Utilizing the assassination of the Spanish premier, Admiral Carrero Blanco in December 1973, the Franco regime has cooked up a frame-up of some of Spain’s leading intellectuals.
On September 16, three days after more than ten persons were killed in the bombing of the Bar Rolando, a Madrid cafe, the police arrested some eight persons. Among them was Genoveva (Eva) Forest de Sastre, a psychiatrist and one of the country’s bestknown feminists. She is married to Alfonso Sastre, one of Spain’s leading playwrights.
After subjecting her to brutal torture, Franco’s police have now accused her of direct complicity in the Carrero Blanco assassination.
An international defense committee has been set up to defend Forest. In France, the committee has been endorsed by numerous organizations and 200 prominent figures, among them Simone de Beauvoir, Françoise Sagan, Delphine Seyrig, Michèle Vian, Jean-Paul Sartre, François Billetdoux, and Maurice Clavel.
According to a November 15 Europa-Press agency dispatch, the Franco regime’s “inquiry” has named thirteen persons as suspects in the Carrero Blanco assassination. Eleven, all now in exile in France, were alleged to be members of ETA (Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna – Basque Nation and Freedom), a Basque nationalist organization. The two others named were Forest and Antonio Durán Velasco, a construction worker.
Forest, accused of having been closely associated with ETA since 1972, is also accused of belonging to the Communist party. According to the police script, Forest was informed in 1973 of a plot to kidnap Carrero Blanco, then Franco’s vicepresident. The police allege that she agreed to collaborate and to provide information on Carrero Blanco’s movements.
It was Forest, according to the police document, who asked Antonio Durán, also charged with being a Communist party member, to prepare an apartment to hide the admiral. With the apartment ready. Forest is alleged to have informed Durán in December that the plot no longer called for the kidnapping of the admiral but for his death. The apartment would now be used to hide the members of the commando squad, who would find a safe refuge there while waiting to flee to France with false papers provided by Forest.
The cops also claim that Forest coauthored Operation Ogre, a best-selling book published in France that purports to give a documented ETA account of the Carrero Blanco assassination. They said they had found a copy of the manuscript edited in Forest’s own handwriting. But an account of the case by Barbara Probst Solomon in the November 25 New York Times disputes the cops’ assertions. “I have read the hook,” Solomon wrote. “Clearly, it is written in the unique Basque argot, which a non-Basque, Madrid psychiatrist such as Dr. Forest simply would have had no access to. Dr. Forest is of Catalan origin.”
Those familiar with the political differences between the Communist party and the ETA “consider linkage between the two groups lacking in credibility,” Solomon pointed out. “Clearly, it is an attempt by extremists in the police to discredit the opposition.”
After being kept incommunicado in solitary confinement for forty days, Forest managed to smuggle a letter out of prison to her attorney, describing how she is being treated. The defense committee in France obtained a copy of the letter, and the November 17-18 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde published an article by French feminist Gisèle Halimi recounting the facts.
“Arrested in Madrid at her home on September 16, by the political police. Dragged down to the headquarters of the chief of security after the methodical ransacking of her apartment. Turned over to a dozen ‘young athletes with their sleeves rolled up,’ Eva later reported [in her letter].
“Insults, obscenities. She is flattened against a wall and the ‘athletes’ set to work on her. Punches, kicks, butts with the head. No part of her body is spared. ‘You’ll tell the truth, then we’ll throw you out the window. You’ll have committed suicide, that’s all....
“‘You’ll lick up your vomit.’ Eva refuses. She receives a blow worse than any previous one. She loses consciousness. Buckets of water, slaps, and an ‘official doctor’ force her to her feet again.
“The sessions were repeated, for hours on end. Eva passes out again. ‘Speak, slut, speak ...’ For Eva, half unconscious, a flash of understanding: no question had yet been put to her. Simply a softening up, then, for the next stage.
“For this ‘next stage,’ a new setting. A luxurious office, with thick pile furnishings. Up front two very dignified-looking officials and a secretary ready at her machine. Eva is again beaten, but, it seems, in a more systematic way: a type of ‘rabbit chop’ (delivered repeatedly on the nape of her neck) at the same time as the cops are crushing her temples with their hands. Her hair is pulled out in tufts. Her skull feels as though it will burst. From time to time a question: ‘Shit, how could you be a member of the Communist party and of ETA at the same time?’
“For the official referred to as ‘Robert’ it’s time for the sexual interlude. ‘I love you, you’re pretty, let me make love to you,’ with which he throws himself on Eva. A particular torture inflicted on women who take part in struggles in a dedicated way.
“Altogether, nine days of interrogation at the security headquarters. Mental torture supplemented the physical. Eva is informed that her husband (in hiding at the time but since arrested) had been wounded in a clash with the police. ‘We had to finish him off,’ the inspectors explain regretfully. Evita, her twelve-year-old daughter, was going to be imprisoned, and they offer legal arguments backing up the threat.”
Forest wrote that she caught sight of other suspects at the security headquarters. They were barely recognizable after the treatment they had undergone. One of them, Lydia Falcón, had to be hospitalized after she was tortured. Three other women prisoners – Maria del Carmen Nadal, Maria Remedio López, and Rosalia López Pedrez – are in permanent solitary confinement.
Genoveva Forest’s husband, Alfonso Sastre, gave himself up to the police in an effort to save the lives of his wife and the other prisoners. According to Spanish law, a husband is legally responsible for crimes committed by his wife.
The Swedish section of Amnesty International has denounced the regime’s trumped-up charges against the prisoners. Amnesty sent an observer to Madrid, but neither the minister of justice, F. Ruiz Jarabo, nor the minister of the interior, José Garcia Hernández, would even agree to a meeting. Nor was the observer allowed to visit Forest. The International Federation for the Rights of Man has also protested her arrest to the Spanish authorities.
The exiled Peruvian revolutionist Hugo Blanco has circulated an appeal from Stockholm calling for an international defense campaign. Play wright Peter Weiss issued an open letter to the Spanish minister of justice on September 26 that was published in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. He demanded that the regime reveal what it had done with Forest.
More than 500 French feminists signed a half-page advertisement in the October 31 Le Monde calling for support to Forest and the other women imprisoned in Franco’s jails. “We are in solidarity with the accused, women who are living in struggle against the oppression,” they declared. “In solidarity with our comrades in Spain, we call on all women to mobilize massively. For Puig Antich [the Spanish anarchist garroted by the regime in March] international opinion was alerted too late.
“It is necessary to act quickly.”*
* Telegrams and letters of protest should be addressed to F. Ruiz Jarabo, Ministerio de la Justicia, Madrid, Spain.
Expressions of solidarity may be sent through the French feminist organization Librairie “des femmes,” 68, rue des Saints-Peres, 75007 Paris, France, or through the Swedish section of Amnesty International, Box 79, S-310 15 Ranneslov, Sweden.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1244.pdf#page=7&view=FitV,3