Half a century ago, two weeks before the dictator’s death, ABC ran the following headlines: “Franco was urgently transferred to a La Paz hospital yesterday,” “Four hours of surgery,” and “The diagnosis is very serious.” Since October 15 … In 1975, he suffered his first heart attack, and this newspaper talked about his slow suffering, including the cabinet that he headed against the advice of his doctor. Many painful and unnecessary interventions followed, and the Bishop of Zaragoza even performed severe anointing.
One of the most dramatic and complex operations, life or death, took place on October 28, in the improvised operating room of the El Pardo Palace. A year later, with the dictator already buried in the Valley of the Fallen, the doctor who carried out the operation, Manuel Hidalgo Huerta, recounted the details on ABC: “I was having lunch with some friends in a restaurant to say goodbye to one of them, Palomo Linares, who was leaving for South America on his bullfighting campaign, when I received a phone call from El Pardo on behalf of Marques Villaverde to visit the Generalissimo due to his illness.”
The doctor later described the visit: “My first impression when seeing the head of state was painful. “He was in his bed in El Pardo, relatively conscious, having difficulty breathing, a distended stomach from too much fluid, rectal bleeding and a changed pulse.” He then listed a series of problems that gave a “poor prognosis,” including a lateral abdominal X-ray that added “possible perforation of the gastrointestinal tract.”
According to the doctor, on November 3, Dr. Alonso Castrillo called him again, urgently, and informed him that the dictator was suffering from severe stomach bleeding that could not practically be replaced by quick and large blood donations. “I quickly returned to El Pardo and the panorama was dramatic,” Hidalgo Huerta continued on ABC. “The leader is bleeding profusely, very profusely, with a phenomenon of suffocation due to the passage of blood into the respiratory system and the general condition.”
Extend your life
“What can we do?” asked Dr. Cristobal Martinez Purdue. The doctor recommended that the head of state undergo surgery “to the extreme.” Some later theories suggested that all these interventions were aimed at prolonging his life until 26 November, the date on which the term of Alejandro Rodríguez de Valcarcel as President of the Council of the Realm and the Cortes should be renewed to ensure the presence of a “reliable” person who could influence the election of the future President of the Council of Ministers.
Martínez Bordieu then consulted with his mother-in-law and the dictator’s wife, Carmen Franco, and with his wife, Carmen Franco y Polo, who gave their consent to the intervention. “Márquez Villaverde decided that Franco would undergo a life-or-death operation,” can be read in an ABC report published on November 8, 12 days before the dictator’s death. “But there is no time to take him to the hospital. It must be solved there and by any means, even if it seems fantasy or madness. But this is the case and we have no other alternative. At this moment, General Gavilan told me: “In the regimental barracks next to the palace there is an operations room that can be used.”
Hidalgo Huertas moved quickly to check this out. In the medicine cabinet there was a room called the operating room “of small dimensions, with an old table and a lamp, as well as two additional tables entirely occupied with rubbish which could be used as soon as it was cleared and cleaned and materials brought from the hospital.” Franco was taken there in an ambulance, “leaving a trail of blood in his wake.” He was placed as quickly as possible on the operating table and the bleeding from the mouth stopped, giving him “a few minutes of rest.”
“It’s worthless”
The doctor, who published some excerpts from his book How and Why Franco was Operated (Garci, 1976), said that the then head of government, Arias Navarro, was present in a small adjoining room; Some ministers, senior army officers and princes of Asturias: “We conducted a rapid medical consultation with varying standards regarding an intervention with undeniable risks. There was even someone outside the regular medical team who described the surgical attempt as “not worth while.” He asserts that he himself joined this trend, when suspicions arose that the dictator had suffered from a blood clot, but a few minutes later Martinez Bordieu appeared declaring that it was a false alarm.
At that moment, they asked Hidalgo Huerta again, and she replied: “If he were my father, I would operate on him right now.” They gave the green light to start the operation at 9:30 p.m. The medical team decided that nine liters of blood would be necessary during the intervention. “The conditions of the improvised operating room were primitive, and in order to get adequate visibility we used a series of flashlights that our colleagues had kept. He added, “The electric scalpel was working poorly due to the power outage, even though all the lights in the palace and its rooms were turned off.”
According to Hidalgo Huerta, this life-or-death process, even if it was for a few days, was satisfactory: “The bleeding was controlled and action was taken locally on the accompanying stomach lesions. We were not permitted to perform gastric bypass surgery which was doomed to failure and was not necessary once the proposed goal had been achieved. The doctor explained: “We sutured the stomach incision, which assured us that the bleeding would not reoccur.”
The green march
After overcoming major stomach bleeding caused by a peptic ulcer, Franco was finally transferred to a La Paz hospital. On November 6, he was in the intensive care unit when Morocco’s King Hassan II took advantage of political uncertainty in Spain to invade the Spanish Sahara with the famous Green March. In light of all the chaos experienced by the regime, which was living its final days, the dictator contracted acute peritonitis, which caused the failure of many organs as a result of the holes that occurred during the aforementioned operation.
Even though they tried, there seemed to be no solution. On November 15, he underwent surgery for the third and final time, and on the 18th, Hidalgo Huerta announced that he would not be operated on again. “There was nothing to be done, I thought, and when the meeting with the team was over, I went into Caudillo’s room again, and Martinez Bordieu asked me for the last time: ‘Do you think there is something else that can be done?’ My answer was negative,” the doctor recalls.
A day later, the tubes connecting him to the machines keeping him alive were removed, and he died of septic shock on November 20 at 4:20 a.m. The death was announced to the media through a telegram written by Ruffo Gamazo, a senior official in the National Movement press, which included the phrase “Franco is dead” only three times. Two hours later, the news was first broadcast on Radio Nacional and broadcast by Arias Navarro on TVE: “Spaniards, Franco is dead.”