CONDEMNED DT FASCIST SPAIN
PARIS, March 4 -- Leaders of the strikes of April 1962 continue to be railroaded to prison in fascist Spain. After the. trial of the Valencia and Catalonia militants of the FLP (Frente de Liberacion Popular), Basque members have now been tried and | sentenced in Madrid. , _
The Tranco regime, its judges, radio and press, have tried consistently to play down the role played by the FLP in the strikes and the important position which this orgenization has come to occupy in the working-class underground. This ties in with Franco's effort to play up the “Communist menace," which he does by picturing the Communist party as the main underground opposition force in Spain. The truth is that more than one hundred members of the ioe ee tried, or are awaiting trial, for participating in e strike.
Western bourgeois papers, including the usually objective Paris Le Honde, have fallen in with Franco's game of playing down the TLP role, They do this by putting the spotlight on "Catholics" and "intellectuals" as presumably the principal victins. . ”
As a matter of fact, the great majority are workers. This includes four out of five among the Basque militants, 18 out of the 25 in the Valencia group, and 11 out of the 17 in the Catalonia- ‘Barcelona groud. .
Of course, such well-known left Catholics as the Basque write: Recalde, are among Franco's victims. But 30 are such atheist — left-wing militants as the son of Angel Pestana, the famous anarcho-syndicalist leader of the twenties, who was condemned to many years of hard labor, and Angel Abad, a national leader of the FLP, who was condemned to six years at hard labor for his role in the Barcelona strike.
KURDS STEP UP