The Spanish Holocaust

Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

Paul Preston

Copyright

HarperPress

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2012

Copyright © Paul Preston 2012

Paul Preston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST. Copyright © Paul Preston 2012. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780002556347

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007467228

Version: 2016-07-04

Dedication

For Gabrielle

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Prologue

PART 1: THE ORIGINS OF HATRED AND VIOLENCE

1 Social War Begins, 1931–1933

2 Theorists of Extermination

3 The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934

4 The Coming of War, 1934–1936

PART 2: INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE IN THE REBEL ZONE

5 Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South

6 Mola’s Terror: The Purging of Navarre, Galicia, Castile and León

PART 3: THE CONSEQUENCE OF THE COUP: SPONTANEOUS VIOLENCE IN THE REPUBLICAN ZONE

7 Far from the Front: Repression behind the Republican Lines

8 Revolutionary Terror in Madrid

PART 4: MADRID BESIEGED: THE THREAT AND THE RESPONSE

9 The Column of Death’s March on Madrid

10 A Terrified City Responds: The Massacres of Paracuellos

PART 5: TWO CONCEPTS OF WAR

11 Defending the Republic from the Enemy Within

12 Franco’s Slow War of Annihilation

PART 6: FRANCO’S INVESTMENT IN TERROR

13 No Reconciliation: Trials, Executions, Prisons

Epilogue: The Reverberations

Acknowledgements

Photographic Insert

Glossary

Notes

Appendix

Searchable Terms

Other Books by Paul Preston

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Franco in Seville with the brutal leader of the ‘Column of Death’, Colonel Juan Yagüe. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Yagüe’s artillery chief, Luis Alarcón de la Lastra. (EFE/jt)

General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. (EFE/Jalon Angel)

General Emilio Mola. (EFE/Delespro/jt)

Gonzalo de Aguilera. (Courtesy of Marianela de la Trinidad de Aguilera y Lodeiro, Condesa de Alba de Yeltes)

Virgilio Leret with his wife, the feminist, Carlota O’Neill. (Courtesy of Carlota Leret-O’Neill)

Amparo Barayón. (Courtesy of Ramon Sender Barayón)

A Coruña, Anniversary of the foundation of the Second Republic, 14 April 1936. (Fondo Suárez Ferrín, Proxecto “Nomes e Voces”, Santiago de Compostela)

José González Barrero, Mayor of Zafra. (Courtesy of González Barrero family)

Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, Mayor of Fuente de Cantos. (Courtesy of Cayetano Ibarra)

Ricardo Zabalza, secretary general of the FNTT and Civil Governor of Valencia during the war, with his wife Obdulia Bermejo. (Courtesy of Abel Zabalza and Emilio Majuelo)

Mourning women after Castejón’s purge of the Triana district of Seville, 21 July 1936. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Queipo de Llano (foreground) inspects the 5º Bandera of the Legion in Seville on 2 August 1936. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Rafael de Medina Villalonga, in white, leads the column that has captured the town of Tocina, 4 August 1936. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Trucks taking miners captured in the ambush at La Pañoleta for execution. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Utrera, 26 July 1936. Townsfolk taken prisoner by the column of the Legion which captured the town. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Lorca’s gravediggers. (Courtesy of Víctor Fernández and Colección Enrique Sabater)

Regulares examine their plunder. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

After a village falls, the column moves on with stolen sewing machines, household goods and animals. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

A firing squad prepares to execute townspeople in Llerena. (Archivo Histórico Municipal de Llerena, Fondo Pacheco Pereira, legajo 1.)

Calle Carnicerías (Butchery Street) in Talavera de la Reina. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Mass grave near Toledo. (© ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla, Fondo Serrano)

Pascual Fresquet (centre left) with his ‘death brigade’ in Caspe. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, 1426, EXP.45, IMAGEN128)

The seizure of the Iglesia del Carmen in Madrid by militiamen. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-Causa_General, 1907, 1, p.81)

Arms and uniforms of the Falange found by militiamen in the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-Causa_General, 1814, 1, IMAGEN6)

Aurelio Fernández. (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG-CNT)

Juan García Oliver. (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, IISG-CNT)

Ángel Pedrero García. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FC-CAUSA_GENERAL, 1547, EXP.9, IMAGEN45)

The Brigada García Atadell outside their Madrid headquarters, the Rincón Palace. (EFE/Díaz Casariego/jgb)

Santiago Carrillo. (EFE/jgb)

Melchor Rodríguez. (EFE/Vidal/jgb)

The wounded Pablo Yagüe receives visitors. (EFE/Vidal/jgb)

The cameraman Roman Karmen and the Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov. (Courtesy of Victor Alexandrovich Frandkin, Koltsov family)

Andreu Nin and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. (L’Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona)

Josif Grigulevich, the Brigadas Especiales, Roman Karmen, then two of the NKVD staff, Lev Vasilevsky and then his boss, Grigory Sergeievich Syroyezhkin. Madrid October 1936. (Cañada Blanch Collection)

Vittorio Vidali. (Imperial War Museum)

Refugees flee from Queipo’s repression in Málaga towards Almería. (Photograph by Hazen Sise, reproduced courtesy of Jesús Majada and El Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía)

Exhaustion overcomes the refugees from Málaga on the road to Almería. (Photograph by Hazen Sise, reproduced courtesy of Jesús Majada and El Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía)

The Regulares enter northern Catalonia January 1939. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FOTOGRAFIAS-DESCHAMPS, FOTO.7)

Republican prisoners packed into the fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona, February 1939. (España. Ministerio de Cultura. Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. FOTOGRAFIAS-DESCHAMPS, FOTO.764)

No military threat from those making the long trek to the French border. (Photos 12/Alamy)

A crowd of Spanish women and children refugees cross the border into France at Le Perthus. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

Recently arrived at Argelès, women await classification. (Roger-Viollet/Rex Features)

The male refugees are detained at Argelès – the only facility being barbed wire. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

Prisoners carry rocks up the staircase at the Mauthausen-Gusen death camp. (akg-images/ullstein bild)

Franco welcomes Himmler to Madrid. (EFE/Hermes Pato/jgb)

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera. (EFE/jgb)

Himmler visits the psycho-technic checa of Alfonso Laurencic in Barcelona. (L’Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona)

Drawings made by Simon Manfield during the excavation at Valdedios, Asturias, summer 2003. (© Simon Manfield. Part of the Memoria Histórica series, simonmanfield@hotmail.com)

PROLOGUE

Behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly 200,000 men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process. They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17–18 July 1936 against the Second Republic. For the same reason, perhaps as many as 200,000 men died at the battle fronts. Unknown numbers of men, women and children were killed in bombing attacks and in the exoduses that followed the occupation of territory by Franco’s military forces. In all of Spain after the final victory of the rebels at the end of March 1939, approximately 20,000 Republicans were executed. Many more died of disease and malnutrition in overcrowded, unhygienic prisons and concentration camps. Others died in the slave-labour conditions of work battalions. More than half a million refugees were forced into exile and many were to die of disease in French concentration camps. Several thousand were worked to death in Nazi camps. The purpose of this book is to show as far as possible what happened to civilians and why. All of what did happen constitutes what I believe can legitimately be called the Spanish holocaust.

I thought long and hard about using the word ‘holocaust’ in the title of this book. I feel intense sorrow and outrage about the Nazis’ deliberate attempt to annihilate European Jewry. I also feel intense sorrow and outrage about the lesser, but none the less massive, suffering undergone by the Spanish people during the Civil War of 1936–9 and for several years thereafter. I could find no word that more accurately encapsulates the Spanish experience than ‘holocaust’. Moreover, in choosing it, I was influenced by the fact that those who justified the slaughter of innocent Spaniards used an anti-Semitic rhetoric and frequently claimed that they had to be exterminated because they were the instruments of a ‘Jewish–Bolshevik–Masonic’ conspiracy. Nevertheless, my use of the word ‘holocaust’ is not intended to equate what happened within Spain with what happened throughout the rest of continental Europe under German occupation but rather to suggest that it be examined in a broadly comparative context. It is hoped thereby to suggest parallels and resonances that will lead to a better understanding of what happened in Spain during the Civil War and after.

To this day, General Franco and his regime enjoy a relatively good press. This derives from a series of persistent myths about the benefits of his rule. Along with the carefully constructed idea that he masterminded Spain’s economic ‘miracle’ in the 1960s and heroically kept his country out of the Second World War, there are numerous falsifications about the origins of his regime. These derive from the initial lie that the Spanish Civil War was a necessary war fought to save the country from Communist take-over. The success of this fabrication influenced much writing on the Spanish Civil War to depict it as a conflict between two more or less equal sides. The issue of innocent civilian casualties is subsumed into that concept and thereby ‘normalized’. Moreover, anti-communism, a reluctance to believe that officers and gentlemen could be involved in the deliberate mass slaughter of civilians and distaste for anti-clerical violence go some way to explaining a major lacuna in the historiography of the war.

The extent to which the rebels’ war effort was built on a prior plan of systematic mass murder and their subsequent regime on state terror is given relatively little weight in the literature on the Spanish conflict and its aftermath. The same may be said of the fact that a chain reaction which fuelled retaliatory mass assassinations within the loyalist zone was set off once the exterminatory plans of the military rebels began to be implemented from the night of 17 July 1936. The collective violence in both rearguards unleashed by brutal perpetrators against undeserving victims justifies the use of the word ‘holocaust’ in this context not just because of its extent but also because its resonances of systematic murder should be invoked in the Spanish case, as they are in those of Germany and Russia.

There were two rearguard repressions, one each in the Republican and rebel zones. Although very different, both quantitatively and qualitatively, each claimed tens of thousands of lives, most of them innocent of wrongdoing or even of political activism. The leaders of the rebellion, Generals Mola, Franco and Queipo de Llano, regarded the Spanish proletariat in the same way as they did the Moroccan, as an inferior race that had to be subjugated by sudden, uncompromising violence. Thus they applied in Spain the exemplary terror they had learned in North Africa by deploying the Spanish Foreign Legion and Moroccan mercenaries, the Regulares, of the colonial army.

Their approval of the grim violence of their men is reflected in Franco’s war diary of 1922, which lovingly describes Moroccan villages destroyed and their defenders decapitated. He delights in recounting how his teenage bugler boy cut off the ear of a captive.¹ Franco himself led twelve Legionarios on a raid from which they returned carrying as trophies the bloody heads of twelve tribesmen (harqueños).² The decapitation and mutilation of prisoners was common. When General Miguel Primo de Rivera visited Morocco in 1926, an entire battalion of the Legion awaited inspection with heads stuck on their bayonets.³ During the Civil War, terror by the African Army was similarly deployed on the Spanish mainland as the instrument of a coldly conceived project to underpin a future authoritarian regime.

The repression carried out by the military rebels was a carefully planned operation to eliminate, in the words of the director of the coup, Emilio Mola, ‘without scruple or hesitation those who do not think as we do’.⁴ In contrast, the repression in the Republican zone was hot-blooded and reactive. Initially, it was a spontaneous and defensive response to the military coup which was subsequently intensified by news brought by refugees of military atrocities and by rebel bombing raids. It is difficult to see how the violence in the Republican zone could have happened without the military coup which effectively removed all of the restraints of civilized society. The collapse of the structures of law and order as a result of the coup thus permitted both an explosion of blind millenarian revenge (the built-in resentment of centuries of oppression) and the irresponsible criminality of those let out of jail or of those individuals never previously daring to give free rein to their instincts. In addition, as in any war, there was the real military necessity of combating the enemy within.

There is no doubt that hostility intensified on both sides as the Civil War progressed, fed by outrage and a desire for revenge as news of what was happening on the other side filtered through. Nevertheless, it is also clear that, from the first moments, there was a level of hatred at work that sprang forth ready formed from the army in the North African outpost of Ceuta on the night of 17 July 1936 or from the Republican populace on 19 July at the Cuartel de la Montaña barracks in Madrid. The first part of the book explains how those enmities were fomented. Polarization ensued from the right’s determination to block the reforming ambitions of the democratic regime established in April 1931, the Second Republic. The obstruction of reform led to an ever more radicalized response by the left. At the same time, rightist theological and racial theories were elaborated to justify the intervention of the military and the destruction of the left.

In the case of the military rebels, a programme of terror and extermination was central to their planning and preparations. Because of the numerical superiority of the urban and rural working classes, they believed that the immediate imposition of a reign of terror was crucial. With the use of forces brutalized in the colonial wars in Africa, backed up by local landowners, this process was supervised in the south by General Queipo de Llano. In the significantly different regions of Navarre, Galicia, Old Castile and León, deeply conservative areas where the military coup was almost immediately successful and left-wing resistance minimal, the application of terror under the supervision of General Mola was disproportionately severe.

The exterminatory objectives of the rebels, if not their military capacities, found an echo on the extreme left, particularly in the anarchist movement, in rhetoric about the need for ‘purification’ of a corrupt society. In Republican-held areas, the underlying hatreds deriving from misery, hunger and exploitation exploded in a disorganized terror, particularly in Barcelona and Madrid. Inevitably, the targets were not just the military personnel identified with the revolt but also the wealthy, the bankers, the industrialists and the landowners who were regarded as the instruments of oppression. It was directed too, often with greater ferocity, at the clergy who were seen as the cronies of the rich, legitimizing injustice while the Church accumulated fabulous wealth. Unlike the systematic repression unleashed by the rebels as an instrument of policy, this random violence took place despite, not because of, the Republican authorities. Indeed, as a result of the efforts of successive Republican governments to re-establish public order, the left-wing repression was restrained and was largely at an end by December 1936.

Two of the bloodiest episodes in the Spanish Civil War, which are closely interrelated, concern the siege of Madrid by the rebels and the capital’s defence. Franco’s Africanista forces, the so-called ‘Column of Death’, left a trail of slaughter as they conquered towns and villages along their route from Seville to the capital. Having thus announced what Madrid could expect if surrender was not immediate, the consequence was that those responsible for the defence of the city made the decision to evacuate right-wing prisoners, particularly army officers who had sworn to join the rebel forces as soon as they could. The implementation of that decision led to the notorious massacres of right-wingers at Paracuellos on the outskirts of Madrid.

By the end of 1936, two differing concepts of the war had evolved. The Republic was on the defensive both against Franco and against enemies within. Such enemies included not just the burgeoning rebel fifth column, dedicated to spying, sabotage and spreading defeatism and despondency. Threats to the international image of the Republic and indeed to its war effort were also seen in the revolutionary ambitions of the anarchist movement, consisting of its trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, and its activist wing, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. The anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista was equally determined to make a priority of revolution. Both thus became targets of the same security apparatus which had put a stop to the uncontrolled repression of the first months. On the rebel side, the rapid advance of the African columns was replaced by Franco’s deliberately ponderous war of annihilation through the Basque Country, Santander, Asturias, Aragon and Catalonia. His war effort was conceived ever more as an investment in terror which would facilitate the establishment of his dictatorship. The post-war machinery of trials, executions, prisons and concentration camps consolidated that investment.

The intention was to ensure that establishment interests would never again be challenged as they had been from 1931 to 1936 by the democratic reforms of the Second Republic. When the clergy justified and the military implemented General Mola’s call for the elimination of ‘those who do not think as we do’, they were not engaged in an intellectual or ethical crusade. The defence of establishment interests was assumed to require the eradication of the ‘thinking’ of progressive liberal and left-wing elements. They had questioned the central tenets of the right which could be summed up in the slogan of the major Catholic party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas – or Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups) – ‘Religion, Fatherland, Family, Order, Work, Property’, the untouchable elements of social and economic life in Spain before 1931. ‘Religion’ referred to the Catholic Church’s monopoly of education and religious practice. ‘Fatherland’ meant no challenge to Spanish centralism from the regional nationalisms. ‘Family’ denoted the subservient position of women and the prohibition of divorce. ‘Order’ meant no toleration of public protest. ‘Work’ referred to the duties of the labouring masses. ‘Property’ meant the privileges of the landowners whose position must remain unchallenged. Sometimes, the word ‘hierarchy’ was included in the list to emphasize that the existing social order was sacrosanct. To protect all of these tenets, in the areas occupied by the rebels, the immediate victims were not just schoolteachers, Freemasons, liberal doctors and lawyers, intellectuals and trade union leaders – those who might have propagated ideas. The killing also extended to all those who might have been influenced by their ideas: the trade unionists, those who didn’t attend Mass, those suspected of voting in February 1936 for the left-wing electoral coalition, the Popular Front, and the women who had been given the vote and the right to divorce.

