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Inside Spain: Is Corruption Inevitable In The Land Of The Picaresque?

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5 hours ago

May 30, 2026

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Alex Dunham – alex.dunham@thelocal.com

Published: 30 May, 2026 CET. Updated: Sat 30 May 2026 09:57 CET

Inside Spain: Is corruption inevitable in the land of the picaresque? — Protestors hold an effigy of the Spanish Prime Minister’s wife Begoña Gómez and a banner reading ‘Spain is corrupt’ at a protest in Madrid. (Photo by Oscar DEL POZO / AFP)

In this week’s Inside Spain, we look at why many ordinary Spaniards feel justified to ‘cheat the system’ in a country where corruption among the political elite is rife.

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May 30, 2026

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Camilo José Cela

How A Group Of Young Italians Created An International Scandal With Their Trip To Spain In 1961 To Record Anti-Franco Songs

Published

8 hours ago

May 30, 2026

Inigo Dominguez

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Seven young Italians — five men and two women between the ages of 20 and 30, with a spirit of adventure — sparked an international diplomatic conflict with Francisco Franco’s Spain in the early 1960s. They traveled through the country as tourists in 1961, secretly recording popular songs against the regime among the people, and later released two albums and a book. It was primarily the book, Canti della nuova resistenza spagnola: 1939-1961 (Songs of the New Spanish Resistance: 1939-1961) — published in 1962 by the prestigious Turin publishing house Einaudi, where the writer Italo Calvino, a friend of the group, worked — that triggered a major scandal.

The new Minister of Information at the time, Manuel Fraga, launched a campaign in the Spanish press against what he called a “libel,” and the regime pulled strings with the Vatican to secure its support, which it obtained, because some of the songs were violently anticlerical. Above all, there was one particularly scandalous song, recorded in the Spanish city of Santander, which became the focus of the controversy and which the Franco regime seized upon in its crusade against the book: “They say the hair of the Holy Christ of Limpias / grows / what grows is his cock / from fucking the clergy.” Four months later, the book was seized in Italy.

The authors of the book, Sergio Liberovici and Michele L. Straniero, were prosecuted in Turin for defaming religion, even being convicted in the first instance before being acquitted on appeal. But the incident led to the book being translated in many countries in Europe and America, because Einaudi freely granted the rights, and editions of the records were also released in several languages. It opened a rift in the image of Francoism. The book’s cover — black and depicting police officers restraining citizens — included a verse in Galician from one of the collected songs that summarized the spirit of a segment of the Spanish population: “Holy Christ of Fisterra / Saint of the golden beard / help me through / the dark night of Spain.”

“What bothered the Spanish government was the confirmation of the existence of a resistance movement, and since they wouldn’t admit it existed, it was their own stupidity in creating the scandal that made the book and records a success,” says 97-year-old poet, writer, and musicologist Emilio Jona, the only surviving member of that group, speaking by phone from his home in Turin. When asked what Spain was like in 1961, he replies: “An extremely archaic Spain.” He recalls the poverty and hunger in the villages of the Iberian plateau, on the outskirts of the cities. In any case, he immediately felt at home, because he is a Sephardic Jew, and he perceived something intimate, familiar, in the people and the landscapes.

This story was once widely publicized, but it faded into obscurity and has recently resurfaced thanks to the research of historian Alberto Carrillo, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Seville. He first learned of it in 2008 in the archives of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He then uncovered documentation, acquired the records, and eventually tracked down the only two surviving members of the group, Emilio Jona and Margot Galante, who passed away in 2017. “She remembered the suffocation, the police presence, and the feeling of being constantly watched,” he notes. Carrillo published his first article on the subject in 2012. The story was later adapted into a documentary, La marsellasa de los borrachos (or, The Drunkards’ Marseillaise), directed by Pablo Gil Rituerto, which premiered in 2024 and was presented last year at the Seminci Film Festival in Valladolid. In it, contemporary artists such as Nacho Vegas, María Arnal, Amorante, or Labregos do tempo dos Sputniks reinterpreted the songs.

