Also, the former king of Spain Juan Carlos has revealed for the first time how he shot and killed his younger brother Alfonso, when they were teenagers, almost 70 years ago and admits that for decades “I didn’t like to talk about it, and this is the first time I have.” Tragedy marked him.
“The Tragedy”
The traumatic incident happened when the siblings were “playing” with a gun as teenagers at their family home in Portugal in 1956, when Spain was groaning under the yoke of dictator Franco.
“I will not recover from this tragedy. Her earnestness will accompany me forever.” wrote Juan Carlos.
“We had the magazine removed. We had no idea there was a bullet left in the chamber,” he wrote.
“We fired once in the air, the bullet ricocheted off and hit my brother right in the forehead. He died in our father’s arms.”
At the time, there was no judicial inquiry into the circumstances of the firearms accident. Juan Carlos, was then 18 years old, and his brother Alfonso, 14 years old. They were apparently playing with a Star Bonifacio Echeverria automatic pistol, which belonged to the younger brother.
As the two children were playing alone in a room, it has never been clarified how Alfonso was killed. One of Princess Maria de las Mercedes’ tailors then claimed that Juan Carlos pointed the pistol at Alfonso and fired, not realizing it was loaded.
But other sources believed that the bullet ricocheted or that a door hit Juan’s hand, causing him to accidentally shoot his brother.
It was also long believed that Juan Carlos, who had returned home for Easter from the rigorous military school, was cleaning a revolver given to him by Francisco Franco when he shot his brother.
Their father, the Count of Barcelona, allegedly grabbed him by the throat and shouted angrily: “Swear to me you didn’t do it on purpose!”
The damaged relationship with his father
In the book, it is revealed that Juan Carlos’ father covered Alfonso’s body with a Spanish flag and later threw the pistol into the sea. Juan Carlos was sent back to the strict military academy – his relationship with his father was destroyed.
“There is a before and an after,” wrote Juan Carlos, reflecting on the event. “It’s still hard for me to talk about it, and I think about it every day… I miss her. I wish I had him by my side and could talk to him. I lost a friend, a confidant. It left me with a huge void. Without his death, my life would be less dark, less unhappy.”
Franco’s succession and resignation
Juan Carlos was born in Rome in 1938, in the midst of his family’s exile and the bloody Spanish Civil War, which led to Franco’s rise to power.
As the dictator groomed him to succeed him, Juan Carlos’ childhood and adolescence were “horrendous”, according to his British biographer Professor Paul Preston.
“I think that explains a lot. The deprivations of his childhood and adolescence may explain, let’s say, his greed, his need to collect money one way or another,” he said on the “Corinna and the King” podcast.
Juan Carlos ascended the Spanish throne in 1975, after the death of the dictator Franco, who had named him as his successor. He was a major figure on the international stage and was respected for decades for enabling the return of democracy to Spain.
He stepped down in 2014 in favor of his son, amid fierce controversy over his extramarital affairs and suspected involvement in corruption scandals. Juan Carlos began to fall into the eyes of the Spanish since 2012, when details about the his elephant hunting trip to Botswana with his ex-lover Corinna Larsen; while Spain was in an economic crisis.
This was followed by revelations about “off-shore” accounts and the famous transfer of 65 million euros by the then King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, in 2008.
Juan Carlos claims that the amount was a “gift of friendship” in the context of diplomatic cooperation between the two countries. “It was a gift I didn’t know how to refuse,” he writes, admitting that his acceptance “there was a serious mistake.”
His son and heir to the throne, King Felipe today, did not invite his father to the official ceremony to celebrate the anniversary on November 21. It is obvious that after what has happened since 2012, his own relations with his father have also deteriorated.
He also canceled his annual royal grant and severed all institutional ties, while prosecutorial investigations into money laundering in Spain and Switzerland were eventually dropped without charges.
Today, Juan Carlos declares bitterly: “I gave freedom to the Spaniards, but I never enjoyed it myself.” And, with evident bitterness, he adds: “I am the only Spaniard without a pension, after forty years of service.”
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