Video in Spanish, detailing a lot of things you probably never knew about the soon-to-abdicate king of Spain. That he squandered thousands of euros of public money per day on a canned hunt in Botswana is well known; not so obvious, however, is the fact that his “man of the people” image is a carefully cultivated myth. And that it all began with Generalissimo Franco, who covered up the fact that Juan Carlos killed his own brother, Alfonso, with a revolver as a boy. (The Wikipedia entry on Alfonso perpetuates this myth, claiming it was a gun accident, and that the pistol went off as Alfonso was cleaning it. The article cites only two sources.)
Of course, a killer-king is one thing nobody wants on the throne…and most Spaniards never knew they had one until recently, as Franco-fascism gradually gave way to more press freedom. But, as my most recent entry shows, there is still not nearly enough of that…because the whole damn world doesn’t know about this yet. And because the whole damn world still doesn’t know how badly Spain wants to be a republic again.