Carrillo was immediately captivated by the story, and he recounted it in November in Rome at a conference on Italy’s ties to the anti-Franco resistance. The conference, organized by the Rosso un Fiore association to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death, featured performances by the Coro Inni e Canti di Lotta Giovanna Marini choir, who sang some of the songs. “This story is perfect for a film,” Carrillo explains. “It has that impressive theatricality of the Franco regime. You run into Italo Calvino, the Vatican… What surprised me most was that simple songs, little verses that sometimes last only 40 seconds, could have the power to compel Franco to make these moves on an international scale. That something so small could have such a profound impact.”

Jona and his six friends were precisely seeking the subversive power of those small songs. They were part of the Turin-based musical group Cantacronache (Singing Chronicles), pioneers of protest and singer-songwriter music in Italy, with connections to the literary and intellectual world of the time. “Without them, the history of Italian song would have been different,” wrote Umberto Eco, another of their friends.

Jona recalls that they started singing almost as a game in the late 1950s: “We were irritated by the Italian songs that were fashionable at the time, the escapist kind, the ones from the Sanremo festival, and we wanted to make songs to escape from that escapism, to tell the reality of everyday life. In Italy there were no political songs, and our references were French singer-songwriters, like Brassens, or the Germans of the thirties.”

Their trip wasn’t spontaneous or improvised; it was part of a project to collect anti-fascist songs across Europe. They began by seeking information from the Spanish exile community in France and Switzerland, hoping to gain contacts. For example, they met with Antonio Soriano, founder of the Spanish bookstore in Paris, a key meeting place for Republican emigrants. And in Switzerland, they met the philosopher and mathematician Miguel Sánchez-Mazas, brother of Rafael and Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio. Carrillo notes that the latter “perfectly embodied the ideal of social, singer-songwriter, protest music that Cantacronache had been exploring and experimenting with.” He later contributed, anonymously, fundamental songs to other albums, songs that became popular in the 1960s, such as Gallo rojo, gallo negro (Red Rooster, Black Rooster).

This is how they obtained a list of trusted contacts in Spain. It was highly sensitive information, so they wrote it in tiny letters on matchsticks. Each matchstick had a name and address and could be burned in case of danger. This allowed them to visit artists and intellectuals in Spain such as José Agustín Goytisolo, Alfonso Sastre, the brothers Carlos and Antonio Saura, Jesús López Pacheco, and Gloria Fuertes. Some recordings emerged from these meetings, as well as from encounters with people in the labor and academic worlds. For example, a cha-cha-cha about a Basque priest who poisons the dictator during communion: “Here lies Paco Franco / from a poisoned host / they gave him in church / and it certainly does a fine job.” Or a song by López Pacheco, Una canción (A Song), precisely about the redemptive power of music: “People of Spain / start to sing / A people that sings / will not die.” Everything was meticulously recorded on technical data sheets, although always preserving the anonymity of the participants, for their safety.

The rest of the songs were simply collected along the way, randomly, when they gained someone’s trust and they felt comfortable enough to sing one for them. Workers, farmers, or the regulars at a bar where there was a guitar. “People weren’t afraid to open up to us, seeing that we were foreigners,” Jona recalls. This is the case with one of the most moving songs, Sin pan (Without Bread), about the hunger they endured, which, according to the record, is performed by an Andalusian taxi driver in Madrid. The songs addressed the hardships of daily life, social inequalities, and reflected a strong aversion to the clergy, Franco, and his wife. There were parodies, satires, outbursts of frustration, but also lyrical pieces, songs of hope, ideals, and even some with a surreal tone. “The songs had a dramatic and expressive power that anonymously documented the harshness of the repression,” Jona explains.

The group only traveled through the northern half of Spain, suggesting that a significant portion of the southern region’s musical heritage was lost. They entered from France via Bourg-Madame, traveling to Puigcerdá in Girona, and then on to Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, and Toledo. They then split into two groups. One went to Cuenca and later rejoined the other in Santiago de Compostela. The second group passed through Ávila, Salamanca, Zamora, Ourense, and Vigo. Afterward, they all continued together through Cudillero, Llanes, Santander, Bilbao, and San Sebastián, leaving the country via Bayonne. They amassed several hours of recordings and hundreds of photographs. All the documentation is now archived at the CREO (Centro Ricerca Etnomusica Oralità) center in Turin.

