnought Alfonso XIII and participated in the Rif War from 1924–1926. In 1926, he decided to specialise in submarine warfare, and served as lieutenant commander on the B-2 and as commander on the B-5.
In 1929, he married María del Carmen Pichot y Villa with whom he had five children.

Civil war

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War, Carrero Blanco was a naval instructor teaching Submarine Tactics at the Naval Warfare College in Madrid. As a military man of conservative views he knew that he was marked; his brother José had already been detained and subsequently executed and his father died on the day of his arrest. Like many people who found themselves on the wrong side, he sought refuge first in the Mexican embassy and later that of France, from where he was able to cross the border from San Sebastián into France and re-enter on the Nationalist side in June 1937.
Carrero Blanco then served in the Nationalist navy first as corvette captain aboard the destroyer Huesca and later the submarine General Sanjurjo. Following the Nationalist victory and subsequent establishment of Generalísimo Franco as Caudillo of Spain, Carrero Blanco was appointed Chief of Naval Operations in August 1939.

Political career

Carrero Blanco was made Vice-Admiral in 1963 and Admiral in 1966. He was Deputy Prime Minister from 1967 to 1973. By that time, Franco even if he was still then the Head of State and concurrent Prime Minister, had already delegated the day-to-day running of the government over to Carrero Blanco himself owing to the former's old age and illness. And the latter excelled on this regard, in terms of carrying Franco's policies and in directing the ministries towards that direction.
His zenith came on 8 June 1973, when being named the Prime Minister of Spain and made a top deputy to Franco, who remained as Head of State with some substantial powers in compliance with the Organic Law of the State ratified in 1967 which separated the posts of the Head of State and Prime Minister. It seemed as though it was only a matter of time before he would succeed the ailing Franco.

Death

Six months after being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated on 20 December 1973 in Madrid by four members of an ETA cell, who carried out a bombing near San Francisco de Borja Church on Calle de Serrano while he returned from daily mass in a Dodge 3700.
In a collective interview justifying the attack, the ETA bombers said:
In his first speech to the Cortes on 12 February 1974, Carrero Blanco's successor as prime minister, Carlos Arias Navarro, promised liberalizing reforms including the right to form political associations. Though he was denounced by falangists, the transition had begun.

Reprisal

One of the members of the cell who had assassinated Carrero Blanco was himself assassinated by a car bomb in southern France on 21 December 1978 by a special team organized within the Navy. This group included a member of the Higher Centre of Defence Information secret service, another from the Naval Intelligence Service and the other belonged to the Defence High Command. In addition, it received assistance from a number of right-wing paramilitary groups through Jean-Pierre Cherid, José María Boccardo and Mario Ricci .
Argala, the codename by which the ETA member was known, was the only one who could identify the source who had handed Carrero Blanco's schedule and itinerary over to ETA. According to Leonidas, a former member of the Spanish Army who participated in the bombing against Argala, "The explosives came from a US base. I don't remember exactly if it was from Torrejón or Rota, but I do know that the Americans did not know what they would be used for. It was a personal favour for Pedro el Marino" who provided the explosives. Argala's assassination was claimed by the Spanish Basque Battalion. However, according to Leonidas'', "BVE, ATE" or "Triple A" are only labels of convenience that are used by the same group.

Funeral and burial

Carrero Blanco's funeral, which would be one Franco's last public appearances, was held the following day at the Basilica of Saint Francis the Great, Madrid and he was buried at Mingorrubio Cemetery in the neighbouring municipality of El Pardo.

Political views

Blanco himself was a monarchist. Devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, he was close to Opus Dei. In 1951, he was closely involved in the production of the film Dawn of America, a patriotic work portraying Christopher Columbus' discovery of the Americas. Carrero Blanco worked on the screenplay of the film, which was strongly supported by the government for its nationalist theme.

Ideology and positions

Carrero did not clearly belong to any family within the regime; his ultimate identification was with the work of the Dictator; as such, he can be considered a pure Francoist. Antonio Elorza described as most distinct features of his ideology the ideas of counter-revolution, anticommunism and satanization of masonry, all according to a conspirative vision of history, in line with a "degraded augustinianism".
Also known to have dropped antisemite diatribes, by the time of 1941 he saw the state of affairs of a world in war as follows: "Spain, paladin of the Faith in Christ, is again against the true enemy: Judaism.. Because the world, even if it does not look like it, lives in a permanent war of religious type; it is the struggle of Christianism against Judaism. War to the death, as the fight of good against evil should be."
Carrero, who held paternalist views when assessing the Spanish presence in Africa, was refractory towards the acceptance of the decolonisation process. As he declared that the Western Sahara "had not ever been controlled by the Moroccan Empire", he defended that the territory was "as Spanish as the province of Cuenca is".
Openly germanophile in his articles written for the Mundo magazine during the first part of World War II, after the turn in the conflict against the Axis Powers in 1943, he modulated his hostile discourse towards the Allied Powers in those pieces; finally, after the defeat of the Axis, he had wholly replaced the message attacking the liberal democracies by a merely anti-soviet one. A defender of the idea that the victory of the Francoist side in the Civil War had happened "despite" an alleged international conspiration against the former, years later, in the 1950s, he insisted again: "this is precisely the Spanish problem, Spain want to implement the Good, and the forces of Evil, unleashed upon the world, try to prevent her from doing it".
He was reportedly among the endorsers of the so-called "Proyecto Islero", an alleged secret plan to develop a nuclear weapon for Spain.
Regarding the future of a post-Franco Spain, Carrero, along López Rodó, envisaged and promoted the idea of an authoritarian monarchy guaranteeing the continuity of Francoism.

Service summary

Orders, decorations and medals

Military

Carrero Blanco wrote a number of books on the Spanish navy and Spanish naval military history, as well as political treatises on Communism and Freemasonry.