What all this meant in terms of numbers of deaths is still impossible to say with finality, although the broad lines are clear. Accordingly, indicative figures are frequently given in the book, drawing on the massive research carried out all over Spain in recent years by large numbers of local historians. However, despite their remarkable achievements, it is still not possible to present definitive figures for the overall number of those killed behind the lines, especially in the rebel zone. The objective should always be, as far as is possible, to base figures for those killed in both zones on the named dead. Thanks to the efforts of the Republican authorities at the time to identify bodies and because of subsequent investigations by the Francoist state, the numbers of those murdered or executed in the Republican zone are known with relative precision. The most reliable recent figure, produced by the foremost expert on the subject, José Luis Ledesma, is 49,272. However, uncertainty over the scale of the killings in Republican Madrid could see that figure rise.⁵ Even for areas where reliable studies exist, new information and excavations of common graves see the numbers being revised constantly, albeit within relatively small parameters.⁶

In contrast, the calculation of numbers of Republican victims of rebel violence has faced innumerable difficulties. Nineteen-sixty-five was the year in which Francoists began to think the unthinkable, that the Caudillo was not immortal, and that preparations had to be made for the future. It was not until 1985 that the Spanish government began to take belated and hesitant action to protect the nation’s archival resources. Millions of documents were lost during those crucial twenty years, including the archives of the Franco regime’s single party, the fascist Falange, of provincial police headquarters, of prisons and of the main Francoist local authority, the Civil Governors. Convoys of trucks removed the ‘judicial’ records of the repression. As well as the deliberate destruction of archives, there were also ‘inadvertent’ losses when some town councils sold their archives by the ton as waste paper for recycling.⁷

Serious investigation was not possible until after the death of Franco in 1975. When researchers began the task, they were confronted not only with the deliberate destruction of much archival material by the Francoist authorities but also with the fact that many deaths had simply been registered either falsely or not at all. In addition to the concealment of crimes by the dictatorship was the continued fear of witnesses about coming forward and the obstruction of research, especially in the provinces of Old Castile. Archival material has mysteriously disappeared and frequently local officials have refused to permit consultation of the civilian registry.⁸

Many executions by the military rebels were given a veneer of pseudo-legality by trials, although they were effectively little different from extra-judicial murder. Death sentences were handed out after procedures lasting minutes in which the accused were not allowed to speak.⁹ The deaths of those killed in what the rebels called ‘cleansing and punishment operations’ were given the flimsiest legal justification by being registered as ‘by dint of the application of the declaration of martial law’ (‘por aplicación del bando de Guerra’). This was meant to legalize the summary execution of those who resisted the military take-over. The collateral deaths of many innocent people, unarmed and not offering any resistance, were also registered in this way. Then there were the executions of those registered as killed ‘without trial’ in reference to those who were discovered harbouring a fugitive, and so were shot just on military orders. There was also a systematic effort to conceal what had happened. Prisoners were taken far from their home towns, executed and buried in unmarked mass graves.¹⁰

Finally, there is the fact that a substantial number of deaths were not registered in any way. This was the case with many of those who fled before Franco’s African columns as they headed from Seville to Madrid. As each town or village was occupied, among those killed were refugees from elsewhere. Since they carried no papers, their names or places of origin were unknown. It may never be possible to calculate the exact numbers murdered in the open fields by squads of mounted Falangists and extreme right-wing monarchists of the so-called Carlist movement. It is equally impossible to ascertain the fate of the thousands of refugees from Western Andalusia who died in the exodus after the fall of Málaga in 1937 or of those from all over Spain who had taken refuge in Barcelona only to die in the flight to the French border in 1939 or of those who committed suicide after waiting in vain for evacuation from the Mediterranean ports.

Nevertheless, the huge amount of research that has been carried out makes it possible to state that, broadly speaking, the repression by the rebels was about three times greater than that which took place in the Republican zone. The currently most reliable, yet still tentative, figure for deaths at the hands of the military rebels and their supporters is 130,199. However, it is unlikely that such deaths were fewer than 150,000 and they could well be more. Some areas have been studied only partially; others hardly at all. In several areas, which spent time in both zones, and for which the figures are known with some precision, the differences between the numbers of deaths at the hands of Republicans and at the hands of rebels are shocking. To give some examples, in Badajoz, there were 1,437 victims of the left as against 8,914 victims of the rebels; in Seville, 447 victims of the left, 12,507 victims of the rebels; in Cádiz, 97 victims of the left, 3,071 victims of the rebels; and in Huelva, 101 victims of the left, 6,019 victims of the rebels. In places where there was no Republican violence, the figures for rebel killings are almost incredible, for example Navarre, 3,280, La Rioja, 1,977. In most places where the Republican repression was the greater, like Alicante, Girona or Teruel, the differences are in the hundreds.¹¹ The exception is Madrid. The killings throughout the war when the capital was under Republican control seem to have been nearer three times those carried out after the rebel occupation. However, precise calculation is rendered difficult by the fact that the most frequently quoted figure for the post-war repression in Madrid, of 2,663 deaths, is based on a study of those executed and buried in only one cemetery, the Almudena or Cementerio del Este.¹²

Although exceeded by the violence exercised by the Francoists, the repression in the Republican zone before it was stopped by the Popular Front government was nonetheless horrifying. Its scale and nature necessarily varied, with the highest figures being recorded for the largely Socialist south of Toledo and the anarchist-dominated area from the south of Zaragoza, through Teruel into western Tarragona.¹³ In Toledo, 3,152 rightists were killed, of whom 10 per cent were members of the clergy (nearly half of the province’s clergy).¹⁴ In Cuenca, the total deaths were 516 (of whom thirty-six, or 7 per cent of the total killed, were priests – nearly a quarter of the province’s clergy).¹⁵ The figure for deaths in Republican Catalonia, according to the exhaustive study by Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Vilarroyo i Font, was 8,360. This figure corresponds closely to the conclusions reached by a commission created by the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Catalan regional government) in 1937. Part of the efforts of the Republican authorities to register deaths, it was led by a judge, Bertran de Quintana, and investigated all deaths behind the lines in order to instigate measures against those responsible for extra-judicial executions.¹⁶ Such a procedure would have been inconceivable in the rebel zone.

Recent scholarship, not only for Catalonia but also for most of Republican Spain, has dramatically dismantled the propagandistic allegations made by the rebels at the time. On 18 July 1938 in Burgos, Franco himself claimed that 54,000 people had been killed in Catalonia. In the same speech, he alleged that 70,000 had been murdered in Madrid and 20,000 in Valencia. On the same day, he told a reporter there had already been a total of 470,000 murders in the Republican zone.¹⁷ To prove the scale of Republican iniquity to the world, on 26 April 1940 he set up a massive state investigation, the Causa General, ‘to gather trustworthy information’ to ascertain the true scale of the crimes committed in the Republican zone. Denunciation and exaggeration were encouraged. Thus it came as a desperate disappointment to Franco when, on the basis of the information gathered, the Causa General concluded that the number of deaths was 85,940. Although inflated and including many duplications, this figure was still so far below Franco’s claims that, for over a quarter of a century, it was omitted from editions of the published résumé of the Causa General’s findings.¹⁸

A central, yet under-estimated, part of the repression carried out by the rebels – the systematic persecution of women – is not susceptible to statistical analysis. Murder, torture and rape were generalized punishments for the gender liberation embraced by many, but not all, liberal and left-wing women during the Republican period. Those who came out of prison alive suffered deep lifelong physical and psychological problems. Thousands of others were subjected to rape and other sexual abuses, the humiliation of head shaving and public soiling after the forced ingestion of castor oil. For most Republican women, there were also the terrible economic and psychological problems of having their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons murdered or forced to flee, which often saw the wives themselves arrested in efforts to get them to reveal the whereabouts of their menfolk. In contrast, despite frequent assumptions that the raping of nuns was common in Republican Spain, there was relatively little equivalent abuse of women there. That is not to say that it did not take place. The sexual molestation of around one dozen nuns and the deaths of 296, just over 1.3 per cent of the female clergy, is shocking but of a notably lower order of magnitude than the fate of women in the rebel zone.¹⁹ That is not entirely surprising given that respect for women was built into the Republic’s reforming programme.

The statistical vision of the Spanish holocaust is not only flawed, incomplete and unlikely ever to be complete. It also fails to capture the intense horror that lies behind the numbers. The account that follows includes many stories of individuals, of men, women and children from both sides. It introduces some specific but representative cases of victims and perpetrators from all over the country. It is hoped thereby to convey the suffering unleashed upon their own fellow citizens by the arrogance and brutality of the officers who rose up on 17 July 1936. They provoked a war that was unnecessary and whose consequences still reverberate bitterly in Spain today.

PART ONE

1

Social War Begins, 1931–1933

On 18 July 1936, on hearing of the military uprising in Morocco, an aristocratic landowner lined up the labourers on his estate to the south-west of Salamanca and shot six of them as a lesson to the others. The Conde de Alba de Yeltes, Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, a retired cavalry officer, joined the press service of the rebel forces during the Civil War and boasted of his crime to foreign visitors.¹ Although his alleged atrocity was extreme, the sentiments behind it were not unrepresentative of the hatreds that had smouldered in the Spanish countryside over the twenty years before the military uprising of 1936. Aguilera’s cold and calculated violence reflected the belief, common among the rural upper classes, that the landless labourers were sub-human. This attitude had become common among the big landowners since a series of sporadic uprisings by hungry day-labourers in the regions of Spain dominated by huge estates (latifundios). Taking place between 1918 and 1921, a period of bitter social conflict known thereafter as the trienio bolchevique (three Bolshevik years), these insurrections had been crushed by the traditional defenders of the rural oligarchy, the Civil Guard and the army. Previously, there had been an uneasy truce within which the wretched lives of the landless day-labourers (jornaleros or braceros) were occasionally relieved by the patronizing gestures of the owners – the gift of food or a blind eye turned to rabbit poaching or to the gathering of windfall crops. The violence of the conflicts had outraged the landlords, who would never forgive the insubordination of the braceros they considered to be an inferior species. Accordingly, the paternalism which had somewhat mitigated the daily brutality of the day-labourers’ lives came to an abrupt end.

The agrarian oligarchy, in an unequal partnership with the industrial and financial bourgeoisie, was traditionally the dominant force in Spanish capitalism. Its monopoly of power began to be challenged on two sides in the course of the painful and uneven process of industrialization. The prosperity enjoyed by neutral Spain during the First World War emboldened industrialists and bankers to jostle with the great landowners for political position. However, with both menaced by a militant industrial proletariat, they soon rebuilt a defensive alliance. In August 1917, the left’s feeble revolutionary threat was bloodily smothered by the army. Thereafter, until 1923, when the army intervened again, social ferment occasionally bordered on undeclared civil war. In the south, there were the rural uprisings of the ‘three Bolshevik years’. In the north, the industrialists of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias, having tried to ride the immediate post-war recession with wage-cuts and layoffs, faced violent strikes and, in Barcelona, a terrorist spiral of provocations and reprisals.

In the consequent atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety, there was a ready middle-class audience for the notion long since disseminated by extreme right-wing Catholics that a secret alliance of Jews, Freemasons and the Communist Third International was conspiring to destroy Christian Europe, with Spain as a principal target. In Catholic Spain, the idea that there was an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging their interests. In this paranoid fantasy, Freemasons were smeared as tools of the Jews (of whom there were virtually none) in a sinister plot to establish Jewish tyranny over the Christian world.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, such views were expressed with ever increasing vehemence. They were a response to the kaleidoscopic processes of rapid economic growth, social dislocation, regionalist agitations, a bourgeois reform movement and the emergence of trade unions and left-wing parties. An explanation for the destabilization of Spanish society and the attendant collapse of the relative certainties of a predominantly rural society was found in a deeply alarming, yet somehow comforting, assertion that shifted the blame on to an identifiable and foreign enemy. It was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masses. Such views had long been peddled by El Siglo Futuro, the daily newspaper of the deeply reactionary Carlist Traditionalist Communion. In 1912, the National Anti-Masonic and Anti-Semitic League had been founded by José Ignacio de Urbina with the support of twenty-two Spanish bishops. The Bishop of Almería wrote that ‘everything is ready for the decisive battle that must be unleashed between the children of light and the children of darkness, between Catholicism and Judaism, between Christ and the Devil’.² That there was never any hard evidence was put down to the cleverness and colossal power of the enemy, evil itself.

In Spain, as in other European countries, anti-Semitism had reached even greater intensity after 1917. It was taken as axiomatic that socialism was a Jewish creation and that the Russian revolution had been financed by Jewish capital, an idea given a spurious credibility by the Jewish origins of prominent Bolsheviks such as Trotsky, Martov and Dan. Spain’s middle and upper classes were chilled, and outraged, by the various revolutionary upheavals that threatened them between 1917 and 1923. The fears of the elite were somewhat calmed in September 1923, when the army intervened again and a dictatorship was established by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. As Captain General of Barcelona, Primo de Rivera was the ally of Catalan textile barons and understood their sense of being under threat from their anarchist workforce. Moreover, coming from a substantial landowning family in Jérez, he also appreciated the fears of the big southern landowners or latifundistas. He was thus the ideal praetorian defender of the reactionary coalition of industrialists and landowners consolidated after 1917. While Primo de Rivera remained in power, he offered security to the middle and upper classes. Nevertheless, his ideologues worked hard to build the notion that in Spain two bitterly hostile social, political and, indeed, moral groupings were locked in a fight to the death. Specifically, in a pre-echo of the function that they would also fulfil for Franco, these propagandists stressed the dangers faced from Jews, Freemasons and leftists.

These ideas essentially delegitimized the entire spectrum of the left, from middle-class liberal democrats, via Socialists and regional nationalists, to anarchists and Communists. This was done by blurring distinctions between them and by denying their right to be considered Spanish. The denunciations of this ‘anti-Spain’ were publicized through the right-wing press and the regime’s single party, the Unión Patriótica, as well as through civic organizations and the education system. These notions served to generate satisfaction with the dictatorship as a bulwark against the perceived Bolshevik threat. Starting from the premise that the world was divided into ‘national alliances and Soviet alliances’, the influential right-wing poet José María Pemán declared that ‘the time has come for Spanish society to choose between Jesus and Barabbas’. He claimed that the masses were ‘either Christian or anarchic and destructive’ and the nation was divided between an anti-Spain made up of everything that was heterodox and foreign and the real Spain of traditional religious and monarchical values.³

Another senior propagandist of the Primo de Rivera regime, José Pemartín, linked, like his cousin Pemán, to the extreme right in Seville, also believed that Spain was under attack by an international conspiracy masterminded by Freemasonry, ‘the eternal enemy of all the world’s governments of order’. He dismissed the left, in generalized terms, as ‘the dogmatists deluded by what they think are modern, democratic and European ideas, universal suffrage, the sovereign parliament, etc. They are beyond redemption. They are made mentally ill by the worst of tyrannies, ideocracy or the tyranny of certain ideas.’ It was the duty of the army to defend Spain against these attacks.⁴

Despite his temporary success in anaesthetizing the anxieties of the middle and ruling classes, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship did not last. His benevolent attempt to temper authoritarianism with paternalism inadvertently alienated landowners, industrialists, the Church hierarchy and some of the elite officer corps of the army. Most dramatically, his attempts to reform military promotion procedures ensured that the army would stand aside when a great electoral coalition of Socialists and middle-class Republicans swept to power on 14 April 1931. After the dictator’s departure in January 1930, one of the first to take up the defence of establishment interests was Dr José María Albiñana, an eccentric Valencian neurologist and frenetic admirer of Primo de Rivera.

The author of more than twenty novels and books on neurasthenia, religion, the history and philosophy of medicine and Spanish politics, and a number of mildly imperialist works about Mexico, Albiñana was convinced that there was a secret alliance working in foreign obscurity in order to destroy Spain. In February 1930, he distributed tens of thousands of copies of his Manifiesto por el Honor de España. In it, he had declared that ‘there exists a Masonic Soviet which dishonours Spain in the eyes of the world by reviving the black legend and other infamies forged by the eternal hidden enemies of our fatherland. This Soviet, made up of heartless persons, is backed by spiteful politicians who, to avenge offences against themselves, go abroad to vomit insults against Spain’. This was a reference to the Republicans exiled by the dictatorship. Two months later, he launched his ‘exclusively Spanish Nationalist Party’ whose objective was to ‘annihilate the internal enemies of the fatherland’. A fascist image was provided by its blue-shirted, Roman-saluting Legionaries of Spain, a ‘citizen volunteer force to act directly, explosively and expeditiously against any initiative which attacks or diminishes the prestige of the fatherland’.⁵

Albiñana was merely one of the first to argue that the fall of the monarchy was the first step in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy to take over Spain. Such ideas would feed the extreme rightist paranoia that met the establishment of the Second Republic. The passing of political power to the Socialist Party (PSOE – Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and its urban middle-class allies, the lawyers and intellectuals of the various Republican parties, sent shivers of horror through right-wing Spain. The Republican–Socialist coalition intended to use its suddenly acquired share of state power to implement a far-reaching programme to create a modern Spain by destroying the reactionary influence of the Church, eradicating militarism and improving the immediate conditions of the wretched day-labourers with agrarian reform.

This huge agenda inevitably raised the expectations of the urban and rural proletariats while provoking the fear and the determined enmity of the Church, the armed forces and the landowning and industrial oligarchies. The passage from the hatreds of 1917 –23 to the widespread violence that engulfed Spain after 1936 was long and complex but it began to speed up dramatically in the spring of 1931. The fears and hatreds of the rich found, as always, their first line of defence in the Civil Guard. However, as landowners blocked attempts at reform, the frustrated expectations of hungry day-labourers could be contained only by increasing brutality.

Many on the right took the establishment of the Republic as proof that Spain was the second front in the war against world revolution – a notion fed by numerous clashes between the forces of order and workers of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the anarchist union. Resolute action against the extreme left by the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, did not deter the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro from attacking the government and claiming that progressive Republican legislation was ordered from abroad. It declared in June 1931 that three of the most conservative ministers, the premier, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, Miguel Maura and the Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos Urruti, were Jews and that the Republic itself had been brought about as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. The more moderate Catholic mass-circulation daily El Debate referred to de los Ríos as ‘the rabbi’. The Editorial Católica, which owned an influential chain of newspapers including El Debate, soon began to publish the virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic magazines Gracia y Justicia and Los Hijos del Pueblo. The editor of the scurrilously satirical Gracia y Justicia was Manuel Delgado Barreto, a one-time collaborator of the dictator General Primo de Rivera, a friend of his son José Antonio and an early sponsor of the Falange. It would reach a weekly circulation of 200,000 copies.⁶

The Republic would face violent resistance not only from the extreme right but also from the extreme left. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT recognized that many of its militants had voted for the Republican–Socialist coalition in the municipal elections of 12 April and that its arrival had raised the people’s hopes. As one leading anarchist put it, they were ‘like children with new shoes’. The CNT leadership, however, expecting the Republic to change nothing, aspired merely to propagate its revolutionary objectives and to pursue its fierce rivalry with the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which it regarded as a scab union because of its collaboration with the Primo de Rivera regime. In a period of mass unemployment, with large numbers of migrant workers returning from overseas and unskilled construction workers left without work by the ending of the great public works projects of the dictatorship, the labour market was potentially explosive. This was a situation that would be exploited by the hard-line anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) who argued that the Republic, like the monarchy, was just an instrument of the bourgeoisie. The brief honeymoon period came to an end when CNT–FAI demonstrations on 1 May were repressed violently by the forces of order.⁷

In late May, a group of nearly one thousand strikers from the port of Pasajes descended on San Sebastián with the apparent intention of looting the wealthy shopping districts. Having been warned in advance, the Minister of the Interior, Miguel Maura, deployed the Civil Guard at the entrance to the city. They repelled the attack at the cost of eight dead and many wounded. Then, in early July, the CNT launched a nationwide strike in the telephone system, largely as a challenge to the government. It was defeated by harsh police measures and strike-breaking by workers of the Socialist UGT who refused to join the CNT in what they saw as a sterile struggle. The Director General of Security, the sleek and portly Ángel Galarza of the Radical-Socialist Party, ordered that anyone seen trying to damage the installations of the telephone company should be shot. Maura and Galarza were understandably trying to maintain the confidence of the middle classes. Inevitably, their stance consolidated the violent hostility of the CNT towards both the Republic and the UGT.⁸

For the Republican–Socialist cabinet, the subversive activities of the CNT constituted rebellion. For the CNT, legitimate strikes and demonstrations were being crushed by dictatorial methods indistinguishable from those used by the monarchy. On 21 July 1931, the cabinet agreed on the need for ‘an urgent and severe remedy’. Maura outlined a proposal for ‘a legal instrument of repression’ and the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, proposed a decree to make strikes illegal. The two decrees would eventually be combined on 22 October into the Law for the Defence of the Republic, a measure enthusiastically supported by the Socialist members of the government not least because it was perceived as directed against their CNT rivals.⁹ It made little difference to the right, which perceived the violent social disorder of the anarchists as characteristic of the entire left, including the Socialists who denounced it and the Republican authorities who crushed it.

