In 1916, the fading Spanish Empire was at war in Morocco. Less than two decades had elapsed since the former global power — the first on which it was claimed “the sun never set” — lost its colonies of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the upstart United States. All that was left of Spain’s once massive collection of overseas possessions was a relatively tiny foothold in North Africa just across the Straights of Gibraltar, around the coastal cities of Melilla and Ceuta, as well as present-day Western Sahara. By the 1910s, even this his colonial redoubt was under threat by many among the indigenous Amazigh peoples¹, who had no interest in being ruled, taxed, or having their extensive iron resources extracted by Madrid.

One of the young Spanish officers sent to “pacify” the Amazigh was a 24-year-old captain named Francisco Franco. A short man with a squeaky voice (his comrades called him “Franquito” — Little Franky), Franco had developed a reputation for field logistics and steadiness under fire. His drive was ideological — Franco was an africanista, a member of the far-right colonial cadres who defined themselves by an almost fatalistic obsession with restoring Spanish imperial glory abroad, and “by their rejection of the political in-fighting of the governing parties and the politicians’ incapacity to stamp out, or even contain, the protests and pressure for change from the forces of the Left,” as Franco biographer Sheelagh Ellwood has written. Franco’s deep belief in the superiority of the “Spanish race” did not prevent him from happily commanding pro-Spanish Moroccan troops of the native Regulares Indígenas, who made up the bulk of the actual Spanish fighting force.²

In June 1916, capitán Franco was ordered to lead his company of Regulares in an assault on the mountaintop stronghold of El Biutz, the main supply point for Riffian guerrillas trying to cut off communications between the cities of Tetouan and Tangier. It was extremely bloody fighting, as the Amazigh rebels had dug in with trenches and machine guns, and were committed to defending their position to the death. At some point, one of Franco’s native Moroccan underlings was killed. The tiny captain picked up his rifle to charge forward, only to be shot in what has generally been referred to as “the abdomen.”³

This was widely considered a kill shot in those days: if it didn’t destroy a vital organ then the wounded could be expected to develop sepsis or bleed out internally. But Franco, of course, recovered. By a stroke of pure chance, the bullet missed all the major organs and his spine, and no serious infection set in. As another Franco biographer, Paul Preston, has written: “A fraction of an inch in any direction and he would have died."

Franco’s Moroccan troops said he had baraka—a mixture of divine protection and supernatural luck. “Thus was sown the seed for the belief—to which Franco subscribed and which was subsequently exploited to the full by his propagandists—that his life received guidance of a superhuman nature,” Ellwood summarized.

In 1939, Franco, with the assistance of tens of thousands of his Moroccan colonial troops in the Army of Africa, among others, completed the overthrow of the Second Spanish Republic and the left-liberal Popular Front that had governed it. (Franco’s Nationalists alleged, in a move that should sound familiar, that the Popular Front had rigged the 1936 elections that brought them to power.) For three years of civil war, he had overseen the crushing of Communist, anarchist, and liberal forces, killing civilians and partisans alike, with the formidable military assistance of his allies Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

The Spanish Civil War claimed the lives of over 500,000 Spaniards, including 200,000 civilians. After the war ended, Franco “shifted his attention from open battleground conflict and extensive rearguard killing to other forms of repression and containment of the enemy in jails and concentration camps, as well as to trials, purges, forced labor, evictions, expropriation of property, and so on,” a scholar summarized. A modern Catholic theocracy was erected, in which gay and transgender people were imprisoned, tortured and executed, and women lost the rights to abortion, divorce, and working outside the home without permission. Franco further banned Jewish worship and supplied the Nazis with a list of Spanish Jews in case the war came to Iberia.

To get away with it, Franco constructed an imposing cult of personality, using photographs, fake journalism, and mandated propaganda-filled school textbooks. (One elementary school textbook taught children: “El Caudillo sólo responde ante Dios y ante la Historia.” “The Caudillo [Franco] only answers to God and to History.”) The aura of God-given invincibility — Franco’s supposed “baraka” — was key to this image. His propagandists also made great use of the “martyrs” of the Civil War, interning thousands in a monumental cemetery renamed the Valley of the Fallen. As the scholar Derrin Pinto has written:

The horrors of the Spanish Civil War served two purposes for Franco: one, he participated in and exploited them to their fullest extent to rid Spain of his social and political enemies and rivals, real and perceived. And, two, those horrors imparted a lasting fear among the surviving and non-exiled populace of the chaos of division and civil war — a threat that Franco’s propagandists stressed over and over that only the Caudillo could keep at bay. Thanks to a series of accidents that left Spain officially neutral in World War II,⁴ and Franco’s decision to subtly shift his anti-Communist favor to the Americans and British at the end of the war, Franco — unlike his former allies Hitler and Mussolini — was able to keep that cult of personality going for decades; until his baraka finally ran out, in 1975, at the age of 82.