The remains of dictator General Franco, still glorified as a heroic figure by the right-wing in Spain, are being relocated to a low-key grave to fulfil a key pledge of the socialist government. In 1939 Franco won the civil war, which had claimed almost half a million lives, extending his dictatorship to the whole country. What followed was a period of repression of political opponents and dissenters, with between 100,000 and 200,000 dying in forced labour and executions in concentration camps. He ruled for almost four decades, nurturing a cult of personality, initially as a totalitarian regime though that gradually softened and he introduced social and economic reform which brought prosperity. Many believe Spain has never faced up to its fascist part while others still hold him up as a figure of reverence.
Born 4 December 1892 at 12.30 am, he certainly had an unpleasant and cruel chart. His Sagittarius Sun opposed an alarming collection of Neptune Pluto Moon in Gemini in a hyperactive square to Mars in Pisces; with a Mystic Rectangle of Saturn in Libra opposition Jupiter in Aries sextile/trine his Sun and Pluto Neptune Moon.
Sun Neptune Pluto gives stratospheric ambitions and in square to Mars goals are accomplished through violence and publicity (Mars Neptune). It’s a surprisingly scattered chart for a personality who seemed enduring. Though the unyielding Saturn trine Pluto and sextile his Sun would help to anchor him.
His wife, Carmen Polo, was an influential figure in Francoist Spain, appearing at her husband’s side, always elegantly dressed with jewels. Born 11 June 1900, she had the same Gemini Sagittarius emphasis he did. Her Gemini Sun was conjunct Pluto and Neptune; and she had Jupiter Uranus, maybe Moon in Sagittarius. Her Mars was in rock solid Taurus. Their relationship chart had an affectionate Sun Venus conjunction in a wild and way out square to Neptune Pluto; plus a power-couple Jupiter trine Pluto Neptune sextile Mars.
That Neptune Pluto at the end of the 19th Century had a lot to answer for in terms of the brutality of the century that followed. From my Astrological History of the World.
“These two planets together in the same sign coincide with the rise of great powers, often led by brutal dictators, and a consequent dissolving of previous empires, starting with the fall of the Roman Empire and Britain’s decline into the Dark Ages in the fifth century.
Attila the Hun (born c. 406), who devastated the Eastern Mediterranean in a campaign of terror in the fifth century, and Joseph Stalin (born 1879), the revolutionary Marxist whose brutal purges led to the death of some 20 million Russian peasants by execution or famine in the 1920s and 1930s, were born 1400 years apart but both under the sway of a Neptune–Pluto conjunction in Taurus. Adolf Hitler (born 1889) and Mao Tse Tung (born 1893), the other two major destructive power figures of the 20th century, were born with Neptune close to Pluto in Gemini. When the 14th-century conjunction was at its peak, Tamerlane the Great was terrorizing the Middle East.
More recently, in the final 20 years of the nineteenth century, the Englishman Cecil Rhodes was forcefully attempting to create a British colonial African super-state from south to north. In a chilling pointer to the holocaust of the next century, the British invented concentration camps during the Boer War. In North America, the Native American Indians were finally driven into total submission, and America was established as an imperial power, having won the Spanish-American War. Germany, now reunified, was rising steadily under Bismarck to become a super-power.
Neptune in its visionary aspect, mixing with Pluto’s power drive, creates a delusional though often devastatingly effective megalomania. Both planets in their negative roles are chillingly inhumane. Neptune puts the dream above reality, writes off human sacrifice as a necessary cost to gain the end. Pluto as the arch controller reduces individual humans to objects, pawns on the chessboard; the puppet-master reigns supreme.”