What mattered to the right was that the Civil Guard and the army lined up in defence of the existing economic order against the anarchists. Traditionally, the bulk of the army officer corps perceived the prevention of political and economic change as one of its primordial tasks. Now, the Republic would attempt to reform the military, bringing both its costs and its mentalities into line with Spain’s changed circumstances. A central part of that project would be the streamlining of a massively swollen officer corps. The tough and uncompromising colonial officers, the so-called Africanistas, having benefited from irregular and vertiginous battlefield promotions, would be the most affected. Their opposition to Republican reforms would inaugurate a process whereby the violence of Spain’s recent colonial history found a route back into the metropolis. The rigours and horrors of the Moroccan tribal wars between 1909 and 1925 had brutalized them. Morocco had also given them a beleaguered sense that, in their commitment to fighting to defend the colony, they alone were concerned with the fate of the Patria. Long before 1931, this had developed into a deep contempt both for professional politicians and for the pacifist left-wing masses that the Africanistas regarded as obstacles to the successful execution of their patriotic mission.

The repressive role of both the army and the Civil Guard in Spain’s long-standing social conflicts, particularly in rural areas, was perceived as central to that patriotic duty. However, between 1931 and 1936, several linked factors would provide the military with pervasive justifications for the use of violence against the left. The first was the Republic’s attempt to break the power of the Catholic Church. On 13 October 1931, the Minister of War, and later Prime Minister and President, Manuel Azaña, stated that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic.’¹⁰ Even if this was true, Spain remained a country with many pious and sincere Catholics. Now, the Republic’s anti-clerical legislation would provide an apparent justification for the virulent enmity of those who already had ample motive to see it destroyed. The bilious rhetoric of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy was immediately pressed into service. Moreover, the gratuitous nature of some anti-clerical measures would help recruit many ordinary Catholics to the cause of the rich.

The religious issue would nourish a second crucial factor in fostering right-wing violence. This was the immensely successful propagation of theories that left-wingers and liberals were neither really Spanish nor even really human and that, as a threat to the nation’s existence, they should be exterminated. In books that sold by the tens of thousands, in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, the idea was hammered home that the Second Republic was foreign and sinister and must be destroyed. This notion, which found fertile ground in right-wing fear, was based on the contention that the Republic was the product of a conspiracy masterminded by Jews, and carried out by Freemasons through left-wing lackeys. The idea of this powerful international conspiracy – or contubernio (filthy cohabitation), one of Franco’s favourite words – justified any means necessary for what was presented as national survival. The intellectuals and priests who developed such ideas were able to connect with the latifundistas’ hatred for the landless day-labourers or jornaleros and the urban bourgeoisie’s fear of the unemployed. The Salamanca landowner Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, like many army officers and priests, was a voracious reader of such literature.¹¹

Another factor which fomented violence was the reaction of the landowners to the Second Republic’s various attempts at agrarian reform. In the province of Salamanca, the leaders of the local Bloque Agrario, the landowners’ party, Ernesto Castaño and José Lamamié de Clairac, incited their members not to pay taxes nor to plant crops. Such intransigence radicalized the landless labourers.¹² Across the areas of great estates (latifundios) in southern Spain, Republican legislation governing labour issues in the countryside was systematically flouted. Despite the decree of 7 May 1931 of obligatory cultivation, unionized labour was ‘locked out’ either by land being left uncultivated or by simply being refused work and told to comed República (literally ‘eat the Republic’, which was a way of saying ‘let the Republic feed you’). Despite the decree of 1 July 1931 imposing the eight-hour day in agriculture, sixteen-hour working days from sun-up to sun-down prevailed with no extra hours being paid. Indeed, starvation wages were paid to those who were hired. Although there were tens of thousands of unemployed landless labourers in the south, landowners proclaimed that unemployment was an invention of the Republic.¹³ In Jaén, the gathering of acorns, normally kept for pigs, or of windfall olives, the watering of beasts and even the gathering of firewood were denounced as ‘collective kleptomania’.¹⁴ Hungry peasants caught doing such things were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard or by armed estate guards.¹⁵

Their expectations raised by the coming of the new regime, the day-labourers were no longer as supine and fatalistic as had often been the case. As their hopes were frustrated by the obstructive tactics of the latifundistas, the desperation of the jornaleros could be controlled only by an intensification of the violence of the Civil Guard. The ordinary Civil Guards themselves often resorted to their firearms in panic, fearful of being outnumbered by angry mobs of labourers. Incidents of the theft of crops and game were reported with outrage by the right-wing press. Firearms were used against workers, and their deaths were reported with equal indignation in the left-wing press. In Corral de Almaguer (Toledo), starving jornaleros tried to break a local lock-out by invading estates and starting to work them. The Civil Guard intervened on behalf of the owners, killing five workers and wounding another seven. On 27 September 1931, for instance, in Palacios Rubios near Peñaranda de Bracamonte in the province of Salamanca, the Civil Guard opened fire on a group of men, women and children celebrating the successful end to a strike. The Civil Guard began to shoot when the villagers started to dance in front of the parish priest’s house. Two workers were killed immediately and two more died shortly afterwards.¹⁶ Immense bitterness was provoked by the case. In July 1933, on behalf of the Salamanca branch of the UGT landworkers’ federation (Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra), the editor of its newspaper Tierra y Trabajo, José Andrés y Mansó, brought a private prosecution against a Civil Guard corporal, Francisco Jiménez Cuesta, on four counts of homicide and another three of wounding. Jiménez Cuesta was successfully defended by the leader of the authoritarian Catholic party, the CEDA, José María Gil Robles. Andrés y Mansó would be murdered by Falangists at the end of July 1936.¹⁷

In Salamanca and elsewhere, there were regular acts of violence perpetrated against trade union members and landowners – a seventy-year-old beaten to death by the rifle butts of the Civil Guard in Burgos, a property-owner badly hurt in Villanueva de Córdoba. Very often these incidents, which were not confined to the south but also proliferated in the three provinces of Aragon, began with invasions of estates. Groups of landless labourers would go to a landowner and ask for work or sometimes carry out agricultural tasks and then threateningly demand payment. More often than not, they would be driven off by the Civil Guard or by gunmen employed by the owners.¹⁸

In fact, what the landowners were doing was merely one element of unequivocal right-wing hostility to the new regime. They occupied the front line of defence against the reforming ambitions of the Republic. There were equally vehement responses to the religious and military legislation of the new regime. Indeed, all three issues were often linked, with many army officers emanating from Catholic landholding families. All these elements found a political voice in several newly emerged political groups. Most extreme among them, and openly committed to the earliest possible destruction of the Republic, were two monarchist organizations, the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and Acción Española, founded by supporters of the recently departed King Alfonso XIII as a ‘school of modern counter-revolutionary thought’. Within hours of the Republic being declared, monarchist plotters had begun collecting money to create a journal to propagate the legitimacy of a rising against the Republic, to inject a spirit of rebellion in the army and to found a party of ostensible legality as a front for meetings, fund-raising and conspiracy against the Republic. The journal Acción Española would also peddle the idea of the sinister alliance of Jews, Freemasons and leftists. Within a month, its founders had collected substantial funds for the projected uprising. Their first effort would be the military coup of 10 August 1932. And its failure would lead to a determination to ensure that the next attempt would be better financed and entirely successful.¹⁹

Somewhat more moderate was the legalist Acción Nacional, later renamed Acción Popular, which was prepared to try to defend right-wing interests within Republican legality. Extremists or ‘catastrophists’ and ‘moderates’ shared many of the same ideas. However, after the failed military coup of August 1932, they would split over the efficacy of armed conspiracy against the Republic. Acción Española formed its own political party, Renovación Española, and Acción Popular did the same, gathering a number of like-minded groups into the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas.²⁰ Within a year, the ranks of the ‘catastrophists’ had been swelled by the creation of various fascist organizations. What all had in common was that they completely denied the democratic legitimacy of the Republic. Despite the legalist façade of Acción Popular and the CEDA, its leaders would frequently and unrestrainedly proclaim that violence against the Republic was perfectly justifiable.

Barely three weeks after the establishment of the new regime, at a time when the government was notable mainly for its timidity in social questions, Acción Nacional had been created as ‘an organization for social defence’. It was the creation of Ángel Herrera Oria, editor of the militantly Catholic (and hitherto monarchist) daily El Debate. A shrewd political strategist, Herrera Oria would be the brains behind political Catholicism in the early years of the Second Republic. Acción Nacional brought together two organizations of the right that had combated the rising power of the urban and rural working class for the previous twenty years. Its leaders came from the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas, an elite Jesuit-influenced organization of about five hundred prominent and talented Catholic rightists with influence in the press, the judiciary and the professions. Its rank-and-file support would be found within the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria, a mass political organization which proclaimed its ‘total submission to the ecclesiastic authorities’. Established to resist the growth of left-wing organizations, the CNCA was strong among the Catholic smallholding peasantry in north and central Spain.²¹

Acción Nacional’s manifesto declared that ‘the advance guards of Soviet Communism’ were already clambering on the ruins of the monarchy. It denounced the respectable bourgeois politicians of the Second Republic as weak and incapable of controlling the masses. ‘They are the masses that deny God and, in consequence, the basic principles of Christian morality; that proclaim, against the sanctity of the family, the instability of free love; that substitute private property, the basis and the motor of the welfare of individuals and of collective wealth, by a universal proletariat at the orders of the State.’ In addition, there was ‘the lunacy of Basque and Catalan ultra-nationalism, determined, irrespective of its sweet words, to destroy national unity’. Acción Nacional unequivocally announced itself as the negation of everything for which, it claimed, the Republic stood. With the battle cry ‘Religion, Fatherland, Family, Order, Work, Property’, it declared that ‘the social battle is being waged in our time to decide the triumph or extermination of these eternal principles. In truth, this will not be decided in a single combat; what is being unleashed in Spain is a war, and it will be a long one.’²²

By 1933, when Acción Popular had developed into the CEDA, its analysis of the Republic was even less circumspect: ‘the rabble, always irresponsible because of their lack of values, took over the strongholds of government’. Even for Herrera Oria’s legalist organization, the Republic was created when ‘the contagious madness of the most inflamed extremists sparked a fire in the inflammable material of the heartless, the perverted, the rebellious, the insane’. The supporters of the Republic were sub-human and, like pestilent vermin, should be eliminated: ‘The sewers opened their sluice gates and the dregs of society inundated the streets and squares, convulsing and shuddering like epileptics.’²³ All over Europe, endangered elites were mobilizing mass support by stirring up fears of a left presented as ‘foreign’, a disease that threatened the nation and required a crusade of national purification.

Both at the time and later, the right-wing determination to annihilate the Republic was justified as a response to its anti-clericalism. However, as had been amply demonstrated by its enthusiastic support for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the right hated the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical. Moreover, those who opposed the Republic on religious grounds also cited social, economic and political grounds, especially in opposition to regional autonomy.²⁴

Nevertheless, the religious issue was the occasion of intense conflict, both verbal and physical. On Sunday 10 May 1931, the inaugural meeting of the Circulo Monarquico Independiente in the Calle Alcalá ended with loudspeakers provocatively blaring out the Royal Anthem. Republican crowds returning from an afternoon concert in Madrid’s Parque del Buen Retiro were outraged. There was a riot; cars were burned and the offices of the monarchist newspaper ABC in neighbouring Calle Serrano were assaulted. The fierce popular reaction spilled over into the notorious church burnings which took place in Madrid, Málaga, Seville, Cádiz and Alicante from 10 to 12 May. This suggested how strongly ordinary people identified the Church with the monarchy and right-wing politics. The Republican press claimed that the fires were the work of provocateurs drawn from the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. Indeed, it was claimed that, to discredit the new regime, young monarchists had distributed leaflets inciting the masses to attack religious buildings.²⁵

Even if there were agents provocateurs involved, many on the left were convinced that the Church was integral to reactionary politics in Spain and physical attacks were carried out in some places by the more hotheaded among them. In many villages in the south, priests had stones thrown at them. For those on the right, the identity of the true culprits mattered little. The church burnings confirmed and justified their prior hostility to the Republic. Nevertheless, Miguel Maura, the Minister of the Interior, commented bitterly: ‘Madrid’s Catholics did not think for a second that it was appropriate or their duty to make an appearance in the street in defence of what should have been sacred to them.’ There were serious clashes in many small towns (pueblos) where the faithful protected their churches from elements intent on profaning them. Later in May, when the provisional government decreed an end to obligatory religious education, there were many petitions in protest.²⁶

While most of Spain remained peaceful, from the earliest days of the Republic an atmosphere of undeclared civil war festered in the latifundio zones of the south and in other areas dominated by the CNT. Miguel Maura claimed that, in the five months from mid-May 1931 until his resignation in October, he had to deal with 508 revolutionary strikes. The CNT accused him of causing 108 deaths with his repressive measures.²⁷ This was demonstrated most graphically by the bloody conclusion to a period of anarchist agitation in Seville. As the culmination of a series of revolutionary strikes, the anarchist union called a general stoppage on 18 July 1931. This was directed not just at the local employers but also at the CNT’s local rivals in the Socialist Unión General Trabajadores. There were violent clashes between anarchist and Communist strikers on the one hand and blacklegs and the Civil Guard on the other. At the cabinet meeting of 21 July, the Socialist Minister of Labour, Francisco Largo Caballero, demanded that Miguel Maura take firm action to end the disorders which were damaging the Republic’s image. When the Prime Minister, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, asked if everyone was agreed that energetic measures against the CNT were called for, the cabinet assented unanimously. Maura told Azaña that he would order artillery to demolish a house from which anarchists had fired against the forces of order.²⁸

Meanwhile, on the night of 22–23 July 1931, extreme rightists were permitted to take part in the repression of the strikes in Seville. Believing that the forces of order were inadequate to deal with the problem, José Bastos Ansart, the Civil Governor, invited the landowners’ clubs, the Círculo de Labradores and the Unión Comercial, to form a paramilitary group to be known as the ‘Guardia Cívica’. This invitation was eagerly accepted by the most prominent rightists of the city, Javier Parladé Ybarra, Pedro Parias González, a retired lieutenant colonel of the cavalry and a substantial landowner, and José García Carranza, a famous bullfighter who fought as ‘Pepe el Algabeño’. Arms were collected, and the Guardia Cívica was led by a brutal Africanista, Captain Manuel Díaz Criado, known as ‘Criadillas’ (Bull’s Balls). On the night of 22 July, in the Parque de María Luisa, they shot four prisoners. On the following afternoon, the Casa Cornelio, a workers’ café in the neighbourhood of La Macarena, was, as Maura had promised Azaña, destroyed by artillery fire. Elsewhere in the province, particularly in three small towns to the south of the capital, Coria del Río, Utrera and Dos Hermanas, strikes were repressed with exceptional violence by the Civil Guard. In Dos Hermanas, after some stones had been thrown at the telephone exchange, a lorryload of Civil Guards arrived from Seville. With the local market in full swing, they opened fire, wounding several, two of whom died later. In total, seventeen people were killed in clashes in the province.²⁹

Azaña’s immediate reaction was that the events in the park ‘looked like the use of the ley de fugas’ (the pretence that prisoners were shot while trying to escape) and he blamed Maura, commenting that ‘he shoots first and then he aims’. Azaña’s reaction was influenced by the fact that Maura had recently hit him for accusing him of revealing cabinet secrets to the press. Two weeks later, he learned that the cold-blooded application of the ley de fugas was nothing to do with Maura but had been carried out by the Guardia Cívica on the orders of Díaz Criado.³⁰ The murders in the Parque de María Luisa and the shelling of the Casa Cornelio were the first in a chain of events leading to the savagery of 1936. Díaz Criado and the Guardia Cívica would play a prominent role both in the failed military coup of August 1932 and in the events of 1936.

