50 years ago, a spectacular bomb attack by the Basque separatist organization ETA in the heart of Madrid against the No. 2 of the Franco regime, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, would mark the beginning of the collapse of Francoism.

The December 20, 1973 attack in the Salamanca district will also go down in history as ETA’s first large-scale attack.

A key figure in the Franco regime since the 1940s, Luis Carrero Blanco, 69, had been appointed head of government by General Franco six months earlier. That morning he was heading to his office after having previously attended divine service, as he did every day.

Shortly after 09.30, the monstrous explosion caused by tens of kilograms of dynamite that had been placed in a small tunnel dug under the asphalt at the height of number 104 of Claudio Coegio Street will put a definitive end to this daily routine and will also be the fatal blow to francism which was already in decline.

20 meters from the ground

The force of the explosion hurled the car – a luxury black Dodge weighing more than a ton – 20 meters to land in the courtyard of a monastery. Carrero Blanco was found seriously injured inside the car. He will die on the way to the hospital.

The first police officers who arrived at the scene initially thought it was a natural gas explosion. Carrero Blanco’s death was announced that morning, but the cause of the explosion, which also killed his chauffeur and bodyguard, was hushed up for hours.

The truth was not revealed until midnight with a televised announcement by the Ministry of Information.

It will then be known that for several weeks, a commando dug a tunnel seven meters long under the asphalt to plant a bomb from the basement of a neighboring house. To justify the noise, the team members impersonated the sculptors.

After the attack, the group managed to escape Madrid and take refuge in France. On December 28, ETA claimed responsibility for the attack called Operación Ogro (Operation Dragon) with a press conference in Bordeaux.

The Franco regime had never received such a blow: a symbol of hard Francoism, Carrero Blanco, a soldier who fought in the Civil War (1936-1939), was Franco’s secret, gray eminence.

A nationalist-Catholic to the core, a man who could have lived in the 16th century, the Spanish communist leader Santiago Carrillo has said of him.

On the eve of the attack, Carrero Blanco had met with then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The day Franco cried in public

At his funeral, Franco, very old and frail, wept in public for the first time.

The Spanish dictator, who would die two years later, was never the same again: “Physically and psychologically he reached rock bottom,” recalled Laureano López Rodo, foreign minister at the time, in a documentary by Spanish television RTVE. .

The impact of Carrero Blanco’s death on the history of Spain remains a subject of debate in the country.

For some, his death crushed any possibility of the dictatorship continuing with Carrero Blanco in the dictator’s seat. But for others, the attack changed nothing, because the restoration of democracy was in any case inevitable.

In any case, the assassination brought to light a regime in disarray.

As for ETA, which had carried out its first murderous attack in 1968, the death of Carrero Blanco was the beginning of a wave of bloody attacks that would plunge Spain into mourning for forty years, long after Franco’s death.

On September 13, 1974, a bomb would kill 13 people and injure 70 in a Madrid cafe.

The Basque separatist organization was founded in 1959, laid down its arms in 2011 and dissolved itself in 2018. It is believed to be responsible for more than 850 deaths.