Corridor or Living Room?

In the long, silent struggle between Spain's soldiers and Spain's politicians to see who is going to run the country and whither, the soldiers had their inning last week.

Last autumn it was the Falangists going into the big jobs, the military going out (TIME, Oct. 28). This trend was reversed last week when Caudillo Francisco Franco appointed Colonel Valentin Galarza Morante Minister of Government. The nearest thing to a confidant that General Franco has, Galarza will be in charge of local and provincial governments, propaganda, health, relief, national reconstruction, the national police. Since Boss Franco's brother-in-law and the Falangists' boss, Ramon Serrano Suner, gave up this portfolio last autumn to concentrate on the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Government has been run by Jose Lorente, one of Serrano's disciples.

Upped to Galarza's post of sub-secretary to the Caudillo was Luis Carrero Blanco, who was Chief of Naval Operations throughout the Civil War. In as Chief of Staff of the Army was another of Franco's intimates, General Jose Fidel Davila. Out went the Falangist head of the national police, many lesser fry and five provincial governors, including Miguel Primo de Rivera, brother of the Falange's founder. When the Falangist paper Arriba attacked him, Galarza promptly rescinded a five-day-old order exempting it from Government censorship.

Since the end of the Spanish Civil War, Franco has been uncomfortably conscious of the uncollected due bill he gave Hitler for services rendered in the Civil War. With a western Mediterranean campaign looming, it now seems that Hitler will take the due bill out in passage for Nazi troops through Spain, bases in Spanish Africa.

Though he has gobbled up Tangier (under German auspices), Franco is presumably less land-hungry today than he is worried about hunger, poverty and disease in Spain itself. At the same time, if German troops should march through Spain, it would be preferable to have his old Army friends on the reception committee instead of his brother-in-law's pro-Nazi Falange.

In this light, last week's appointments made much sense. Franco had done his best to make Spain a corridor for Germany rather than a living room.

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