The events in Seville and the telephone strike were symptomatic of clashes between the forces of order and the CNT throughout urban Spain. In Barcelona, in addition to the telephone conflict, a strike in the metallurgical industry saw 40,000 workers down tools in August. The activist FAI increasingly advocated insurrection to replace the bourgeois Republic with libertarian communism. Paramilitary street action directed against the police and the Civil Guard was to be at the heart of what the prominent FAI leader Juan García Oliver defined as ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. This inevitably led to bloody clashes with the forces of order and with the more moderate Socialist UGT. The consequent violence in Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza and Madrid, although directed against the government, was blamed by the right on the Republic.³¹

The unease thereby fomented among the middle classes was consolidated among Catholics by the anti-clericalism of the Republic. Little distinction was made between the ferocious iconoclasm of the anarchists and the Republican–Socialist coalition’s ambition to limit the Church’s influence to the strictly religious sphere. Right-wing hostility to the Republic was mobilized fully, with clerical support, in the wake of the parliamentary debate over the proposed Republican Constitution. The text separated Church and state and introduced civil marriage and divorce. It curtailed state support for the clergy and ended, on paper at least, the religious monopoly of education. The proposed reforms were denounced by the Catholic press and from pulpits as a Godless, tyrannical and atheistic attempt to destroy the family.³² The reaction of a priest from Castellón de la Plana was not uncommon. In a sermon he told his parishioners, ‘Republicans should be spat on and never spoken to. We should be prepared to fight a civil war before we tolerate the separation of Church and State. Non-religious schools do not educate men, they create savages.’³³

The Republic’s anti-clerical legislation was at best incautious and at worst irresponsible, perceived on the right as the fruit of Masonic-inspired hatred. Republicans felt that to create an egalitarian society, the power of the Church education system had to be replaced with nondenominational schools. Many measures were easily sidestepped. Schools run by religious personnel continued as before – the names of schools were changed, clerics adopted lay dress. Many such schools, especially those of the Jesuits, tended to be accessible only to the children of the rich. There was no middle ground. The Church’s defence of property and its indifference to social hardship inevitably aligned it with the extreme right.³⁴

Substantial popular hostility to the Republic’s plans for changes in the social, economic and religious landscape was garnered during the so-called revisionist campaign against the Constitution. Bitter right-wing opposition to the Constitution passed on 13 October was provoked by plans to advance regional autonomy for Catalonia and to introduce agrarian reform.³⁵ Nevertheless, it was the legalization of divorce and the dissolution of religious orders – seen as evil Masonic machinations – that raised Catholic ire.³⁶ During the debate on 13 October 1931, the parliamentary leader of Acción Popular, José María Gil Robles, declared to the Republican–Socialist majority in the parliament, the Cortes, ‘Today, in opposition to the Constitution, Catholic Spain takes its stand. You will bear responsibility for the spiritual war that is going to be unleashed in Spain.’ Five days later, in the Plaza de Toros de Ledesma, Gil Robles called for a crusade against the Republic.³⁷

As part of the campaign a group of Basque Traditionalists created the Association of Relatives and Friends of Religious Personnel. The Association attracted considerable support in Salamanca and Valladolid, towns notable for the ferocity of the repression during the Civil War. It published an anti-Republican bulletin, Defensa, and many anti-Republican pamphlets. It also founded the violently anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic weekly magazine Los Hijos del Pueblo under the editorship of Francisco de Luis, who would eventually run El Debate in succession to Ángel Herrera Oria. De Luis was a fervent advocate of the theory that the Spanish Republic was the plaything of an international Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy.³⁸ Another leading contributor to Los Hijos del Pueblo was the integrist Jesuit Father Enrique Herrera Oria, brother of Ángel. The paper’s wide circulation was in large part a reflection of the popularity of its vicious satirical cartoons attacking prominent Republican politicians. Presenting them as Jews and Freemasons, and thus part of the international conspiracy against Catholic Spain, it popularized among its readers the notion that this filthy foreign plot had to be destroyed.³⁹

The idea that leftists and liberals were not true Spaniards and therefore had to be destroyed quickly took root on the right. In early November 1931, the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea declared to a cheering audience in Madrid that there was to be a battle to the death between socialism and the nation.⁴⁰ On 8 November, the Carlist Joaquín Beunza thundered to an audience of 22,000 people in Palencia: ‘Are we men or not? Those not prepared to give their all in these moments of shameless persecution do not deserve the name Catholic. We must be ready to defend ourselves by all means, and I don’t say legal means, because all means are good for self-defence.’ Declaring the Cortes a zoo, he went on: ‘We are governed by a gang of Freemasons. And I say that against them all methods are legitimate, both legal and illegal ones.’ At the same meeting, Gil Robles declared that the government’s persecution of the Church was decided ‘in the Masonic lodges’.⁴¹

Incitement to violence against the Republic and its supporters was not confined to the extreme right. The speeches of the legalist Catholic Gil Robles were every bit as belligerent and provocative as those of monarchists, Carlists and, later, Falangists. At Molina de Segura (Murcia) on New Year’s Day 1932, Gil Robles declared: ‘In 1932 we must impose our will with the force of our rightness, and with other forces if this is insufficient. The cowardice of the Right has allowed those who come from the cesspools of iniquity to take control of the destinies of the fatherland.’⁴² The intransigence of more moderate sections of the Spanish right was revealed by the inaugural manifesto of the Juventud (youth movement) de Acción Popular which proclaimed: ‘We are men of the right … We will respect the legitimate orders of authority, but we will not tolerate the impositions of the irresponsible rabble. We will always have the courage to make ourselves respected. We declare war on communism and Freemasonry.’ In the eyes of the right, ‘communism’ included the Socialist Party and Freemasonry signified the various Republican liberal parties and their regional variants known as Left Republicans.⁴³

Justification for hostility to the Republic could easily be found in its efforts to secularize society. Distress had been caused by the fact that municipal authorities were forbidden to make financial contributions to the Church or its festivals. In January 1932, Church cemeteries came under municipal jurisdiction. The state now recognized only civil marriage, so those who had a Church wedding also had to visit a registry office. Burial ceremonies were to have no religious character unless the deceased, being over the age of twenty, had left specific instructions to the contrary, something involving complicated bureaucracy for relatives.⁴⁴

In May 1932, during the feast of San Pedro Mártir in Burbáguena (Teruel), a brass band played in the town square, thereby deliberately clashing with the religious music being sung in the church in honour of the saint. In Libros (Teruel), a dance was organized outside the parish church while a mass was being said in honour of the Virgen del Pilar.⁴⁵ In Seville, fear of attack led to more than forty of the traditional fraternities (cofradías) withdrawing from the Holy Week procession. Their members were predominantly militants of Acción Popular and of the Carlist Comunión Tradicionalista and their gesture popularized among right-wing Catholics the phrase ‘Seville the martyr’, despite the fact that every effort was made by Republican authorities to see the processions go ahead. Vociferous complaints came from the same men who were also prominent in employers’ and landowners’ organizations. In the event, only one cofradía marched and was the target of insults and stones. Some days later, on 7 April 1932, the Church of San Julián was burned down.⁴⁶

Some local municipalities removed crucifixes from schools and religious statues from public hospitals as well as prohibiting the ringing of bells. Such measures went beyond official government policy, which was that municipal permission was required for public ceremonies. Perceived as persecution, they caused ordinary Catholics to see the Republic as their enemy. In many villages in the province of Salamanca, there were street protests and children were kept away from school until the crucifixes were returned. Ordinary Catholics were upset when, in late September 1932, the ringing of church bells was prohibited in Béjar for mass, weddings or funerals. Elsewhere, many left-wing alcaldes (mayors) levied a local tax on bell-ringing.⁴⁷ In Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), the Mayor imposed fines on women wearing crucifixes. In the socially conflictive province of Badajoz, numerous incidents, such as the prohibition of funeral processions, incited hatred. In Fuente de Cantos, the Mayor imposed a tax on bell-ringing of 10 pesetas for the first five minutes and 2 pesetas for every minute thereafter. In Fregenal de la Sierra, bell-ringing was forbidden altogether and a tax levied on Catholic burials. There were church burnings in several villages. In Villafranca de los Barros, the Socialist majority of the town council voted in April 1932 for the removal of the statue of the Sacred Heart from the main square.⁴⁸

Religious frictions were quickly exploited by the right. Processions became demonstrations, pilgrimages became protest marches, and Sunday sermons became meetings which often provoked anti-clerical reactions, sometimes violent.⁴⁹ It was but a short step from the rhetoric of persecution and suffering to the advocacy of violence against Republican reforms portrayed as the work of a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot.⁵⁰ In later years, Gil Robles would admit that he had deliberately set out to push his audiences towards conflict with the authorities. In April 1937, when Acción Popular was being dissolved and incorporated by Franco into his new one-party state, Gil Robles claimed proudly that the reserves of mass rightist belligerence which he had built up during the Republic made possible the victory of the right in the Civil War. He saw this ‘splendid harvest’ as the fruit of his own propaganda efforts. He was still taking pride in this achievement when he published his memoirs in 1968.⁵¹

Gil Robles’s rhetoric during the Republic reflected the feelings and the fears of his most powerful backers, the big landowners or latifundistas. Their outrage at the sheer effrontery of landless labourers in daring to take part in the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–21 reflected their sense of social, cultural and indeed near-racist superiority over those who worked their estates. That the Republican–Socialist coalition should declare its intention to improve the daily lot of the wretched day-labourers implied a sweeping challenge to the very structures of rural power. The hostility of the landowners towards the new regime was first manifested in a determination to block Republican reforms by any means, including unrestrained violence. The hatred of the latifundistas for their braceros would find its most complete expression in the early months of the Civil War when they would collaborate enthusiastically with Franco’s African columns as they spread a wave of terror through south-western Spain.

The Republic’s attempts to streamline the officer corps had provoked the hostility of many officers but especially of the Africanistas. General José Sanjurjo, Director General of the Civil Guard and a prominent African veteran, was one of the first officers publicly to identify the subject tribes of Morocco with the Spanish left – a transference of racial prejudice which would facilitate the savagery carried out by the Army of Africa during the Civil War. Sanjurjo blurted this out in the wake of the atrocity at the remote and impoverished village of Castilblanco in Badajoz, when villagers murdered four Civil Guards in an outburst of collective rage at systematic oppression. The Socialist landworkers’ union, the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), had called a forty-eight-hour strike in the province to protest against the landowners’ constant infractions of the Republic’s social legislation. On 31 December 1931, in Castilblanco, urged on by the Mayor, Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration by strikers, killing one man and wounding two others. Shocked, the infuriated villagers turned on the four Civil Guards and beat them to death. For the left, the events of Castilblanco were the result of the area’s long history of appalling economic deprivation.⁵²

Sanjurjo was furious because the obligation to go to Castilblanco forced him to miss a big society wedding banquet in Zaragoza.⁵³ On 2 January 1932, when he arrived in the village, now occupied by a substantial detachment of Civil Guards, the officer in charge indicated the hundred or so prisoners with the words: ‘Here are the murderers, just look at their faces!’ Sanjurjo burst out, ‘But haven’t you killed them yet?’ The prisoners were severely mistreated. For seven days and nights, they were kept stripped to the waist and, in temperatures below freezing, forced to stand with their arms upright. If they fell, they were beaten with rifle butts. Several died of pneumonia. Speaking to journalists at the funeral of the murdered guards, Sanjurjo compared the workers of Castilblanco to the Moorish tribesmen he had fought in Morocco, commenting, ‘In a corner of the province of Badajoz, Rif tribesmen have a base.’ He declared mendaciously that after the colonial disaster at the battle of Annual in July 1921, when nine thousand soldiers had died, ‘even in Monte Arruit, when the Melilla command collapsed, the corpses of Christians were not mutilated with such savagery’.⁵⁴

This prejudice was echoed in the national and local press by journalists who never actually visited Castilblanco. The monarchist daily ABC remarked that ‘the least civilized Rif tribesmen were no worse’.⁵⁵ Right-wing journalists described the landless labourers of Extremadura as ‘these Rif tribesmen with no Rif’ and as ‘Berbers, savages, bloodthirsty savages and Marxist hordes’. In general terms, the local newspaper reports of Castilblanco reflected the belligerently racist attitudes of the rural elite. The inhabitants of Castilblanco, and by extension the rural proletariat as a whole, were presented as an inferior race, horrible examples of racial degeneration. It was common for them to be described as sub-human and abnormal. Colourfully exaggerated descriptions pandered to the ancestral fears of the respectable classes: the allegation that a woman had danced on the corpses recalled the witches’ Sabbath.⁵⁶ The often explicit conclusion was that the rural proletariat should be disciplined in the same way as the colonial enemy in Morocco, and there were calls for the Civil Guard to be reinforced with crack motorized units.⁵⁷

Over the course of the week following the incident at Castilblanco, the bloody revenge of the Civil Guard saw eighteen people die. Three days after Castilblanco, they killed two and wounded three in Zalamea de la Serena (Badajoz). Two days later, a striker was shot dead and another wounded in Calzada de Calatrava and one striker was shot in Puertollano (both villages in Ciudad Real), while two strikers were killed and eleven wounded in Épila (Zaragoza), and two strikers killed and fifteen wounded, nine seriously, in Jeresa (Valencia). On 5 January 1932, there took place the most shocking of these actions, when twenty-eight Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Arnedo, a small town in the northern Castilian province of Logroño.

One of Arnedo’s main sources of employment was a shoe factory, owned by Faustino Muro, a man of extreme right-wing convictions. Towards the end of 1931, he sacked several of his workers for failing to vote for monarchist candidates in the elections of April and others for belonging to the UGT. The case was put before the local arbitration committee, which declared in favour of the workers, but Muro refused to give them back their jobs. A public protest meeting was held in front of the Ayuntamiento (town hall). Without apparent motive, the Civil Guard opened fire, shooting dead a worker, a twenty-six-year-old pregnant mother, her two-year-old son and three other women bystanders. Bullet wounds were suffered by a further fifty townspeople, including many women and children, some of them babes-in-arms. Over the next few days, a further five died of their wounds and many had to have limbs amputated, among them a five-year-old boy and a widow with six children.⁵⁸ The inhabitants of Arnedo would suffer further in the early months of the Civil War. Forty-six would be murdered between late July and early October 1936, including some who had been wounded in 1932.⁵⁹

Azaña observed in his diary that Spanish public opinion was now divided between those who hated the Civil Guard and those who revered it as the last-ditch defender of the social order.⁶⁰ After Arnedo, Sanjurjo declared that the Civil Guard stood between Spain and the imposition of Soviet communism and that the victims were part of an uncultured rabble that had been deceived by malicious agitators.⁶¹ His words after Castilblanco and the Civil Guard’s revenge reflected the way in which the cruelty and savagery of the Moroccan wars was imported into Spain and used against the working class. Sanjurjo, however, was not the first person to note the link. The Asturian miners’ leader, Manuel Llaneza, wrote after the repression of the revolutionary general strike of 1917 of ‘the African hatred’ with which the military columns had killed and beaten workers and wrecked and looted their homes.⁶²

Unfortunately for the Republican–Socialist coalition, for an increasing number of middle-class Spaniards the excesses of the army and the Civil Guard were justified by the excesses of the CNT. On 18 January 1932, there was an insurrection by miners who took over the town of Fígols in the most northerly part of the province of Barcelona. The movement spread to the entire region of northern Catalonia. The CNT immediately declared a solidarity strike. The only place outside Catalonia where there was any significant response was Seville. There, the CNT, with the backing of the Communist Party, called a general strike on 25 and 26 January. The strike was total for the two days and public services were maintained by the Civil Guard. The accompanying violence convinced the Socialists that there were agents provocateurs in the anarchist movement working to show that the government was incapable of maintaining order. On 21 January, Azaña also declared in the Cortes that the extreme right was manipulating the anarchists. He stated that those who occupied factories, assaulted town halls, uprooted railway tracks, cut telephone lines or attacked the forces of order would be treated as rebels. His response was to send in the army, apply the Law for the Defence of the Republic, suspend the anarchist press and deport the strike leaders from both Catalonia and Seville. Inevitably, CNT hostility against the Republic and the UGT intensified to a virtual war.⁶³

There were other fatal incidents involving the Civil Guard throughout the months following Arnedo. As part of the 1 May 1932 celebrations at the village of Salvaleón in Badajoz, a meeting of FNTT members from other towns and villages in the province was held at a nearby estate. After speeches by several prominent Socialists including the local parliamentary deputies Pedro Rubio Heredia and Nicolás de Pablo, a workers’ choir from the village of Barcarrota sang the ‘Internationale’ and the ‘Marseillaise’. The crowd dispersed, many to attend a dance held in Salvaleón. Afterwards, before returning to Barcarrota, the choir went to sing outside the home of the Socialist Mayor of Salvaleón, Juan Vázquez, known as ‘Tío Juan el de los pollos’ (Uncle John the Chicken Man). This late-night homage infuriated the local commander of the Civil Guard whose men opened fire, killing two men and a woman, as well as wounding several others. In justification of his action, the commander later claimed that a shot had been fired from the crowd. Arrests were made, including the deputy Nicolás de Pablo and Tío Juan, the Mayor of Salvaleón. Pedro Rubio would be murdered in June 1935, Nicolás de Pablo at the end of August 1936 and Juan Vázquez in October 1936 in Llerena.⁶⁴

Sanjurjo was relieved of the command of the Civil Guard in January 1932 and appointed Director General of the Carabineros (frontier guards). He, and many others, assumed that he was being punished because of his stance after Castilblanco.⁶⁵ As a result, he was fêted by the extreme right. Eventually in August 1932, he led an abortive military coup. It was briefly successful only in Seville, where it was enthusiastically supported by the local right. During the so-called ‘Sanjurjada’ (the Sanjurjo business), the plotters arrested the most prominent Republicans in Seville, including the Mayor, José González Fernández de Labandera. When he had heard of the coup attempt on 10 August, Labandera had immediately gone to the town hall and ordered all the town councillors, heads of parties and unions to attend. He had already created a Committee of Public Salvation (Comité de Salvación Pública) when Major Eleuterio Sánchez Rubio Dávila arrived, sent by Sanjurjo to take over as Mayor. Labandera had refused and a perplexed Sánchez Rubio Dávila withdrew. He returned shortly afterwards with a unit of the Republican anti-riot police, the Assault Guards, and arrested Labandera who, as he was taken away, shouted, ‘Last decree of the Mayor, declaration of a general strike of all public services.’ The declaration of the strike virtually guaranteed the failure of the coup and saved his life, but the local right would take its revenge when the Civil War started. Labandera was shot on 10 August 1936.

