At that time the family was at their usual summer holiday location in San Sebastián; Luis Larramendi escaped to the Nationalist zone and returned few weeks later, when the Carlist Requeté seized the city.

[19] With no major combat the battalion advanced through Catalonia to the French frontier, in late winter shuttled to Extremadura and, again after low-intensity skirmishes, reached the province of Toledo at the moment of final Nationalist victory.

Together with a group of similarly-minded peers, best known of them Rafael Gambra and Francisco Elías de Tejada,[35] he staged minor and semi-private anti-Francoist demonstrations,[36] at one point in 1942 having been detained and placed under security supervision.

[37] Their most notable activity was Academia Vázquez de Mella, a Carlist-flavored private educational initiative of Maximo Palomar; the experience formatted Larramendi reinforcing his penchant for social issues and for cultural rather than political dimension of Traditionalism.

During that period Larramendi, influenced by Elías de Tejada and own father,[38] tended to favor Dom Duarte and the Braganzas as most legitimate candidates to the throne,[39] though in the early 1950s he was already converted to supporter of the Borbón-Parmas.

[48] As internal crisis climaxed, in the mid-1950s Fal was forced into resignation and Vasco-Navarros suggested that Larramendi be appointed to Secretariado Político, a freshly created body supposed to assist a new leader, José María Valiente.

[54] In fact he remained somewhat skeptical and anxious that the prince might be tempted to pursue a collaborationist line; the same year Larramendi was vital fomenting dissent in the Madrid AET organization,[55] which deposed its leader and key Don Carlos Hugo promoter, Ramón Massó, as the one who compromised Traditionalist identity and advocated rapprochement with the regime.

Differences of opinion continued and gave rise to two factions, pro-collaborationists and anti-collaborationists;[57] Massó, leader of the former and himself former Larramendi's acquaintance from the Academia years,[58] considered him representative of "mas pura ortodoxia tradicionalista".

[65] They were soon proved wrong; Larramendi stayed out of the newly emergent Partido Carlista and in 1975 addressed his king, Don Javier, with a joint letter, in ultimative terms demanding confirmation of Traditionalist principles.

[82] Larramendi's position as CEO was so strong that when in conflict with chairman of the board, it was rather the latter who resigned in 1972;[83] his own formal role changed in 1975 from director general to consejero delegado, remaining key and dominating corporate personality.

[85] The scheme proved transitional and in 1983 was followed by launch of Sistema MAPFRE 85, Mutual at its centre and by means of Corporación controlling all daughter companies, now specializing in 3 areas: transport, various risks and life & re-insurance.

In the early 1970s the company, by means of Editorial MAPFRE, embarked on public relations campaign,[89] while Larramendi used to tour the continent himself; he made sure that Argentina was the most promising market[90] and Colombia was the "mas españolista" country.

The entire business was re-drawn in line with the logic gaining popularity among corporative moguls of the era and designed after the Japanese zaibatsu model; its key feature was turning multi-business conglomerates into loose federative schemes with huge autonomy of its components.

[107] When inquired about his success as a manager, Larramendi usually pointed to HR-related factors, principally the internal code of conduct he introduced, at that time unheard of in corporative business and responsible for emergence of a new breed of employees, called mafristas.

Indeed, business historians agree that Larramendi's approach to human factor was key; importing mechanisms he learnt in Britain and the US, he introduced modern HR management with career paths, training plans, supervision, mentoring and other techniques, apart from preference for recruiting university graduates.

[110] That was part of his general mindset, default in case of present-day managers though absent at that time, focused at holistic realm of stakeholders – employees, owners, customers, suppliers, everyone affected – instead of merely shareholders.

[113] He is credited for developing a business model dubbed "specialized diversification",[114] allowing customer focus, reduced back-office and increased economics of scale by taking advantage of numerous shared services.

[119] His focus on accessible and accurate information, bordering obsession, led to leadership in terms of technology; MAPFRE was the second company in Spain[120] to introduce telex[121] and among the first ones to embrace broad-scale digital data storage techniques.

[123] Another concept referred to is Richard Caves' "intangible assets theory"; in case of Larramendi it would be selection of risks (with focus on re-insurance, direct insurance and assistance), HR management and especially banking on cultural proximity, which allowed MAPFRE to outpace other, especially US-based competitors.

Its key initiative was launching Colecciones Mapfre 1492, a set of 19 series, each with multitude of publications and each dedicated to specific subject, e.g. indigenous languages or urban centers;[129] each volume published was presented to a number of institutions in Latin American countries and elsewhere.

Formally discussing legal, commercial and insurance systems, the book was praise of the British social and state model; it was hailed as merger of efficient economic order and organization on the one hand, and traditional values and structures on the other.

[146] Fascination with British sense of continuity and intermediary institutions acting in-between state and society remained with Larramendi until the end of his life;[147] Tres claves stands out as an anomaly in usually anti-British Carlist thought, lambasting Albion as a hotbed of Liberalism, plutocracy, freemasonry and greed.

In practical terms it vaguely proposed a hybrid regime with some regulatory mechanisms working as checks-and-balances versus politics decided by universal suffrage,[150] thought most Francoist institutions were deemed useless.

[151] Greatly in favor of Spanish integration within the West European structures, it also proposed "la gran Europa de raza blanca y herencia cristiana" as political entity for the 21s century.

[154] In 1992 Larramendi published Utopía de la Nueva América, result of his American fascinations; the key thesis advanced was that Iberoamérica and Angloamérica would merge to create a new cultural entity.

[155] In the mid-1990s he commenced his written opus magnum, a series of 5 volumes intended as a response to perceived threats of global imbalance, disintegration of Europe and fragmentation of Spain; it was supposed to advance a proposal of "reforma operativa del estado español" though also to address general problems.

The final and possibly most popular book[161] was Así se hizo MAPFRE (2000), discussing history of the company against fairly wide background of personal life and general business and social environment.