in Spanish politics and to the State.
They were many facial changes but inside the internal structures of the State didn’t change much. Most of its top members, Police officials and Army officials remain in their places. No a single genocide, no a single fascist was judge by the crimes they committed. Impunity became law and still remains like that. And the people that became rich by the looting of the possessions of many working class and middle class after the war are still rich.
In Cantabria after the black years, the genocide suffered and the killing of the last freedom fighters many good people refused to talk or even to think about politics. This still happens today in many elder and no so elder. Fear and the memory of the repression is too much for many people.
But the Red flame was still burning in our Country. Many socialist and communist remain active, even inside Christian- catholic organizations you found them and for example the 1 of May was celebrated secretly.
The workers keep getting organized. In the ’60 strikes started to be a reality, even under the dictatorship. Cantabria at that time was quite economically powerful and still have quite big industry and of course fishing industry, agricultural activity, and cows, the main animal of Cantabria. We export many milk. But some industries started to close or to fire workers. Even they were strikes for better conditions. The international revolutionaries winds reach our small country as well.
This developed in the ’70 with a powerful general left-wing mentality and young movement that even confront the fascist activists quite openly in the streets. Strikes were increasing. The trade-unions, with class conscious were very active in that time. The social and political scenes were boiling at that time. Were years of struggle and hopes in a better future, and more important, in a revolutionary future.
In the ’80 already with a “democracy” the social situation was still boiling. Still hard left-wing organizations and with very active class trade-unionist the strikes many times finish in violent clashes, in battles with the police. The young people were very active as well. They support the workers struggles and most of them were in the fights with the police and in verbal and physical confrontation in a daily basis. They at the time weren’t called openly occupation forces but they were see like that. The TV was starting slowly to expand. But more important, the streets were flooded with drugs. The social situation, the oppression and exploitation make that thousand of young people turn their heads into the easy escape of the drugs. And hundreds paid this with their lives. The plague of Heroin decimated many generations in the Cantabrian People.
The social situation of the ’80 exploited at the end in many battles against the police in villages and cities as Malianu. It finished tragically in 1987 with the Battle of Reinosa where the cantabrian worker Gonzalo Ruiz (near cantabrian and socialist positions) was killed by the police in the clashes that took place to defend the jobs and the future of the valley. All the people of Reinosa were in the protests. The Police occupied the city for many days with tanks, helicopters and hundreds of armed guards. It was a small war operation. The news travel around the Spanish State and Europe. Solidarity came to Reinosa and Cantabria. But for that time the biggest trade-unions already had betrayed the workers and of course the class struggle. And many activists and revolutionaries were in the way of giving up the fight, some of them falling in drugs, and many simply emigrating out of Cantabria. And in the young generations specially in working class neighbourhoods the plague of drugs was very effective spreading dead and addiction.
The’90 decade is a strange one. In Cantabria we saw a relative calm, but still with a flood of drugs and bad general conditions for the working class. The consequences were that many, hundreds and hundreds, young people died and many went into jail because the addiction made them turn into robberies