Among the civilian participants in the coup were many of those who had been involved in the Guardia Cívica responsible for the events in the Parque de María Luisa in July 1931. There is no sign that they were deterred by their failure in 1932. Indeed, several of them, along with the officers involved, would be prominent in the events of the summer of 1936.⁶⁶ Sanjurjo was tried for treason on 25 August in the Military Section of the Supreme Court. The acting president of the court, Mariano Gómez González, had no choice but to issue the death sentence, but he recommended a pardon with the sentence reduced to expulsion from the army.⁶⁷ Plutarco Elías Calles, the Mexican President, sent a message to Azaña: ‘If you wish to avoid widespread bloodshed and make the Republic live, shoot Sanjurjo.’ In cabinet, Azaña successfully argued in favour of Mariano Gómez’s recommendation. No one was shot, and Sanjurjo and others were imprisoned and eventually released.⁶⁸

Despite loud protests about the allegedly excessive prison sentences meted out, the right was sufficiently emboldened by the relatively feeble punishments to intensify preparations for a successful venture next time.⁶⁹ The prison regime could hardly have been more easygoing. The man intended to lead Sanjurjo’s coup in Cádiz was Colonel José Enrique Varela, the most highly decorated officer in the army. Although he had not gone into action, his involvement in the conspiracy saw him arrested and jailed in the same prison which held the principal Carlist elements in the coup – Manuel Delgado Brackembury and Luis Redondo García, the leader of the city’s militant Carlist militia group or Requeté. They, and the Carlist leader Manuel Fal Conde who visited him, entranced Varela with their ideas for organized popular violence against the regime. Varela was entirely converted to Carlism after being transferred with Redondo to the prison at Guadalajara.⁷⁰

Unfortunately, the left became over-confident, seeing the Sanjurjada as the equivalent of the Kapp putsch of March 1920 in Berlin. Since Sanjurjo, like Kapp, had been defeated by a general strike, many believed that the defeat of the Sanjurjada had strengthened the Republic as Kapp’s failure had strengthened Weimar. Nothing was done to restructure guilty units. In contrast, the right learned much from Sanjurjo’s fiasco, especially that a coup could not succeed without the collaboration of the Civil Guard and that the Republican municipal authorities and trade union leaders had to be silenced immediately.

Above all, the conspiratorial right, both civilian and military, concluded that they must never again make the mistake of inadequate preparation. In late September 1932, a conspiratorial committee was set up by Eugenio Vegas Latapie and the Marqués de Eliseda of the extreme rightist group Acción Española and Captain Jorge Vigón of the General Staff to begin preparations for future success. The theological, moral and political legitimacy of a rising against the Republic was argued in the monarchist journal Acción Española. The group operated from the Biarritz home of the monarchist aviator and playboy Juan Antonio Ansaldo. Considerable sums of money were collected from rightist sympathizers to buy arms and to finance political destabilization for which unnamed elements of the CNT–FAI were put on the payroll. A substantial amount was also spent each month on the services of a police inspector, Santiago Martín Báguenas. He had been a close collaborator of General Emilio Mola, who had headed the Dirección General de Seguridad (the General Directorate of Security) in the last months of the monarchy. Martín Báguenas was now hired to provide an intelligence service for the conspirators and he in turn employed another of Mola’s cronies, the even more corrupt policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla. Another of the principal objectives of the new committee was the creation of subversive cells within the army itself, a task entrusted to Lieutenant Colonel Valentín Galarza Morante of the General Staff.⁷¹

Galarza Morante had been involved in the Sanjurjada, but nothing could be proved against him. Azaña saw him as one of the most dangerous of the military conspirators because of knowledge acquired in years of meddling in the Ministry of War.⁷² Galarza would be the link between the monarchist conspirators and the clandestine association of army officers, the Unión Militar Española (UME), created at the end of 1933 by the retired Colonel Emilio Rodríguez Tarduchy, a close friend of General Sanjurjo and one of the first members of the fascist party, Falange Española. Members of the UME would play a crucial role in the military rebellion of 1936.⁷³ Tarduchy was soon succeeded by a captain of the General Staff, Bartolomé Barba Hernández, an Africanista friend of Franco who had appointed him as a member of his teaching staff at the Academia Militar General in Zaragoza.⁷⁴

The defeat of Sanjurjo did nothing to calm social hatred in the south and the behaviour of the Civil Guard did much to exacerbate it. In late 1932, near Fuente de Cantos in the south of Badajoz, a left-wing meeting in the nearby fields was broken up by the Civil Guard and a local union leader, Julián Alarcón, detained. To teach him a lesson, they buried him up to his neck and left him until his comrades could return and dig him out.⁷⁵

In mid-December 1932, in Castellar de Santiago in the province of Ciudad Real, the Civil Guard stood immobile while local landowners and their retainers ran riot. The principal source of local employment was the olive harvest. There were few large estates and the smaller farmers who grew olives had trouble paying their workers a decent wage and preferred to employ workers from outside the province or women, who were traditionally paid less. After protests from the local Socialist workers’ society, the Casa del Pueblo, an agreement had been negotiated with the landowners not to use women and outside workers while local men remained idle. However, encouraged by the Agrupación Nacional de Propietarios de Fincas Rústicas (the Association of Rural Estate-Owners), an aristocratic pressure group, local farmers united to confront what was perceived as the temerity of the workers and ignored the agreement. The Mayor, under pressure from the landowners, did nothing to implement the agreements and simply tried to absent himself from the conflict by going to the town of Valdepeñas.

On 12 December, his car was stopped by a group of unemployed day-labourers who tried to make him return and do his job. Someone in his car fired a shot, hitting Aurelio Franco, the clerk of the Casa del Pueblo, and a fight started. Stones were thrown and the Mayor was hurt. The landowners and their armed guards then rampaged through workers’ houses, smashing furniture and threatening their wives and children. Aurelio Franco and two other union officials were pulled out of their houses and shot in front of their families. The Civil Guard witnessed the incidents but did not intervene. The FNTT newspaper, El Obrero de la Tierra, commented that what had happened in Castellar de Santiago ‘represents in its extreme form the barbarity of a moneyed class that believes that it owns people’s lives and livelihoods. Utterly out of control, the local bosses revealed the real nature of the class that they represent because they turned that place into a corner of Africa.’ A general strike was called in the province. Nevertheless, the local landowners continued to ignore working agreements and no one from the Castellar post of the Civil Guard was punished for dereliction of duty.⁷⁶

Demonstrating the Civil Guard’s support for employers determined to block Republican social legislation, the events at Castellar de Santiago were surpassed less than one month later. Now dominated by the extremist FAI, the anarchist movement launched an ill-prepared insurrection on 8 January 1933. It was suppressed easily in most of Spain, but in the small village of Casas Viejas (Cádiz) a savage repression ensued. With the best land around the village used for breeding fighting bulls, the inhabitants faced year-round unemployment, near-starvation and endemic tuberculosis. The writer Ramón Sender wrote of the poor being maddened with hunger like stray dogs. When the FAI declaration of libertarian communism reached the local workers’ centre, the villagers hesitantly obeyed. Assuming that all of Cádiz had followed the revolutionary call, they did not expect bloodshed and naively invited the local landowners and the Civil Guard to join the new collective enterprise. To their bewilderment, the Civil Guard replied to the offer with gunfire. Many fled the village, but some took refuge in the hut of the septuagenarian Curro Cruz, known as Seisdedos. Inside with Seisdedos were his two sons, his cousin, his daughter and son-in-law, his daughter-in-law and his two grandchildren. They and a few other villagers were armed only with shotguns loaded with pellets. A company of Assault Guards arrived under the command of Captain Manuel Rojas Feijespan. During a night-long siege, several were killed as machine-gun bullets penetrated the mud walls of the hovel. Rojas ordered the Guards to set fire to the hut. Those who tried to escape were shot down. Another twelve villagers were executed in cold blood.⁷⁷

The immediate reaction of the rightist press was favourable, echoing its customary applause for the Civil Guard’s repression of the rural proletariat.⁷⁸ However, when they realized that political capital could be made, rightist groups cried crocodile tears and echoed anarchist indignation. Before the full details of the massacre were known, all three Socialist ministers, especially the moderate Indalecio Prieto, had given Azaña their support for the anarchist rising to be suppressed.⁷⁹ However, despite their hostility to the anarchists, the Socialists could not approve of the gratuitous brutality displayed by the forces of order. To make matters worse, the officers responsible claimed falsely that they had been acting under orders. They were backed up to devastating effect by the future leader of the Unión Militar Española. Captain Barba Hernández was on duty the night of 8 January 1933. When the scandal broke out, he defended his friend Captain Rojas Feijespan by claiming that Azaña had personally given the order ‘shoot them in the belly’. Seized upon by the right-wing press, the fabrication did immense damage to the Republican–Socialist coalition.⁸⁰ Casas Viejas and its repercussions brought home to the Socialist leadership the cost of participation in the government. They saw that the defence of the bourgeois Republic against the anarchists was sacrificing their credibility with the Socialist masses.

There was further violence during the campaign for the re-run municipal elections on 23 April 1933. There were to be elections in twenty-one towns in the province of Badajoz, the most important being Hornachos. On that day, the Mayor of Zafra, José González Barrero, headed a demonstration in Hornachos of three hundred Socialists and Communists. Red flags were flown and revolutionary chants heard. Initially, on the orders of the Civil Governor, the Civil Guard stood back. However, local rightists, who were running in the elections as the Anti-Marxist Coalition, approached Rafael Salazar Alonso, one of the Radical deputies for the province, who was in Hornachos on that day. Since there was no telephone line to Hornachos, Salazar Alonso drove to the nearby town of Villafranca de los Barros where he telephoned the Minister of the Interior and called for the Civil Guard to be given the freedom to open fire. In his own account, he was still in Villafranca de los Barros when that happened. Other sources suggest that, in fact, he was present when, after stones were thrown and a shot fired, the Civil Guard in Hornachos began to shoot at the crowd. Four men and one woman were killed and fourteen people wounded. Forty workers were arrested, several of whom were badly beaten.⁸¹ It was widely believed that Salazar Alonso was responsible for the action of the Civil Guard in Hornachos on that day.⁸²

The pugnacious and provocative Salazar Alonso was a man given to extreme enthusiasms who, prior to 1931, had been a fiery, anti-clerical Republican but had undergone a dramatic change after falling under the spell of the landed aristocracy of Badajoz. In consequence, he threw himself into the service of reactionary interests with the zeal of a convert and played an important role in the genesis of violence in southern Spain. According to Pedro Vallina, a celebrated doctor of anarchist beliefs, Salazar Alonso was ferociously ambitious and had adopted anti-clericalism as a way of rising to prominence within the Radical Party. He had been born and brought up in Madrid. In his father’s home town, Siruela in Badajoz, he had married the daughter of a wealthy landowner. He had made his early career manifesting radical views, but once he secured a seat in parliament he moved rapidly to the right. During his lightning visit to Villafranca de los Barros on 23 April 1933, he met Amparo, the wife of another even wealthier landowner, a man much older than herself. He abandoned his own wife and children and began an affair with Amparo, who began to visit him in Madrid. The austere and idealistic Dr Vallina was confirmed in his view that Salazar Alonso was ‘one of the most shameless and cynical men I have ever known’. Even the head of the Radical Party, the corrupt Alejandro Lerroux, commented wistfully that Salazar Alonso ‘frequented palaces where I had never been other than on official business’.⁸³ Eventually, both because of and despite the adulterous nature of his relationship with Amparo, he would abandon Freemasonry and become a pious Catholic.⁸⁴

Throughout the spring and summer of 1933, evidence mounted that the Republic’s social laws were simply being ignored. Official labour exchanges and the arbitration committees known as mixed juries were bypassed and work offered only to men who would tear up their union cards. Land was withdrawn from cultivation. There were ever more cases of landowners shooting at workers. A meeting of the national committee of the UGT was held in mid-June to consider the drift to anarchist and Communist organizations of members frustrated by Socialist efforts to maintain worker discipline in the face of provocation.⁸⁵

Workers – especially in the countryside – were being forced into increasing militancy by the employers’ refusal to comply with social legislation. As long as the Socialists had a presence in the government and could offer the prospect of reform, the unions would still respond to calls for discipline and patience. However, for some time, Alcalá Zamora had been seeking an opportunity to get the Republican–Socialist coalition out of power. This was partly because of discomfort with the Socialists and personal incompatibility with Manuel Azaña. In early September, despite a parliamentary vote of confidence for Azaña, the President invited the corrupt leader of the Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux, to form a government. Unable to face parliament without certain defeat, he governed with the Cortes closed. Landowners were quickly delighted by the forbearing stance of the new Ministers of Agriculture, Ramón Feced Gresa (a property registrar by profession) and of Labour, Ricardo Samper (a Radical from Valencia). The new Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, named several reactionary civil governors who permitted most of the Republic’s social legislation to be more or less ignored. To the detriment of local workers, cheap labourers were brought into the southern provinces from Galicia. Infractions of the law were not punished.⁸⁶ Inevitably, the dwindling Socialist faith in bourgeois democracy was further undermined.

The appalling conditions in the southern countryside were revealed by the famous Socialist writer and playwright María Lejárraga, on a visit to a village in La Mancha. On her arrival, she discovered that the local Socialists had been unable to find a hall for her meeting. After frantic negotiations, they persuaded a local farmer to let them use his barnyard. After the pigs and hens were shooed away, the meeting began, illuminated only by the light of a hissing acetylene lamp. In the front row sat a number of wretched women, each with one or more children on her lap:

their misshapen heads connected to their skeletal bodies by stick-like necks, their bellies swollen, their little legs twisted into incredible shapes like those of a rag doll, their mouths gulping in air for want of better nourishment. This is the Spain that we found when the Republic was born. Behind the thin and prematurely aged women – who can ever tell whether a woman in the Castilian or Andalusian countryside is twenty-five or two hundred and fifty years old? – stood the men, the oldest supporting their frailty by leaning on the wall at the back.⁸⁷

During the first two years of the Republic, the left had been appalled by the vehemence of opposition to what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation. After the elections of November 1933, however, the flimsy foundations of a socially progressive Republic laid down in that period were to be ruthlessly torn up as the right used its victory to re-establish the repressive social relations obtaining before 1931. That the right should have the opportunity to do so was a cause of great bitterness within the Socialist movement. In large part, it was their own fault for having made the elemental mistake of rejecting an electoral alliance with the Left Republican forces and thus failing to take advantage of the electoral system. They now believed that the elections had no real validity. The Socialists had won 1,627,472 votes, almost certainly more than any other party running alone could have obtained. With these votes, they had returned fifty-eight deputies, while the Radical Party, with only 806,340 votes, had obtained 104 seats. According to calculations made by the secretariat of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the united right had gained a total of 212 seats with 3,345,504 votes, while the disunited left had won ninety-nine seats with 3,375,432 votes.⁸⁸ That the right gained a parliamentary seat for fewer than 16,000 votes while left-wing seats ‘cost’ more than 34,000 was certainly galling, although that did not alter the fact that the main factor in determining the results was the party’s own tactical error in failing to take advantage of a system which favoured coalitions.

However, the Socialists had other, more substantial reasons for rejecting the validity of the elections. They were convinced that in the south they had been swindled out of parliamentary seats by electoral malpractice. In villages where one or two men were the sole source of employment, it was relatively easy to get votes by the promise of a job or the threat of dismissal. For many workers on the verge of starvation, a vote could be bought for food or a blanket. In Almendralejo (Badajoz), a local aristocrat bought votes with bread, olive oil and chorizo. In many villages of Granada and Badajoz, those who attended left-wing meetings were beaten by the landowners’ estate guards while the Civil Guard stood by. The new Civil Governors named by the Radicals were permitting ‘public order’ to be controlled by armed thugs in the service of the landowners. Sometimes with the active assistance of the Civil Guard, at other times simply with its benevolent neutrality, they were able to intimidate the left. In the province of Granada, Fernando de los Ríos and other candidates faced violent disruption of their campaign. In Huéscar, De los Ríos was met with a volley of rifle-fire and, in Moclín, his car was stoned by rightists. At Jérez del Marquesado, the local caciques (bosses) hired thugs whom they armed and filled with drink. De los Ríos was forced to abandon his planned meeting when he was warned that they planned an attempt on his life. At the remote village of Castril, near Huéscar, a meeting being addressed by María Lejárraga and De los Ríos was disrupted by the simple device of driving into the crowd some donkeys laden with logs. In Guadix, their words were drowned out by the persistent ringing of the nearby church bells. In the province of Córdoba, in Bujalance, the Civil Guard tore down left-wing election propaganda. In Montemayor, Encinas Reales, Puente Genil and Villanueva del Rey, Socialist and Communist candidates were prevented by the Civil Guard from giving election speeches. On the eve of the elections, there was an attempt on the life of the moderate Socialist leader Manuel Cordero. In Quintanilla de Abajo (Valladolid), local workers demonstrated against a fascist meeting. The Civil Guard searched them and, when one said that his only weapons were his hands, they broke his arms with rifle butts.⁸⁹

Given the scale of unemployment in the province of Badajoz, nearly 40 per cent, and the consequent near-starvation of many of its inhabitants, it was inevitable that the election campaign should be marked by considerable violence. In a relatively short time, the Socialist deputy Margarita Nelken had won genuine popularity by vehemently expressing her deep concern for the landworkers and their families. In consequence, she became a target for right-wing hatred. Her passionate speeches at meetings throughout the province drew loud applause. The meetings were often suspended by the local authorities or, if they went ahead, interrupted by hecklers. Her principal opponent, the Radical champion of the local landowners, Rafael Salazar Alonso, larded his attacks on her with sexual insults. A local thug known as Bocanegra was released from prison, allegedly at the behest of Salazar Alonso, in order that he might inflict beatings on her, on another Socialist candidate, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, and on Dr Pedro Vallina, the immensely popular anarchist physician. Vidarte was also the victim of two assassination attempts in the province. In Hornachuelos (Córdoba), the Civil Guard lined up the women of the village at gunpoint and warned them not to vote. In Zalamea de la Sierra (Badajoz), local rightists shouting ‘¡Viva el Fascio!’ opened fire on the Casa del Pueblo, killing a worker.⁹⁰

On the day after the election, Margarita Nelken sent a telegram to the Ministry of Labour protesting that a group of thugs led by the Radical Mayor of Aljucén in Badajoz had opened fire on groups of workers, killing one, seriously wounding two and wounding several more.⁹¹ Margarita was herself manhandled at gunpoint after a speech in the Casa de Pueblo of Aljucén. At voting stations, Civil Guards obliged workers to exchange their voting slips for ones already marked in favour of right-wing candidates. There was significant falsification by the right – votes bought with food and/or blankets, intimidation of voters, repeat voting by truckloads of right-wing sympathizers and the ‘misplacing’ of boxes of votes from places with known left-wing majorities. The consequence was that the PSOE won only the three seats allotted to the minority block for the province – Margarita Nelken, along with fellow Socialists Pedro Rubio Heredia and Juan-Simeón Vidarte.⁹²

Throughout the south, glass voting urns and the louring presence of the caciques’ thugs made the secret ballot irrelevant. In some provinces (particularly Badajoz, Málaga and Córdoba), the margin of rightist victory was sufficiently small for electoral malpractice to have affected the results. In Granada, there were nine towns where the rightist majority was an implausible 100 per cent, two where it was 99 per cent and a further twenty-one where it was between 84 and 97 per cent. After the elections, the Minister of Justice resigned, in protest at the level of electoral falsification.⁹³ Across the south, the landowners returned to the semi-feudal relations of dependence that had been the norm before 1931.

