Franco vuelve a ganar la guerra

“Franco vuelve a ganar la guerra” is the novel’s compressed judgment on the political reversal of 21 December 1959: Francisco Franco, already victorious in the Spanish Civil War, gains renewed legitimacy when the United States publicly embraces his regime. The phrase makes a diplomatic success sound like another battlefield victory, and casts its cost in the isolation of those who continue to oppose the dictatorship.

The phrase and the moment

The narrator places the judgment against two consecutive prizes. One day before Valencia is to receive the Christmas Lottery’s top prize, Franco receives what the novel calls a still greater one, almost as valuable as the support the Axis powers gave him in the summer of 1936. The comparison ties the postwar diplomatic turn to the foreign assistance that had helped Franco’s cause at the beginning of the civil war.

On 21 December 1959, Air Force One lands at the newly built Torrejón de Ardoz base. Franco waits at the foot of the aircraft’s stairs and embraces President Dwight D. Eisenhower with unmistakable warmth. A photograph of the meeting travels around the world. In the narrator’s account, the victor of the Second World War thereby appears to absolve the Caudillo, whose earlier protection and alliance with Hitler and Mussolini are not erased so much as overtaken by the public image of a new Western partnership.

Recognition and its price

The visit’s symbolic force rests on a larger political bargain. Under the Pact of Madrid, secret protocols later made public allow the United States to decide unilaterally how to use the bases and to store nuclear weapons there, as it did at Torrejón and Rota. The associated economic assistance is directed almost entirely to construction, access, and maintenance of the bases. Spanish courts also surrender jurisdiction over American citizens accused of civil or criminal offenses in Spain against Spaniards, leaving them to American military jurisdiction.

The narrator presents these terms as humiliating concessions exchanged for what Franco desires most: Spain’s integration into the West and his recognition as a leader of the free world in its struggle against communism. The phrase’s image of a second victory thus concerns more than a ceremonial embrace. It names the conversion of strategic cooperation into political rehabilitation, while the unequal terms expose the price paid for that recognition.

The defeated left behind

The immediate consequence identified in the text is the isolation of the anti-Franco opposition. Its members are left entirely, loudly, and definitively alone in the world; nevertheless, they do not stop fighting the dictatorship. That contrast prevents the phrase from turning defeat into simple surrender: Franco has won a new form of international acceptance, but opposition persists despite the loss of expected outside support.

Years later, the same political imbalance returns in a personal encounter. At Las Ventas, the narrator sees Otto Skorzeny enjoying his money and freedom, shouting in the crowd. He cannot bring himself to tell his sons who Skorzeny is or why he is there. His shame is not for himself or for Manolo, but for the country in which his sons live and must build their lives, and for his own sense of impotence against enemies who remain powerful. The memory of Rita’s question about why the republicans had fared worse than the Nazis sharpens the silence he chooses instead of an explanation. Read beside that scene, the phrase reaches beyond the 1959 photograph: diplomatic recognition has consequences that endure in the ordinary lives of people who inherit the country shaped by Franco’s victory.