Carrillo: In from the Cold

The bespectacled fellow who came out of an apartment building on a crowded Madrid street looked like any businessman caught in the pre-Christmas rush. Then police agents swarmed in and arrested him. Their captive, wearing a gray wig, turned out to be Santiago Carrillo, 62, the exiled head of the still outlawed Spanish Communist Party. Seized with him were seven other party executives who had been meeting in the apartment hideaway.

Carrillo's arrest threatened to become an international cause celebre. Occurring just after a nationwide referendum that overwhelmingly endorsed Premier Adolfo Suarez's political-reform program, it raised new questions about the regime's willingness to broaden participation in Spain's political life. Communist loyalists staged intermittent work stoppages and street demonstrations to protest the arrests, and FREEDOM FOR CARRILLO demands appeared on Madrid walls faster than government workers could clean them off. Protesters rallied in Paris and Rome. Italy's Christian Democratic government, which is dependent on the tacit support of the country's powerful and legal Communist Party, was put upon to express its concern about Carrillo's arrest. As Carrillo admitted after he was taken to Madrid's Carabanchel Prison, "The longer I stay here, the more propaganda I am making for the Communist Party."

The Spanish government seemed to agree. Last week it released Carrillo and his colleagues on bail, temporarily defusing the crisis. In fact, Carrillo's release seemed tantamount to the legalization of his presence in Spain, from which he had been exiled for nearly four decades. He will probably not even be brought to trial before next spring, when Spain will hold its first parliamentary elections since pre-Franco days.

Spanish right-wingers wanted Carrillo tried as a "terrorist" for alleged crimes committed during the Civil War. But Madrid's Court of Public Order decreed that Carrillo and his comrades should be charged with a relatively light offense--violating a law against membership in a party "submitting to an international discipline that proposes to establish a totalitarian system" in Spain. If tried and convicted, the Carabanchel Eight could get as much as six years in prison.

Party Legality. Their lawyers argue that the Spanish party--a member of the Euro-Communist club, claiming independence from Moscow along the democratic line espoused by Italy's Enrico Berlinguer--is not subject to international discipline and hence the law is not applicable. Thus the case may become a test of Communist Party legality. The Suarez government has suggested that it might legalize the party "at the right moment." But that moment is still indefinite, and the Communists are eager to have their status settled before the upcoming elections.

In a gesture calculated to force the issue, Carrillo surfaced three weeks ago--just before the referendum on political reform--at a Madrid press conference. Following 37 years in exile, mostly in France, he said, he had slipped back into Spain in February 1976, after he was refused a legal passport--and had crossed the border several times.

For a while, at least, the regime apparently chose to ignore Carrillo's illicit return. Indeed, some Madrilenos suspect that the government was not happy to have Carrillo as its captive. They believe that diehard Franquistas in the security police acted on their own in making the arrest.

Carrillo's case, when and indeed if it comes to trial, could present the regime with a chance to seize the initiative and settle the issue of Communist Party legality at a moment when public opinion seemed to be backing its cautious political reforms. Spain wants to be in on the European Community; this is not feasible until Madrid can boast free elections that include the left.

At the least, Carrillo's release will ease the strained dialogue on political reform between the Suarez regime and the opposition parties. Members of the "Commission of Nine," a group of opposition leaders--both centrists and leftists, including the Communists--who are to meet with the government to discuss ground rules for the elections, had said that the arrests raised a "grave obstacle" to the talks. But the negotiating team indicated after Carrillo's release that it would proceed this month with talks on a pre-electoral law that would put all political parties involved in the elections on an equal footing. Should the Communists be included, Carrillo's trial could, conceivably, become academic.

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