2

Theorists of Extermination

Africanista officers and Civil Guards were the most violent exponents of right-wing hostility towards the Second Republic and its working-class supporters. They received encouragement and justification in the murderous hostility to the left peddled by numerous politicians, journals and newspapers. In particular, several influential individuals spewed out a rhetoric which urged the extermination of the left as a patriotic duty. They insinuated the racial inferiority of their left-wing and liberal enemies through the clichés of the theory of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy. The presentation at the beginning of 1933 of the draft law prohibiting schools run by religious orders was a useful trigger. On 30 January, at a mass meeting in the Monumental Cinema in Madrid, the Carlist landowner José María Lamamié de Clairac, a parliamentary deputy for Salamanca, denounced the law as a satanic plot by the Freemasons to destroy the Catholic Church.¹ The Law was approved on 18 May. On 4 June, Cándido Casanueva, Lamamié’s fellow deputy for Salamanca, responded by telling the Women’s Association for Civic Education: ‘You are duty bound to pour into the hearts of your children a drop of hatred every day against the Law on Religious Orders and its authors. Woe betide you if you don’t!’² The following day, Gil Robles declared that ‘the Freemasonry that has brought the Law on Religious Orders to Spain is the work of foreigners, just like the sects and the Internationals’.³

The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin in Spain by the dissemination from 1932 onwards of one the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russia in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.⁴ The first Spanish translation of The Protocols had been published in Leipzig in 1930. Another translation was made available in Barcelona in 1932 by a Jesuit publishing house which then serialized it in one of its magazines. Awareness and approval of The Protocols was extended through the enormously popular work of the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–98), author of the best-seller Orígenes de la revolución española. Tusquets was born into a wealthy banking family in Barcelona on 31 March 1901. His father was a descendant of Jewish bankers, a committed Catalan nationalist and a friend of the plutocrat Francesc Cambó. His mother was a member of the fabulously wealthy Milà family, the patrons of Gaudí. His secondary education took place in a Jesuit school, then he studied at the University of Louvain and the Pontifical University in Tarragona, where he wrote his doctorate. He was ordained in 1926 and was soon regarded as one of the brightest hopes of Catalan philosophy. Renowned for his piety and his enormous culture, he became a teacher in the seminary of the Catalan capital, where he was commissioned to write a book on the theosophical movement of the controversial spiritualist Madame Helena Blavatsky. In the wake of its success, he developed an obsessive interest in secret societies.⁵

Despite, or perhaps because of, his own remote Jewish origins, by the time the Second Republic was established Tusquets’s investigations into secret societies had developed into a fierce anti-Semitism and an even fiercer hatred of Freemasonry. In a further rejection of his family background, he turned violently against Catalan Nationalism and gained great notoriety by falsely accusing the Catalan leader Francesc Macià of being a Freemason.⁶ Working with another priest, Joaquim Guiu Bonastre, he built up a network of what he called ‘my faithful and intrepid informers’. His ostentatious piety notwithstanding, Tusquets was not above spying or even burglary. One of the principal lodges in Barcelona was in the Carrer d’Avinyó next to a pharmacy. Since Tusquets’s aunt lived behind the pharmacy, he and Father Guiu were able spy on the Freemasons from her flat. On one occasion, they broke into another lodge and started a fire, using the ensuing confusion to steal a series of documents. These ‘researches’ were the basis for the regular, and vehemently anti-Masonic, articles that Tusquets contributed to the Carlist newspaper El Correo Catalán and for his immensely successful book Orígenes de la revolución española. This book was notable both for popularizing the notion that the Republic was the fruit of a Jewish–Masonic conspiracy and for publishing the names of those he considered its most sinister members. He later alleged that, in retaliation for his writings, the Freemasons twice tried to assassinate him. From his account, it seems that they did not try very hard. On the first occasion, he cheated death simply by getting into a taxi. On the second, he claimed, curiously, that he was saved by an escort provided by the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. This alleged benevolence on the part of the anarchists was all the more implausible given their own passionate anti-clericalism.⁷

Tusquets used The Protocols as ‘documentary’ evidence of his essential thesis that the Jews were bent on the destruction of Christian civilization. Their instruments were Freemasons and Socialists who did their dirty work by means of revolution, economic catastrophes, unholy and pornographic propaganda and unlimited liberalism. He condemned the Second Republic as the child of Freemasonry and denounced the President, the piously Catholic Niceto Alcalá Zamora, as both a Jew and a Freemason.⁸ The message was clear – Spain and the Catholic Church could be saved only by the destruction of Jews, Freemasons and Socialists – in other words, of the entire left of the political spectrum. Orígenes de la revolución española sold massively and also provoked a noisy polemic which gave even greater currency to his ideas. His notion that the Republic was a dictatorship in the hands of ‘Judaic Freemasonry’ was further disseminated through his many articles in El Correo Catalán and a highly successful series of fifteen books (Las Sectas) attacking Freemasonry, communism and Judaism.

The second volume of Las Sectas included a complete translation of The Protocols and also repeated his slurs on Macià. The section entitled ‘their application to Spain’ asserted that the Jewish assault on Spain was visible both in the Republic’s persecution of religion and in the movement for agrarian reform via the redistribution of the great estates.⁹ Made famous by his writings, in late 1933 Tusquets was invited by the International Anti-Masonic Association to visit the recently established concentration camp at Dachau. He remarked that ‘they did it to show what we had to do in Spain’. Dachau was established as a camp for various groups that the Nazis wished to quarantine: political prisoners (Freemasons, Communists, Socialists and liberal, Catholic and monarchist opponents of the regime) and those that they defined as asocials or deviants (homosexuals, Gypsies, vagrants). Despite his favourable comments at the time, Tusquets would claim more than fifty years later that he had been shocked by what he saw. Certainly the visit did nothing to stem the flow and the intensity of his anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic publications.¹⁰

Tusquets would come to have enormous influence within the Spanish right in general and specifically over General Franco, who enthusiastically devoured his anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic diatribes. He produced a bulletin on Freemasonry that was distributed to senior military figures. Franco’s most powerful collaborator, his brother-in-law Ramón Serrano Suñer, would later praise Tusquets’s contribution to ‘the creation of the atmosphere which led to the National uprising’.¹¹ However, Tusquets did more than just develop the ideas that justified violence. He was involved in the military plot against the Republic through his links with Catalan Carlists. He and his crony Joaquim Guiu participated in conspiratorial meetings of the Unión Militar Española, which was powerful in Barcelona. In late May 1936, he would approach the private secretary to the Catalan millionaire Francesc Cambó to request financial assistance for the forthcoming coup d’état. Although Cambó, as a friend of Tusquets’s father, had written and congratulated him on the success of Orígenes de la revolución española, he did not provide finance for the coup.¹² From the early 1930s, Tusquets and Joaquim Guiu had assiduously compiled lists of Jews and Freemasons. Their search for the enemy extended to societies of nudists, vegetarians, spiritualists and enthusiasts of Esperanto. When Tusquets finally became a collaborator of Franco in Burgos during the Civil War, his files on alleged Freemasons would provide an important part of the organizational infrastructure of the repression.¹³

Endorsement of The Protocols also came from the founder of the ultra-right-wing monarchist theoretical journal Acción Española, the Marqués de Quintanar. At an event held in his honour at the Ritz, Quintanar alleged that the disaster of the fall of the monarchy came about because ‘The great worldwide Jewish–Masonic conspiracy injected the autocratic Monarchies with the virus of democracy to defeat them, after turning them into liberal Monarchies.’¹⁴ Julián Cortés Cavanillas, also of the Acción Española pressure group, cited The Protocols as proof that through Masonic intermediaries the ‘evil offspring of Israel’, the Jews, controlled the anarchist, Socialist and Communist hordes. That the new Republican–Socialist government contained Freemasons, Socialists and men thought to be Jewish was proof positive that the alliance of Marx and Rothschild had established a bridgehead in Spain.¹⁵ Reviewing with total seriousness a French edition of The Protocols as if it were empirical truth, the Marqués de Eliseda implied with a veiled reference to Margarita Nelken that Castilblanco had been masterminded by the Jews.¹⁶

Other influential writers in Acción Española were the lay theologian Marcial Solana and Father Aniceto de Castro Albarrán, the senior canon of Salamanca Cathedral. They, and Father Pablo Leon Murciego, produced theological justifications for the violent overthrow of the Republic. They argued that it was a Catholic duty to resist tyranny. Solana used St Aquinas to justify the assertion that the tyrant was any oppressive or unjust government. Since power ultimately rested with God, an anti-clerical constitution clearly rendered the Republic tyrannical.¹⁷ In 1932, Castro Albarrán, at the time rector of the Jesuit University of Comillas, had written a book on the right to rebellion. Although it was not published until 1934, an extract was presented in Acción Española which reinforced Solana’s incitements to rebellion and specifically attacked the legalism of El Debate. Castro Albarrán, through his articles and sermons, would become the principal theological apologist of the military rising. He later summed up his views in his 1938 book Guerra santa (Holy War).¹⁸ He, Solana and others argued that violence against the Republic was justified because it was a holy rebellion against tyranny, anarchy and Moscow-inspired Godlessness. In 1932, Father Antonio de Pildain Zapiain, deputy for Guipúzcoa and canon of Vitoria Cathedral, declared in the Cortes that Catholic doctrine permitted armed resistance to unjust laws. Similar arguments were central to a controversial book published in 1933 by Father José Cirera y Prat.¹⁹

The writings of Castro Albarrán and Cirera horrified more moderate clerics such as Cardinal Eustaquio Ilundain Esteban of Seville and Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona. Vidal was distressed by the arrogance with which Castro Albarrán presented as Catholic doctrine partisan ideas which ran counter to Vatican policy on coexistence with the Republic. He protested to Cardinal Pacelli, the Papal Secretary of State, who ordered that the nihil obstat (seal of ecclesiastical approval) be removed from the book and tried to have it withdrawn from circulation. The book was serialized in the Carlist press, and the newly appointed Primate of All Spain, Archbishop Isidro Gomá of Toledo, expressed his approval to members of Acción Española.²⁰ Gomá’s predecessor in Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, exiled in Rome, was presented by the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro as the archetype of Catholic intransigence to the Republic. He would later be found actively encouraging the Carlist leadership as their armed militia or Requetés trained for insurrection against the Republic.²¹

General Franco was a subscriber to Acción Española and a firm believer in the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik contubernio (filthy concubinage). Significantly, among the many other senior military figures sharing such views was General Emilio Mola, the future director of the military coup of 1936. The tall, bespectacled Mola had the air of a monkish scholar, but his background was that of no-nonsense veteran of the African wars. Born in Cuba in 1887, the son of a captain of the Civil Guard, a harsh disciplinarian, he rose to military prominence serving with the Regulares Indígenas (Native Regulars – locally recruited mercenaries) during the African wars. His memoirs of Morocco, wallowing in descriptions of crushed skulls and bloated intestines, suggest that he had been utterly brutalized by his African experiences.²² In February 1930 in the wake of the fall of the dictatorship, Mola was appointed Director General of Security. He quickly took to police work. Until the collapse of the monarchy fourteen months later, he devoted himself to crushing labour and student subversion as he had crushed tribal rebellion in Morocco.²³ To this end, he created a crack anti-riot squad, physically well trained and well armed, and a complex espionage system. This so-called Sección de Investigación Comunista used undercover policemen to infiltrate opposition groups and then act as agents provocateurs. The network was still substantially in place in 1936 when Mola employed it in the preparation of the military uprising.²⁴

Mola over-estimated the menace of the minuscule Spanish Communist Party, which he viewed as the tool of sinister Jewish–Masonic machinations. This reflected the credence that he gave to the fevered reports of his agents, in particular those of Santiago Martín Báguenas and of the sleazy and obsessive Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Mola’s views on Jews, Communists and Freemasons were also coloured by information received from the organization of the White Russian forces in exile, the Russkii Obshche-Voinskii Soiuz (ROVS, Russian All-Military Union) based in Paris. Thereafter, even when he was no longer Director General of Security, he remained in close contact with the ROVS leader Lieutenant General Evgenii Karlovitch Miller. Miller was, like the Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German. Their hatred of communism reflected the fact that the Bolshevik revolution saw them lose their families, property, livelihood and homeland. Believing that the Jews had masterminded the revolution, they were determined to prevent them doing the same in western Europe.²⁵

When the Republic was established, convinced that he would be arrested for his work in defence of the monarchy, Mola went into hiding. Then on 21 April 1931, he gave himself up to the Minister of War, Manuel Azaña. Four days earlier, General Dámaso Berenguer had been arrested for his role in the Moroccan wars, as Prime Minister and later as Minister of War during the summary trial and execution of the two pro-Republican rebels Captains Fermín Galán and Ángel García Hernández. The arrests of Mola and Berenguer fed the right-wing perception of the Republic as vindictive.²⁶ In the eyes of the Africanistas, Berenguer was being persecuted for his part in a war in which they had risked their lives, and for following military regulations in court-martialling the mutineers Galán and García Hernández. Similarly, they saw Mola as a hero of the African war who, as Director General of Security, had merely been doing his job of controlling subversion. The Africanistas were enraged that officers whom they admired were persecuted while those who had plotted against the Dictator were rewarded. The arrests gave Africanistas like Manuel Goded, Joaquín Fanjul, Mola and Franco a justification for their instinctive hostility to the Republic. They regarded the officers who received the preferment of the Republic as the lackeys of Jews and Freemasons, weaklings who pandered to the mob.

Awaiting trial for his use of excessive force against a student demonstration on 25 March, Mola was imprisoned in a ‘damp and foul-smelling cell’ in a military jail.²⁷ Azaña arranged on 5 August for this to be changed to house arrest, but, unsurprisingly, seeing his recent targets now in positions of power, Mola nurtured a rancorous hostility to the Republic and a personal hatred of Azaña. The paranoid reports sent him by Carlavilla and the dossiers supplied by the ROVS convinced him that the triumph of the democratic regime had been engineered by Jews and Freemasons. In late 1931, in the first volume of his memoirs, he wrote of the threat of Freemasonry: ‘When, in fulfilling my duties, I investigated the intervention of the Masonic lodges in the political life of Spain, I became aware of the enormous strength at their disposal, not through the lodges themselves but because of the powerful elements that manipulated them from abroad – the Jews.’ Acción Española celebrated the appearance of the book with a rapturous nine-page review by Eugenio Vegas Latapié, one of the journal’s founders and a fierce advocate of violence against the Republic.²⁸

By the time that Mola came to write the second volume of his memoirs, he was more explicit in his attacks on Freemasons and Jews. He himself implied that this was because, in addition to the reports of General Miller, he had read both the work of Father Tusquets and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus Mola wrote that the coming of the Republic was a reflection of the hatred for Spain of the Jews and Freemasonry:

What rational motives exist to explain why we Spaniards excite the hatred of the descendants of Israel? Fundamentally three: the envy produced in them by any race that has a fatherland of its own; our religion for which they feel unquenchable revulsion because they blame it for their dispersion throughout the world; the memory of their expulsion, which came about not, as is often claimed, because of a King’s whim but because the people demanded it. These are the three points of the Masonic triangle of the Spanish lodges.²⁹

In December 1933, Mola wrote the conclusion to his bitterly polemical book El pasado, Azaña y el porvenir (The Past, Azaña and the Future), in which he gave voice to the widespread military animosity towards the Republic in general and towards Azaña in particular. Mortified by what he perceived as the unpatriotic anti-militarism of the left, he attributed it to various causes, mainly to the fact that:

decadent nations are the favourite victims of parasitical international organizations, used in their turn by the Great Powers, taking advantage of the situation in weak nations, which is where such organizations have most success, just as unhealthy organisms are the most fertile breeding ground of the virulent spread of pathological germs. It is significant that all such organizations are manipulated if not actually directed by the Jews … The Jews don’t care about the destruction of a nation, or of ten, or of the entire world, because they, having the exceptional ability to derive benefit from the greatest catastrophes, are merely completing their programme. What has happened in Russia is a relevant example and one that is very much on Hitler’s mind. The German Chancellor – a fanatical nationalist – is convinced that his people cannot rise again as long as the Jews and the parasitical organizations that they control or influence remain embedded in the nation. That is why he persecutes them without quarter.³⁰

Morose and shy, Mola was not previously noted for his popularity. With this best-seller, he found himself an object of admiration among the most reactionary military and civilian elements.³¹

Since 1927, both Mola and Franco had been avid readers of an anti-Communist journal from Geneva, the Bulletin de l’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. While he was Director General of Security, Mola’s agents concocted inflated reports about the alleged threat from the Comintern, as the Third International was known. Mola passed these dubious reports to the Entente in Geneva where they were incorporated into the bulletin and sent back to Spain to Franco and other military subscribers as hard fact. The Entente had been founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and a White Russian émigré, Georges Lodygensky. Its publications were given a vehemently anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik turn by Lodygensky and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against communism. Enjoying close contacts with Antikomintern, an organization run from Josef Goebbels’s Ministry of Information, the Entente skilfully targeted influential people and supplied them with reports which purported to expose plans for forthcoming Communist offensives. The material from the Entente devoured by Franco, Mola and other officers portrayed the Second Republic as a Trojan horse for Communists and Freemasons determined to unleash the Godless hordes of Moscow against Spain and all its great traditions.³² For the Spanish extreme right and for many of their allies abroad, the Second Republic was an outpost of the Elders of Zion.³³

