“I don’t believe people who say they are apolitical, because that is absolutely impossible and the simple fact of saying it sounds reactionary, although I don’t like to use clichés. If any problem in the profession had to be defended again, I would be there.” declared Concha Velasco to the newspaper The vanguard in 1982. Born in Valladolid and raised in Larache, an African city where her father, a military man who became Franco’s assistant, was assigned, Concha Velasco He was one of the undisputed stars of the dictatorship. A regular at the La Granja festivals organized for the entertainment of Carmen Polo, in the early 70s, the actress began to change your political position. “The bad thing would have been if I didn’t evolve. And I did. Wow, I did!”, he declared in an interview also granted to The vanguard in 2015.
In January 1972, while performing at the Lara Theater in Madrid The arrival of the gods Antonio Buero Vallejo, Juan Diego and Concha Velasco requested to take off one day a week, a request that was responded to by the company with the dismissal of the couple. As the writer Emeterio Díaz Puertas explains, the labor conflict came from behind. In 1971, the actors’ guild union elections had been riddled with irregularities. Among them, the fraud in the counting of votesthat actors who in turn were businessmen would have been allowed to vote or the veto to be candidates for actors like Juan Diego – who was clandestinely active in the Communist Party -, which caused the results to fall in favor of representatives related to the Communist Party. regime that, in turn, were the most lukewarm in labor demands.
To all this we had to add the government’s refusal to allow the actors, who were divided between theater, film, dubbing and television artists, to group together in a single union organization and, finally, the refusal of employers to grant certain benefitslike that long-awaited weekly break, that only one performance was held per day and that rehearsals were paid.
Faced with such a work scenario, the dismissal of Concha Velasco and Juan Diego was the last straw. From that moment on, the actors decided organize outside the National Entertainment Union directed by Jaime Campmany and, in 1974, they raised their demands to the businessmen. When they were not attended to, in February 1975 the group went on strike, which lasted for nine days and provoked the reaction of the Francoist authorities, who even arrested and imprisoned, among others, Aurora Bautista, Enriqueta Carballeira, Tina Sainz, Pedro Mari Sanchez and Rocio durcal that, if he did not end up in prison, it was only because Lola Flores He went to the General Directorate of Security to mediate for her and free her.
A few months later, in March 1976, it would be Concha Velasco herself who would intercede for another of her companions, this time Lola Gaos, who had been arrested for attending a meeting of Lever Ibérica workers. Even though the dictator had been dead for several months, when she and Germán Cobos went to the DGS to find out about the situation in which the veteran actress was, they were expelled from the police station without receiving any type of information or being able to speak. with his partner.
The political activity of Concha Velasco would continue in June of that same year with participation in a festival held at the Alcalá Palace Theater in support to New dairy —a newspaper that, threatened with closure due to debts incurred by the property, left 300 families on the streets—and with the signing, in November 1976, of a letter in which more than 500 professionals demanded changes in RTVE programming , to avoid “cultural and ideological colonization” from countries like the United States and demand an increase in own production in support of the Spanish film and television industry.
Likewise, Velasco signed and was one of those in charge of delivering to the Presidency of the Government, a letter signed by more than 600 personalities, among whom were Juan Antonio Bardem, Ana Belen, Basil Martin I skate and Adolfo Marsillachwhich demanded that an “end be put to the excesses” that occurred in January 1977 and which included the kidnapping of Lieutenant Colonel Eugenio Villaescusa, the death of two students in as many demonstrations and the murder of five labor lawyers in his office on Atocha Street, all within a week.
You can be everything at the same time
“Although I don’t think I’m the best person to talk in depth about such an important topic, I will say yes, I’ve read it, and I think it’s good. I think it protects and defends all of us Spaniards. and I, of course, am going to vote yes. I don’t want to coerce anyone with this. Everyone is free to vote what they want, but it seems fine to me,” Concha Velasco declared to the program Weekly reporta few days before the celebration of the referendum of the Constitution of December 6, 1978.
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A convinced democrat, from then on the actress would not hide her sympathies for the socialist party.an affinity that he combined with his catholic faith because his mother had also done it, of whom, he said, she had been “intelligent, republican, writer and religious because you can be everything at the same time.” This socialist militancy made the actress participated in several electoral campaigns. For example in 1996, when the PSOE was not going through its best moments due to the corruption scandals and the GAL, or in Defend joythe action in support of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in which they also participated Joaquin Sabina, Boris Izaguirre, Ana Belen, Victor Manuel, Loneliness Gimenez either Fran Perea. Although she would later show her disappointment in Zapatero’s second government, the actress returned to recover the illusion in the socialist party with the arrival of Pedro Sánchez, whom he supported at a rally in 2020.
However, in recent years, Velasco lived bitter controversies related to politics that were amplified by social networks. For example, what happened in 2014 when he declared in a television interview that “We can do it, it was necessary. It gives hope. There are many young people and it has opened a door of fresh air” or, when last July, it was visited by surprise in the residence where she was admitted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The president of the Community of Madrid, cornered for her management of nursing homes that caused the death of more than 7,000 people, took a photo with the actress, which she did not hesitate to post on her social networks, thus provoking the indignation of many users who accused her of using the artist to whiten her terrible image.