50 years since May 1, 1976, the first after Franco's death

An undercover 'cop', a pistol in his back and a doorway on Goya street. This is the memory that Ángela Gutiérrez retains from May 1, 1976, the first May Day after the death of dictator Francisco Franco.

It was still a black and white country then. But the mobilizations of that historic day, which this Friday turn 50 years old, were the biggest indication that in Spain "everything had to change," recalls Ángela to Demócrata, then a young anti-Franco militant.

The first months of the Transition turned the streets of the entire pre-constitutional State into a real powder keg. It was that, 1976, a spring that dragged the "gale of strikes" from the end of the previous year, and that could not forget the "events of Vitoria": five workers murdered by the Francoist Police in an assembly.

"Spain at that time was the country with the most strikes in Western Europe, where the working class was driving political and social changes." Doctor in Contemporary History Pablo Alcántara explains to this media outlet. For this reason, that first of May took on unprecedented relevance in our country since the republican era.

The 'Labor Day' in dictatorship

In May 1976, some months would still have to pass for Adolfo Suárez to be appointed President of the Government. But at that moment, the immobilist Carlos Arias Navarro, the same one whom Spaniards had seen cry over the dictator's death the previous November, was still at the helm of the country and was not willing to go along with any democratic demand.

The Francoist Law was blunt. By decree, Franco abolished a May Day that the republican regime had taken it upon itself to elevate to the category of national holiday.

"The days eleven of February, fourteen of April and first of May will be considered working days". Thus the workers' holiday was suppressed, as recorded in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (that of the rebel Spain, as the one in the constitutional zone was called the 'Gaceta Republicana') of Tuesday, April 13, 1937.

And it continues like this: "The official calendar will be drawn up, in which the festivities of the Triumph, that of the Friendship of the Brother Peoples and that of National Labor will be marked." Finally, the dictatorship re-signified the date in accordance with the declaration of Pope Pius XII to dedicate it to Saint Joseph the Worker, patron saint of the workers.

"The leap was made from a protest mobilization of the labor movement to a festival of a religious and folkloric nature organized by the Vertical Trade Union," Pablo Alcántara clarifies to this outlet.

Since 1956, the Organization of Education and Rest Union was in charge of organizing gymnastic exhibitions, parades, and other patriotic activities at the Madrid Chamartín Stadium (today Santiago Bernabeu). Everything presided over by Franco himself, with any other mobilization that exceeded the official character of the regime being excluded from the event.

The clandestine Workers' Commissions

But the years advance and the anti-Franco opposition gains strength. Workerism essentially coalesces around the clandestine Comisiones Obreras.

Ángela Gutiérrez worked on a garment chain in Madrid and was a member of Marcelino Camacho's union, as she recalls to Demócrata. "CCOO was the main opposition union, driven above all by the PCE, although there were members of other political tendencies," remarks Pablo Alcántara for his part.

Precisely, Ángela is part of this group. Before being arrested on May 1st, 76, the Francoist Police had already arrested the one who was also a militant of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) on two occasions. The first, at her workplace. "I clapped twice and called a meeting". The second, it was the feared commissioner Billy el Niño who arrested her on Gran Vía in Madrid while she was walking with her partner, a leader of a university committee. "They were following him, but it just so happened that it was me", she laments.

He passed through the grim dungeons of the Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS), then located in the Correos building on Puerta del Sol. Also through the Women's Prison of Yeserías and through the Alcalá de Henares prison. All of this, added to an exile in Asturias, which could be resolved after Franco's death. He was only 23 years old.

"Jumps" and guns

His third arrest occurred on May 1, 1976. "But how did you think of being there while you were flagged?". This is how an agent of the Brigada Político Social reproached her while taking her statement at the DGS.

Despite the context of repression, the representatives of Comisiones Obreras in the Francoist Vertical Syndicate gradually lost their fear of showing themselves to their colleagues. That first of May, the propaganda apparatuses of the anti-Francoist movements took charge of disseminating the news. "Normally, militants would put up the posters at night, to avoid being seen," explains Alcántara. In Casa de Campo, the union forces had called a massive gathering. "Comisiones Obreras made a call throughout the State," recalls Ángela. And so, the Madrid streets also responded.

The ones known in slang as "jumps" marked the rhythm of the marches, censored under the crime of "illicit association". They translated into hurried mobilizations to avoid being victims of the Armed Police, which acted with speed at the sound of sirens and batons.

"Amnesty and freedom"; "general amnesty, democracy freedom" were the slogans of the day. Ángela joined the "jump" from Goya street, corner with the then Palacio de los Deportes, today Movistar Arena. "There were a few of us on the sidewalks and we jumped into the street to interrupt traffic by throwing some pamphlets," she says.

Dozens of Madrileños jumped into the march through the subway entrance, also from the Palacio de los Deportes, although the lightning action was shorter than expected for Ángela. The area was swarming with plainclothes 'grises'. An agent stopped her at gunpoint in a doorway. "My partner took off running… and he did well, so they wouldn't arrest him," she recalls, laughing. "That was my day, it must have been 12 in the morning and I didn't see anything else."

May 1, 1976, objective: pressure Arias Navarro

The repression of that day was brutal, especially in large cities like Madrid, Barcelona or Seville. "Attempts at demonstrations in various parts of Spain on the occasion of May 1st", headlined the newspaper ABC the following day, which spoke of "more than one hundred and fifty people arrested in Madrid", including Ángela. "One of the most important attempts at demonstration took place in the vicinity of the Sports Palace", the news continues.

According to this media outlet, the Public Force "proceeded to dissolve" the different groups that had gathered there, made up of at least 1,000 people. Read between the lines, and interpreting the information through the lens of censorship, we can easily guess the repressive nature of these actions.

Everything, always in accordance with the Francoist law: "When the demonstration takes on a tumultuous character, whether or not it has been legally authorized, a single warning will suffice for the public force to proceed to disperse it", read the then-in-force Public Order Law.

The Communist Party of Santiago Carrillo was especially critical of the ferocity employed by the Francoist authority. However, the orbit of the anti-Francoist movements was aware that the day could translate into a mechanism to exert pressure against the Government of Arias Navarro, "a step forward to end the dictatorship," emphasizes Pablo Alcántara to Demócrata.

Worker mobilizations like the one on May 1, 1976 played a fundamental role in the development of the coming months. On July 1 of that year, King Juan Carlos demanded Arias Navarro's resignation, considering him an obstacle to his democratic project. A man from Ávila took his place, and the 1978 Constitution finally recognized in its Article 21 the right to peaceful assembly without prior authorization. The rest is history.

Two years earlier, in a dirty cell of the DGS, whose small windows can be seen today in the daylight when walking through the Puerta del Sol, Ángela Gutiérrez had to reassure a group of girls: "I had to console them because they wouldn't stop crying". Other colleagues, like Rosa Raga, couldn't even attend the demonstrations. A militant in the Spanish Democratic University Federation (FUDE), in 1976 she was in Valencia, in "absolute clandestinity", she explains many years later to Demócrata.

They were "years of lead", as their victims remember, heirs of a Transition that disappointed many, emphasizes Ángela, because it did not lay the groundwork for prosecuting their executioners. A Transition that, however, did open the door to a period of freedoms that returned to May Day its festive character. A day that the children of late Francoism continue to claim.