One of the most prominent leaders of the Spanish fascist movement, Onésimo Redondo Ortega, was a fervent believer in The Protocols. Redondo had studied in Germany and was also close to the Jesuits. He was much influenced by Father Enrique Herrera Oria, brother of the editor of El Debate, Ángel Herrera Oria. Father Herrera had encouraged Onésimo in the belief that communism, Freemasonry and Judaism were conspiring to destroy religion and the fatherland and recommended that he read the virulent anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic tract by Léon Poncins, Las fuerzas secretas de la Revolución. FM – Judaismo, ‘FM’ signifying, of course, ‘Freemasonry’. Thus becoming aware of The Protocols, Onésimo translated and published an abbreviated text in his newspaper Libertad of Valladolid, a version later reissued with notes explicitly linking its generalized accusations to the specific circumstances of the Second Republic.³⁴

The ultra-right-wing press in general regarded The Protocols as a serious sociological study. Since there were few Jews in Spain, there was hardly a ‘Jewish problem’. However, Spanish ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ was not about real Jews but was an abstract construction of a perceived international threat. Anti-Semitism was central to integrist Catholicism and harked back to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus Christ and to medieval myths and fears about Jewish ritual killings of children. Now, it was given a burning contemporary relevance by fears of revolution. The notion that all those belonging to left-wing parties were the stooges of the Jews was supported by references to the left-wingers and Jews fleeing from Nazism who found refuge in the Second Republic. As far as the Carlist press was concerned, the few incoming Jews were the advance guard of world revolution and intended to poison Spanish society with pornography and prostitution.³⁵ Opposed to urbanism and industrialism, to liberalism and capitalism, all ideologies associated with Jews and Freemasons, the Carlists aspired to destroy the Republic by armed insurrection and to impose a kind of rural Arcadian theocracy.³⁶

Conservative intellectuals argued that through various subversive devices the Jews had enslaved the Spanish working class. One alleged consequence of this subjugation was that the Spanish workers themselves came to possess oriental qualities. The Spanish radical right began to see the working class as imbued with Jewish and Muslim treachery and barbarism. The most extreme proponent of this view was the late nineteenth-century Carlist ideologue Juan Vázquez de Mella. He argued that Jewish capital had financed the liberal revolutions and was now behind the Communist revolution in order, in union with the Muslim hordes, to destroy Christian civilization and impose Jewish tyranny on the world. Even King Alfonso XIII believed that the rebellion of tribesmen in the Rif was ‘the beginning of a general uprising of the entire Muslim world instigated by Moscow and international Jewry’.³⁷ Carlist ideologues took these ideas seriously, arguing that ‘the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Judaism, Communism, Freemasonry and Death’, already controlled Britain, France and Australia and soon Spain would fall under their dominion.³⁸

The books of Vázquez de Mella and other Carlist ideologues were eagerly devoured by Colonel José Enrique Varela during his imprisonment after the Sanjurjada. Contrasting the success of the Primo de Rivera coup of 1923 and the failure of Sanjurjo in 1932, the dynamic and courageous Varela was convinced that a successful military rising needed substantial civilian support. He was persuaded that this could be found in the fierce Carlist militia, the Requeté. Although he resisted calls to lead an exclusively Carlist uprising on the grounds that this required someone more senior such as Franco, Varela undertook to turn the Requeté into an effective citizen army. Since he was still under police surveillance, on his trips to the Carlists’ northern heartland of Navarre he took the pseudonym ‘Don Pepe’. Day-to-day training was supervised by the National Inspector of the Requeté, the retired Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who also would train the Falangist militia.³⁹ Similarly, in 1934 another of the officers involved in the Sanjurjada, the Civil Guard Captain Lisardo Doval, would train the paramilitary squads of the Juventud de Acción Popular (the youth movement of Gil Robles’s Catholic party, the CEDA).

Carlists, theologians and Africanista officers were among those who through their writings and speeches fomented an atmosphere of social and racial hatred. Another was Onésimo Redondo. Although hardly a national figure, he merits attention both as one of the founders of Spanish fascism and because it was largely due to his ideas that his home town, Valladolid, experienced greater political violence than other Castilian provincial capitals. As a young lawyer, Onésimo Redondo had been involved in Acción Nacional (as Acción Popular was originally called), the Catholic political group founded on 26 April 1931 by Ángel Herrera Oria and principally supported by Castilian farmers. In early May, he set up its local branch in Valladolid and headed its propaganda campaign for the forthcoming parliamentary elections. On 13 June, Onésimo launched the first number of the fortnightly, and later weekly, anti-Republican newspaper Libertad. After the Republican–Socialist coalition won a huge majority on 28 June, Onésimo rejected democracy, broke with Acción Nacional and, in August, founded a fascist party, the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica (the Castilian Hispanic Action Groups).⁴⁰

On 10 August, he published a fiery proclamation in Libertad expressing his commitment to the traditional rural values of Old Castile, to social justice and to violence. He wrote: ‘The historic moment, my young countrymen, obliges us to take up weapons. May we know how to use them to defend what is ours and not to serve politicians.’ For him ‘nationalism is a movement of struggle, it must include warlike, violent activities in the service of Spain against the traitors within’.⁴¹ Certainly, Onésimo Redondo and the Juntas brought a tone of brutal confrontation to a city previously notable for the tranquillity of its labour relations.⁴² Onésimo called for ‘a few hundred young warriors in each province, disciplined idealists, to smash to smithereens this dirty phantom of the red menace’. His recruits armed themselves for street fights with the predominantly Socialist working class of Valladolid. He wrote of the need to ‘cultivate the spirit of violence, of military conflict’. The meetings of the Juntas were held in virtual clandestinity. Over the next few years, his enthusiasm for violence grew progressively more strident.⁴³

The numerical weakness of the Juntas obliged Onésimo to seek links with like-minded groups. Accordingly, his gaze fell upon the first overtly fascist group in Spain, the tiny La Conquista del Estado (the Conquest of the State) led by Ramiro Ledesma Ramos.⁴⁴ Originally from Zamora, Ledesma worked in a post office in Madrid. An enthusiastic disciple of German philosophy, he had founded his group in February 1931 in a squalid room in a Madrid office block. The light had not been connected and the only furniture was a table. The ten participants signed a manifesto he had written entitled ‘The Conquest of the State’. A newspaper of the same name was launched on 14 March. Despite public indifference and police harassment, it survived for a year.⁴⁵ In the first number of Libertad, Onésimo Redondo had referred favourably to Ledesma Ramos’s newspaper: ‘We approve of the combative ardour and the eagerness of La Conquista del Estado, but we miss the anti-Semitic activity which that movement needs be effective and to go in the right direction.’⁴⁶ Although Redondo translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his anti-Semitism drew more on the fifteenth-century Castilian Queen Isabel la Católica than on Nazism. Anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in his writings. In late 1931, for instance, he described the co-educational schools introduced by the Second Republic as an example of ‘Jewish action against free nations: a crime against the health of the people for which the traitors responsible must pay with their heads’.⁴⁷

In October 1931, Onésimo met Ledesma Ramos in Madrid. Over the next few weeks, in several meetings in Madrid and Valladolid, they negotiated the loose fusion of their two groups as the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (the Groups of National Syndicalist Offensive or JONS). Launched on 30 November 1931, the JONS adopted the red and black colours of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and took as its badge the emblem of the Catholic kings, the yoke and arrows. It was anti-democratic and imperialist, demanding Gibraltar, Morocco and Algeria for Spain and aspiring to ‘the extermination, the dissolution of the antinational, Marxist parties’. To this end, ‘national-syndicalist militias’ were to be created ‘in order to oppose red violence with nationalist violence’. Ledesma Ramos argued that political violence was legitimate and advocated the creation of armed militias along the lines of the Italian Fascist Squadri to prepare for insurrection or coup d’état.⁴⁸ By way of practice, the JONS squads assaulted left-wing students and, in June 1933, sacked the Madrid offices of the Association of Friends of the USSR.⁴⁹

In Valladolid, Onésimo devoted ever more time to the conversion of his forty-odd followers into warriors of what he now called ‘organized anti-communist militias’. Soon they would be involved in bloody clashes with left-wing students and workers in the University and in the streets of Valladolid. Pistols were being bought and much time was spent on training. Already by the spring of 1932, Onésimo Redondo was writing about the civil war to come – ‘The war is getting nearer; the situation of violence is inevitable. There is no point in rejecting it. It is stupid to flee from making war when they are going to make war on us. The important thing is to prepare to win, and, to win, it is necessary to seize the initiative and go on to the attack.’ On 3 May 1932, a pitched battle was fought with the left in the main square of Valladolid after which more than twenty people were hospitalized. Onésimo himself was sentenced to two months in prison for the excesses of Libertad.⁵⁰

Imprisonment did nothing to mellow Onésimo Redondo. His article in the fascist monthly JONS in May 1933 reflected the growing virulence of his thought and echoed Sanjurjo’s identification of the Spanish working class with the Arabs:

Marxism, with its Mohammedan utopias, with the truth of its dictatorial iron and with the pitiless lust of its sadistic magnates, suddenly renews the eclipse of Culture and freedoms like a modern Saracen invasion … This certain danger, of Africanization in the name of Progress, is clearly visible in Spain. We can state categorically that our Marxists are the most African of all Europe … Historically, we are a friction zone between that which is civilized and that which is African, between the Aryan and the Semitic … For this reason, the generations that built the fatherland, those that freed us from being an eternal extension of the Dark Continent, raised their swords against attacks from the south and they never sheathed them … The great Isabel ordered Spaniards always to watch Africa, to defeat Africa and never be invaded by her again. Was the Peninsula entirely de-Africanized? Is there not a danger of a new kind of African domination, here where so many roots of the Moorish spirit remained in the character of a race in the vanguard of Europe? We ask this important question dispassionately and we will answer it right away by underlining the evident danger of the new Africanization: ‘Marxism’. Throughout the world, there exists the Jewish or Semite conspiracy against Western civilization, but in Spain it can more subtly and rapidly connect the Semitic element, the African element. It can be seen flowering in all its primitive freshness in our southern provinces, where Moorish blood lives on in the subsoil of the race … The follower of Spanish Marxism, especially the Andalusian, soon takes the incendiary torch, breaks into manor houses and farms, impelled by the bandit subconscious, encouraged by the Semites of Madrid; he wants bread without earning it, he wants to laze around and be rich, to take his pleasures and to take his revenge … and the definitive victory of Marxism will be the re-Africanization of Spain, the victory of the combined Semitic elements – Jews and Moors, aristocrats and plebeians who have survived ethnically and spiritually in the Peninsula and in Europe.⁵¹

By linking Marxism as a Jewish invention and its alleged threat of a ‘re-Africanization’ of Spain, Redondo was identifying Spain’s two archetypal ‘others’, the Jew and the Moor, with the Republic. His conclusion, shared by many on the right, was that a new Reconquista was needed to prevent Spain from falling into the hands of the modern foes. His views on the legitimacy of violence were similar to those of the Catholic extreme right exemplified by the writings of Castro Albarrán.⁵²

Anti-Semitism could be found across most of the Spanish right. In some cases, it was a vague sentiment born of traditional Catholic resentment about the fate of Jesus Christ, but in others it was a murderous justification of violence against the left. Curiously, the virulence of Onésimo Redondo constituted something of an exception within Spain’s nascent fascist movement. Ledesma Ramos regarded anti-Semitism as having relevance only in Germany.⁵³ The Falangist leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had little or no interest in the ‘Jewish problem’ except when it came to the Jewish–Marxist influence over the working class. Nevertheless, the Falangist daily Arriba claimed that ‘the Judaic–Masonic International is the creator of the two great evils that have afflicted humanity: capitalism and Marxism’. José Antonio Primo de Rivera shared with other rightists a belief that violence was legitimate against a Republic that he perceived as influenced by Jews and Freemasons.⁵⁴ He approved of attacks by Falangists on the Jewish-owned SEPU department stores in the spring of 1935.⁵⁵

The identification of the working class with foreign enemies was based on a convoluted logic whereby Bolshevism was a Jewish invention and the Jews were indistinguishable from Muslims and thus leftists were bent on subjecting Spain to domination by African elements. Thus hostility to the Spanish working class was presented as a legitimate act of Spanish patriotism. According to another of the Acción Española group, the one-time liberal turned ultra-rightist Ramiro de Maeztú, the Spanish nation had been forged in its struggles against the Jews (arrogant usurers) and the Moors (savages without civilization).⁵⁶ In one of his articles, the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo neatly encapsulated the racist dimension of the anti-leftist discourse when he referred to the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero as ‘a Moroccan Lenin’.⁵⁷ José Antonio Primo de Rivera also shared this association of the left with the Moors. In his reflections in prison in 1936, he interpreted all of Spanish history as an endless struggle between Goths and Berbers. The spirit of the former lived on in monarchical, aristocratic, religious and military values while that of the latter was to be found in the rural proletariat. He denounced the Second Republic as a ‘new Berber invasion’ signifying the demolition of European Spain.⁵⁸

Gil Robles, if less explicitly than Sanjurjo or Onésimo Redondo, also conveyed the view that violence against the left was legitimate because of its racial inferiority. His frequent use of the word ‘reconquest’ linked enmity towards the left in the 1930s to the central epic of Spanish nationalism, the battle to liberate Spain from Islam between 722 and 1492. During his campaign for the elections of November 1933, on 15 October in the Monumental Cinema of Madrid, he declared: ‘We must reconquer Spain … We must give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity … For me there is only one tactic today: to form an anti-Marxist front and the wider the better. It is necessary now to defeat socialism mercilessly.’ At this point, Antonio Goicoechea, the leader of the extreme rightist Acción Española group, was made to stand and received a tumultuous ovation. Gil Robles continued his speech in language indistinguishable from that of the conspiratorial right:

We must found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaizing Freemasons … We must proceed to a new state and this imposes duties and sacrifices. What does it matter if we have to shed blood! … We need full power and that is what we demand … To realize this ideal we are not going to waste time with archaic forms. Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it.⁵⁹

Gil Robles’s speech was described by El Socialista as an ‘authentic fascist harangue’. On the left, it was perceived as the real policy of his ostensibly moderate mass party, the CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas). Certainly, his every sentence had been greeted by ecstatic applause. Fernando de los Ríos, Minister of Education and Fine Arts since October 1931, a moderate Socialist and a distinguished professor of law, had suffered anti-Semitic abuse for his policy of toleration for Jewish schools and his expressions of sympathy for the Sephardic community in Morocco. He pointed out that Gil Robles’s call for a purge of Jews and Freemasons was a denial of the juridical and political postulates of the Republic.⁶⁰ CEDA election posters declared that Spain must be saved from ‘Marxists, Freemasons, Separatists and Jews’. The entire forces of the left – anarchists, Socialists, Communists, liberal Republicans, regional nationalists – were denounced as anti-Spanish.⁶¹ Violence against them was therefore both legitimate and indeed an urgent patriotic necessity.

The intensified vehemence of Gil Robles was matched in the pages of El Debate by the views of Francisco de Luis, who had succeeded Ángel Herrera Oria as editor. Like Onésimo Redondo, De Luis was an energetic evangelist of the Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik conspiracy theory. His magnum opus on the subject was published in 1935 with an ecclesiastical imprimatur. In it, enthusiastically quoting Tusquets, the Protocols, the Carlist press and General Mola, he argued that the purpose of Freemasonry was to corrupt Christian civilization with oriental values. His premise was that ‘the Jews, progenitors of Freemasonry, having no fatherland of their own, want no man to have one’. Having freed the masses of patriotic and moral impulses, the Jews could then recruit them for the assault on Christian values. In his interpretation, Catholics faced a struggle to the death because ‘inside every Jew there is a Freemason: cunning, deceitful, secretive, hating Christ and his civilization, thirsting for extermination. Freemasons and Jews are the begetters and controllers of socialism and Bolshevism.’⁶²

Other than in the sheer scale of their impact, there was little difference between the pronouncements of Francisco de Luis and Onésimo Redondo and those of a friend, and one-time subordinate of General Mola, the policeman Julián Mauricio Carlavilla del Barrio. Born on 13 February 1896 into a poor rural family in New Castile, in Valparaíso de Arriba in Cuenca, the young Carlavilla worked as an agricultural labourer and as a shepherd before spending three years as a conscript soldier in Morocco only because he couldn’t buy himself out. On his return to Spain, he passed the entry examinations for the police and, on 9 July 1921, was posted to Valencia. Only eleven months later, he was transferred to Zaragoza after complaints from the Civil Governor of Valencia to the Director General of Security that Carlavilla’s behaviour was bringing the police into disrepute. Thereafter, he was sent in rapid succession to Segovia and Bilbao before ending up in Madrid in October 1923. In November 1925, he was transferred to Morocco, where he made contacts with military figures that would stand him in good stead later in his career. Nevertheless, just over one year later, he was sent back to the Peninsula after accusations of irregularities including pocketing fines and selling protection for prostitutes. Nevertheless, Carlavilla eventually rose, in 1935, to the rank of comisario (inspector).⁶³

Initially, he specialized in undercover work, infiltrating left-wing groups where he would then act as an agent provocateur. He did this on his own initiative, without informing his superior officers. His efforts included provoking, and later claiming credit for frustrating, assassination attempts against both Alfonso XIII and General Primo de Rivera during the opening of the great exhibition in Seville in May 1929.⁶⁴ When General Mola became Director General of Security in early 1930, Carlavilla informed him of his clandestine activities, which he described as ‘my role as catalyst within the highest circle of the revolutionaries’.⁶⁵ On Mola’s orders, Carlavilla wrote a detailed report on the supposed activities of the Communist Party in Spain. A wild mixture of fantasy and paranoia, the report was sent by Mola at the end of 1930 to the influential anti-Communist organization in Geneva, the Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The contents were fed into the bulletins that the Entente sent to subscribers, including General Franco. The report formed the basis of Carlavilla’s first book, El comunismo en España.⁶⁶

Carlavilla was involved in the Sanjurjo coup, his role being to prevent the police discovering the nascent conspiracy.⁶⁷ Between 1932 and 1936, he wrote a series of best-sellers, using the pseudonym ‘Mauricio Karl’.⁶⁸ The first, El comunismo en España, described the various Socialist, anarchist and Communist elements of the working-class movement as the enemy of Spain that would have to be defeated. The second and third, El enemigo and Asesinos de España, argued that the enemies masterminding the left-wing assassins of Spain were the Jews who controlled Freemasonry, ‘their first army’, the Socialist and Communist Internationals, and world capitalism. Spanish greatness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the fruit of the expulsion of the Jews, and further greatness would require a repetition. Since there were hardly any Jews to be expelled from Spain, it was their lackeys, the Freemasons and the left, that must be eliminated. The only hope of stopping the destruction of Christian civilization and the establishment of the empire of Israel lay in joining German Nazism and Italian Fascism in defeating the ‘sectarians of Masonic Jewry’. Carlavilla claimed that General Primo de Rivera, who died of natural causes, had been poisoned by a Jewish Freemason and that the Catalan financier, Francesc Cambó, was both Jewish and a Freemason.