After selecting songs, Cantacronache arranged and performed them with instruments on two records released in 1961, Canti de la Guerra de Spagna 1936-1939 (Songs of the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939) and Canti de la nuova resistenza spagnola 1939-1961, the latter featuring a Picasso drawing on the cover. “They are truly two gems from a discographic point of view,” says Carrillo. But what sparked the scandal was the subsequent book that recounted the story of the voyage and included the lyrics, scores, and technical information for 25 songs, eight coplas, and three poetic texts.

The first thing the Spanish government tried was to prevent the book’s distribution by pressuring the publisher, Einaudi. The director general of information, Carlos Robles Piquer, took charge, threatening Giulio Einaudi with barring him from entering Spain, where he was scheduled to travel to participate in the awarding of the Formentor Prize, sponsored by the most prestigious European publishers. In a bitter exchange of telegrams, the Turin-based publisher responded: “You are calling on me to fulfill my duties as a publisher; I believe I can remind you, in turn, that no act of faith, no destruction of books, no censorship has ever been able to eliminate the evils of those who deny existence and stifle dissent.”

Then a massive media offensive was unleashed. The Franco regime seized upon the sacrilegious song about Christ, which was actually the only one of its kind, to denigrate the entire project as an attack on Spain with songs they claimed had been fabricated. “The government argued that it was a laboratory invention by the Italians to attack Spain and the Catholic religion; they wanted to give a religious spin to a matter of a clearly political and social nature,” explains Carrillo. This operation had the support of conservative European media outlets.

“Slime, carrion, disgust”

On January 9, 1963, a note from the General Directorate of Information appeared in the main Spanish newspapers announcing the prohibition of Einaudi’s entry into the country due to the publication of the book, without going into further details because “elementary scruples of public decency prevent the reproduction of the repugnant content of this libel.”

La Vanguardia published a scathing editorial titled Slime, Carrion, Disgust: “Slime, for the putrid residue that comprises it; carrion, because its pages offer no refuge for the slightest breath of noble life, but rather nothing but the death of spiritual dignity and the soul; disgust, because there is no well-born human being — blue, red, green, or yellow — who does not feel invincible nausea at the mere reading of one of Einaudi’s pages.” ABC stated that the book “gravely offends the Catholic religion and Spain” with a “pestilent attack” that transformed the Italian publishing house into “a cesspool at the service of ignoble lucubrations.”

This was the tone of the crusade against the book, which immediately spread to the Italian and European press. And things began to happen in Italy. The L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, wrote: “Under no pretext is the reproduction of sacrilegious obscenities justified, as they cannot constitute any valid political or ideological document, but only the depravity of language and custom.”

Two days after the Vatican’s intervention, the Turin Attorney General’s Office ordered the seizure of the book, accusing it of “obscenity, vilification of religion, and offense against a foreign head of state,” and called for the prosecution of its authors. A homemade bomb was even planted at the record label that had released the albums. In Spain, Fraga compiled all the articles against the book published both within and outside of Spain into a book published by his ministry, titled The Marseillaise of the Drunkards (Data for the History of Libel).

The end of the Formentor Prize and Cela’s intervention

But the response was also very significant. European publishers rallied around Einaudi and announced that the Formentor Prize would no longer be awarded in Spain. It disappeared a few years later and was not revived until 2011. Einaudi held a press conference to denounce what had happened, accompanied by writers of the stature of Italo Calvino, Carlo Levi, and Giorgio Bassani. The matter was even debated in the Italian parliament as an attack on freedom of expression.

In Spain, the writer Camilo José Cela took a stand against Einaudi, who was his publisher in Italy: “The tactic of slander doesn’t work among us. And even less so, that of blasphemy. The noble cause of freedom in Spain, for whose pursuit many Spaniards fight patriotically and without deviating from the rules — the code of honor we ourselves established — has not been strengthened by the book you published. Giving weapons to reactionary forces is certainly not helping those of us who love freedom.”

Despite such a display, the scandal only served to make the book and the records a touchstone of antifascism worldwide. Carrillo believes the regime misjudged its adversaries and the ensuing response because “they acted as they did with the internal opposition, with brute force, and they thought that would solve the problem.” Emilio Jona believes the Francoist reaction “was a symptom of its weakness and ideological poverty, which is why our modest and limited work assumed a dignity far exceeding its merits […] Unexpectedly, it made a significant contribution to the opposition to the Francoist dictatorship, and we felt then, and still feel today, proud and happy about that,” insists Jona, still delighted with that trip to Spain, 64 years later.

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