Belén Landáburu, national councilor of the Movement, cried when the president of the last Francoist Cortes, Torcuato Fernández Miranda, stopped his official car to thank her for the decisive role she had in the dismantling of Francoism.
Burgalesa, who is now 91 years old, was the only woman of the Cortes who contributed, with her voice and her vote, to ensuring that this country left behind decades of dictatorship. The film that tells the whole story (Explosion 76, directed by Marisa Lafuente, produced by Catorce Comunicación and TVE) is one of the thrills of the Spanish 20th century.
Adolfo Suárez, newly appointed president of the government in mid-1977, plotted with his advisors a way to put an end to the regime to which he himself was linked. It was up to him to put an end to Francoism. In the three days of November that the Cortes sessions lasted to begin the dismantling of the 1939 regime, projects were put in place that the film explains as if they were narrated by the screenwriter of James Bond.
It was about repealing the Franco system in favor of democracy. This required a plot that included politicians who had been (or still were) Francoists, military personnel who were already close to Suárez or the future, up to the construction of a purely Spanish intelligence that would begin to put an end to what remained of Francoism.
The film transmits a thrill equivalent to what many Spanish citizens felt in those weeks at the end of November 1977. Meanwhile, Adolfo Suárez’s assistants (such as General Casinello or José Manuel Otero Novas, secretary of the Presidency, and Minister Martín Villa) tried to ensure that those most reluctant to this explosion experienced the events outside Spain. Thus a sufficient group of trade unionists from the regime that was to be overthrown have been induced to live far from here, in Panama, since the end of the regime to which they were attached.
Otero Novas tells it in the film: “The Spaniards wanted to get out of Franco’s regime and have an impeccably democratic regime, but what we didn’t know was how to do it.” In Sandblasting 76 all the elements are there. Santiago Carrillo’s meetings with those who went to visit him in his eternal exile in Paris were one of those elements that contributed to making Spain a liberated country… Adolfo Suárez was looking for tools to transform the legislation conceived by Torcuato Fernández Miranda (the president of the Cortes) into a definitive instrument that would put an end to the regime to which they themselves (Suárez, Fernández Miranda) had once contributed.
The United States is heavily represented in the film about the fate that awaited the Franco regime once the vote that destroyed the regime was over. At the end of the episode, Henry Kissinger congratulated the architects and welcomed the arrival of a new democracy.
Adolfo Suárez appears abundantly in the film. While they were plotting behind the scenes, he read speeches that had the air of a timid intrusion into the future. After the decisive vote of the Cortes, the man who changed the skin of Spain to transform it into a democratic country sighed while looking at the firmament of the Cortes. Certainly towards the area where, five years later, a military attempt unsuccessfully attempted another explosion which this time ended with the failure of the ultras.
At the end of the film, Belén Landáburu, that woman who was so decisive in Spain’s turning point towards democracy, explained to those who want to remember that moment the tears with which she thanked Torcuato Fernández Miranda for having got out of her company car, on the Carrera de San Jerónimo, to thank her for what she had done to make Spain a different country from which, in reality, not even the mother who had given birth to him would have known…