One hundred thousand copies of the third of his books, Asesinos de España, were distributed free to army officers. It ended with a provocative challenge to them. Describing Jews, left-wingers and Freemasons as vultures hovering over the corpse of Spain, he wrote: ‘The Enemy howls with laughter while the nations that serve Zion play diplomatic dice for the cadaver’s land. Thus the Spain once feared by a hundred nations faces such a fate because her sons no longer know how to die or how to kill.’⁶⁹ Carlavilla was expelled from the police in September 1935 as a result, according to his official record, ‘of serious offences’. He would later claim that his dismissal was persecution for his anti-Masonic revelations.⁷⁰

In addition to his criminal activities, Carlavilla was an active member of the conspiratorial group Unión Militar Española. Initially, his role was centred on the writing and distribution of propaganda in favour of a military coup. However, he was also believed to have been involved in plots to kill both the distinguished law professor and PSOE parliamentary deputy Luis Jiménez Asúa and Francisco Largo Caballero. In May 1936, on the orders of the UME, he was implicated in an assassination attempt on Manuel Azaña. As a result, he was obliged to flee to Portugal. All these plans seem to have been masterminded by Mola’s crony, Inspector Santiago Martín Báguenas, who had been working since September 1932 for the monarchist–military plotters. The foiled attempts also involved the same Africanista, Captain Manuel Díaz Criado, who had instigated the shootings in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in July 1931. In Lisbon, Carlavilla linked up with the exiled General Sanjurjo and remained on the fringes of the military plot. Shortly after the outbreak of war, he went to Burgos where he was welcomed on to the staff of General Mola. Carlavilla worked for a time there alongside Father Juan Tusquets.⁷¹

Collectively, the ideas of Tusquets, Francisco de Luis, Enrique Herrera Oria, Onésimo Redondo, Mola, Carlavilla, the Carlist press and all those who alleged the existence of a Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot justified the extermination of the left. The reforms of the Republic and the violent anarchist attacks on the Republic were taken equally as evidence that the left was the ungodly anti-Spain. Accordingly, the brutality of the Civil Guard in crushing strikes and demonstrations, military conspiracy and the terrorist activities of fascist groups were all deemed to be legitimate efforts to defend the true Spain.

3

The Right Goes on the Offensive, 1933–1934

In the wake of their electoral victory in November 1933, the right went on to the offensive just as the unemployment crisis reached its peak. That December there were 619,000 out of work across Spain, 12 per cent of the total workforce. Given Spain’s lack of social welfare schemes, these figures, although much lower than those in Germany and Italy, signified widespread and immense physical hardship. With the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero no longer at the Ministry of Labour, there was no protection even for those in work. In Jaén, for instance, the new Radical Civil Governor set aside existing agreements on working conditions. In the case of the turno riguroso (the strict rotation of work among unemployed labourers), during the olive harvest, the owners were left free to give work only to the cheapest, non-union labour. The consequence was large numbers of families on the verge of starvation.¹ Worsening conditions saw rank-and-file pressure on union officials for militant action particularly in agriculture, metal industries and construction, all of which were represented by substantial groups within the UGT. In the agrarian south, the number of unemployed was dramatically higher than in industrial areas. The worst-hit provinces were Jaén, Badajoz and Córdoba, where the number of unemployed was 50 per cent above the national average. Once landowners began to ignore social legislation entirely and take reprisals for the discomforts of the previous two years, unemployment rose even further. By April 1934 it would reach 703,000.²

In opposition, Largo Caballero responded to rank-and-file distress with empty revolutionary slogans. However, the fact that he had no concrete plans for an insurrection did not diminish middle-class fears provoked both by his statements and by the anarchist commitment to revolutionary violence. In fact, when, on 8 December 1933, the CNT naively called for another nationwide uprising, the Socialists ostentatiously stood aside. In the event, only a few traditionally anarchist areas responded to the call. Despite CNT supporters in Asturias and most of Andalusia standing aside, there was a sporadic wave of violent strikes, some trains were derailed and Civil Guard posts assaulted. In Galicia, the Rioja, Catalonia and Alicante, the insurrectionists were easily suppressed and several hundred prisoners were taken. Throughout Spain, 125 people were killed, sixteen from the forces of order, sixty-five anarchists and forty-four innocent bystanders.³

On 9 December at Bujalance in the highly conflictive province of Córdoba, there was an echo of Casas Viejas. Tempers were running high because the landowners were flouting agreements on wages and conditions. Anarchist peasants took over parts of the town and tried to seize the town hall. The Civil Guard replied by attacking any houses whose doors were not left open. In thirty-six hours of fighting, a Civil Guard, two anarchists, four innocent civilians, including a woman, an eight-year-old child and an elderly landowner, were killed. Two alleged ringleaders were captured in nearby Porcuna and shot by the Civil Guard ‘while trying to escape’. Two hundred prisoners were taken, many of whom were badly beaten by the Civil Guard. The Civil Governor, Mariano Jiménez Díaz, blamed the events in Bujalance on the landowners for ignoring the work agreements and amassing firearms.⁴

The scale of social hatred in Córdoba can be deduced from the testimony of a union leader from Baena:

The same owners who would spend 400,000 pesetas on a shawl for the statue of the Virgin or on a crucifix for the Church stinted the olive oil for the workers’ meals and would rather pay a lawyer 25,000 pesetas than an extra 25 cents to the day-labourers lest it create a precedent and let the workers get their way. In Baena, there was a señorito [master] who put cattle in the planted fields rather than pay the agreed wages to the reapers. A priest who had a farm, when the lad came down to get olive oil, had made dents in the tin jug so that it would hold less oil.

The union official from Baena went on to comment on the intransigence of the employer class when it came to getting any improvement in the awful situation of the farm labourers:

They had power, influence and money; we only had two or three thousand day-labourers behind us and we constantly had to hold them back since the desperation of being unable to feed their children turns men into wild animals. We knew that the employers, well protected by the forces of order, were not bothered if there were victims, because they just bribed the officials to change the paperwork and make black white. In fact, they were happy to see violence because it was a welcome warning to any rebels of the danger of leaving the straight and narrow.

His own experience as a young man was revealing:

The few times (two or three) that I went with a committee to discuss conditions with the employers, the only issue on the table was wages; there was no question of negotiating food or working hours, since everything was considered to be included in the clause ‘Usage and customs of the locality’, which simply meant to work until your back broke, from sun-up to sun-down, or for hours expanded by the arse-licking foremen from when you could just about see until it was too dark to see a thing. I remember in one heated discussion a caci que called me a ‘snot-nosed kid recently out of the shell’ and said that if my father knew how stupid I was, he wouldn’t throw down fodder for me. This exhausted my patience and I got up and said to him as seriously as I could: ‘It is true, Señor, that on many occasions I have had to eat, not cattle feed, but the remnants of fried bread that you throw out for your dogs, a very Christian deed in a town where the workers’ children are dying of hunger.’⁵

There were a number of violent incidents involving the CNT in the western region of Extremadura, an area dominated by large estates or latifundios. In the province of Cáceres, two churches were set alight in Navalmoral de la Mata.⁶ However, since the Socialist Landworkers’ Federation (FNTT) was not involved, the more southerly province of Badajoz was largely unaffected with the exception of Villanueva de la Serena. There, an infantry sergeant, Pío Sopena Blanco, together with eight other anarchists like himself, took over an army recruiting office, killing two Civil Guards and wounding another. They were surrounded but, instead of waiting for them to surrender, the building was bombarded with heavy machine-guns and artillery by combined units of the Civil Guard, Assault Guards and the army. Pío Sopena and two others were killed in the attack and the six others were shot in cold blood. Although local Socialists were not involved, the Mayor and the officials of the Casa del Pueblo (workers’ club) were arrested. The Casas del Pueblo in Villanueva and five other pueblos were shut down.⁷

These violent incidents involving the CNT diverted attention from the growing problem of malnutrition. This was not only because landowners were slashing wages and refusing work to union members but also because of price rises in basic necessities. After the new Radical government removed price control on bread, the cost had risen by between 25 and 70 per cent. Demonstrations of starving women, children and old people calling for bread became a frequent sight.⁸ At the end of 1933, then, the Socialist leaders faced a rising tide of mass militancy, fed by the employers’ offensive and bitterness at the perceived unfairness of electoral defeat. Dismayed by the right’s determination to destroy what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation, ever more members of the trade union movement and the Socialist Youth (Federación de Juventudes Socialistas) had come to believe that bourgeois democracy would never allow the introduction of even a minimal social justice, let alone full-blown socialism. Fearful of losing support, Largo Caballero reacted by heightening his revolutionary tone still further. In mid-January 1934, he declared that to transform society it was necessary to arm the people and disarm the forces of capitalism – the army, the Civil Guard, the Assault Guards, the police and the courts: ‘Power cannot be taken from the hands of the bourgeoisie simply by cheering for Socialism.’⁹

This strident rhetoric was not backed by any serious revolutionary intentions, but, replayed via the right-wing press, it could only provoke middle-class fears. Largo Caballero’s verbal extremism pandered to rank-and-file dissatisfactions but aimed also to pressure President Alcalá Zamora into calling new elections. It was dangerously irresponsible. If the President did not respond to pressure, the Socialists would be forced either to fulfil Largo Caballero’s threats or back down and lose face with their own militants. Since there was little possibility of implementing his threats, the consequence could benefit only the right.

Largo Caballero’s ill-considered rhetoric reflected both the aggressive assault on social legislation that had followed the right-wing electoral victory and fears of fascism. He felt that he had to respond to workers’ delegations from the provinces that came to Madrid to beg the Socialist Party (PSOE) leadership to organize a counter-offensive.¹⁰ At the same time, he and others suspected that not only the Republic’s legislation but also their own persons were in danger from a possible fascist coup. On 22 November, the outgoing Minister of Justice, Fernando de los Ríos, informed the PSOE executive committee of plans being prepared for a rightist coup involving the arrest of the Socialist leadership.¹¹ Throughout November and December, the Socialist press frequently published material indicating that Gil Robles and the CEDA had fascist ambitions. Reprinted documents included the CEDA’s plans for a citizen militia to combat revolutionary activity on the part of the working class. Others showed that, with the connivance of the police, the CEDA was assembling files on workers in every village, with full details of their ‘subversiveness’, which meant their membership of a union. The appearance of the uniformed militias of the CEDA’s youth movement (the Juventud de Acción Popular) was taken as proof that preparations were afoot to establish fascism in Spain.¹²

Inevitably, within the Socialist Youth and among the younger, unskilled union members there was a great surge of enthusiasm for revolution. Largo Caballero was happy to go along with their demands lest they drift towards the more determinedly revolutionary CNT. Although, at a joint meeting of the union (UGT) and party (PSOE) executives on 25 November, revolutionary proposals were defeated, the moderate Indalecio Prieto reluctantly agreed on the need for ‘defensive action’. The two executives compromised with a declaration urging workers to be ready to rise up and oppose ‘reactionary elements in the event that they went beyond the bounds of the Constitution in their public determination to annul the work of the Republic’. A joint PSOE–UGT committee was set up to prepare this ‘defensive action’.¹³ The lack of Socialist participation in the CNT insurrection two weeks later showed that reformist habits prevailed over the new revolutionary rhetoric. The CEDA’s support for the assault on unionized labour together with its declared determination to smash socialism and to establish a corporativist state made it, for most Spanish leftists, indistinguishable from the Italian Fascist Party or the early Nazi Party. The Socialist leadership wanted to avoid the errors made by their German and Italian comrades, but they had no real intention of actually organizing a revolution. Instead, they hoped that threats of revolution would calm rank-and-file frustration and restrain right-wing aggression.

No Socialist organizations had participated in the CNT action, although a few individual militants had done so, believing it to be the ‘defensive action’ agreed on 26 November.¹⁴ In the Cortes, Prieto condemned ‘this damaging movement’. Yet, when both Gil Robles and the monarchist leader Antonio Goicoechea enthusiastically offered to help the government crush subversion, Prieto reacted angrily. It disturbed him that the ‘enemies of the Republic’ supported the regime only when the proposal was for the repression of the working class. By their determination to silence the workers’ organizations, Prieto perceptively told the deputies of the right, ‘you are closing all exits to us and inviting us to a bloody conflict’.¹⁵

On 16 December, Lerroux formed a government with the parliamentary support of the CEDA. Three days later, Gil Robles made a policy statement in the Cortes which explained that, in return for CEDA votes, he expected an amnesty for those imprisoned for Sanjurjo’s coup of August 1932 and a thorough revision of the religious legislation of the Constituent Cortes (so called because it was the parliament that elaborated and approved the Republican Constitution). Most alarming for the left were his demands for the repeal of the reforms which had most benefited the landless peasantry – the laws of municipal boundaries and of obligatory cultivation, and the introduction of the eight-hour day and of mixed juries (arbitration committees). He also demanded a reduction of the area of land subject to expropriation under the agrarian reform bill and denounced the socializing concept of settling peasants on the land. Most alarming for the left was his statement that his ambition was to lead a government and change the Constitution: ‘We are in no hurry, we want other proposals to fail so that experience will show the Spanish people that there can only be one solution, an unequivocally right-wing solution.’ Behind the measured tone, there lay a dramatic threat that, if events showed that a right-wing evolution was not possible, the Republic would pay the consequences. Not surprisingly, the Socialists regarded this as a fascist speech.¹⁶ In reply, Indalecio Prieto made it clear that, for the Socialists, the legislation that Gil Robles aimed to repeal was what made the Republic worth defending. He threatened that the Socialists would defend the Republic against Gil Robles’s dictatorial ambitions by unleashing the revolution.¹⁷ In the exchange could be seen the seeds of the violent events of October 1934.

The appalling dilemma faced by the PSOE executive was revealed by Fernando de los Ríos when he visited the ex-Prime Minister Manuel Azaña on 2 January 1934. Azaña noted in his diary:

He recounted to me the incredible and cruel persecutions that the workers’ political and union organizations were suffering at the hands of the authorities and the employers. The Civil Guard was daring to do things it had never dared do before. It was impossible to restrain the exasperation of the masses. The Socialist leaders were being overwhelmed. Where would it all end? In a great misfortune, probably. I was aware of the barbaric policy followed by the government and of the way the landowners were reducing the rural labourers to hunger and of the retaliations and reprisals against other workers. I know the slogan ‘Let the Republic feed you’ [Comed República]. But all of this and much more that De los Ríos told me, and the government’s measures, and the policy of the Radical–CEDA majority in the Cortes, which aimed only to undo the work of the Constituent Cortes, did not make it advisable, nor justifiable, for the Socialist Party and the UGT to launch themselves into a movement of force.

Azaña told De los Ríos categorically that it was the duty of the Socialist leadership, even at the risk of their own popularity, to make their followers see that an insurrection would be madness. His reason was that ‘there was no reason to expect the right to react calmly or even to limit their reaction to the re-establishment of law and order. In fact, they would abuse their victory and would go far beyond what was happening already and what they were announcing.’ Shortly afterwards, De los Ríos reported Azaña’s prophetic words to the PSOE executive committee. However, given the employers’ intransigence, it was impossible for them to tell their rank and file to be patient.¹⁸

PSOE offices received reports from all over Andalusia and Extremadura about provocations from owners and Civil Guards alike. The new government appointed several conservative provincial governors in the south, a move which was soon reflected in the law being flouted with impunity and an increase in the ‘preventive brutality’ of the Civil Guard. In El Real de la Jara, in the sierra to the north of the province of Seville, the local landowners had refused to employ union labour. A subsequent strike lasted several months and, in December 1933, some starving workers found with acorns stolen from pig troughs were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard. The Civil Governor suspended the village Mayor when he protested to the local Civil Guard commander about these abuses. In Venta de Baúl (Granada) the armed guards of the cacique, a member of the CEDA, beat up local union leaders.¹⁹

In Fuente del Maestre, Fuente de Cantos, Carmonita and Alconchel (Badajoz), it was the Civil Guard which did the beating when hungry workers were caught collecting windfall olives and acorns. Elsewhere in Badajoz, to prevent labourers being able to alleviate their hunger in this way, the owners took pigs into the fields to eat the fallen crops. Some yunteros (ploughmen) who had started to plough an abandoned estate were imprisoned and the Civil Guard occupied the Casa del Pueblo in nearby Hornachos. In contrast, nothing had been done about the deaths in the same town nine months earlier. In many pueblos, especially in Badajoz, Jaén and Córdoba, landowners ignored regulations about rotating jobs among those registered at the local labour exchange. They would give work only to those who had voted for the right and systematically refused jobs to members of the FNTT. In Almendralejo, during the grape and olive harvests, despite massive local unemployment, two thousand outside labourers were brought in. In Orellana la Vieja and Olivenza, the owners employed only women and children, who were paid a fraction of the wage normally paid to men.²⁰

Wages had dropped by 60 per cent. Hunger was breeding desperation and hatred was building up on both sides of the social divide. In Priego de Córdoba, a delegation of union members who had had no work for four months asked the Mayor to intervene. He replied that he could not oblige anyone to give them work and advised them to go on their knees to beg the landowners for jobs. And the problem was not confined to the south. A union official from Villanueva del Rebollar in the Castilian province of Palencia wrote, ‘The caciques should be careful about their foolhardiness. Our patience is wearing thin.’ The FNTT executive made several appeals to the new Minister of Labour, Ricardo Samper, for the implementation of existing social legislation but it was to no avail.²¹

In late December 1933, a draft law had already been presented to the Cortes for the expulsion of peasants who had occupied land in Extremadura the previous year. In January 1934, the law of municipal boundaries was provisionally repealed. The CEDA also presented projects for the emasculation of the 1932 agrarian reform, by reducing the amount of land subject to expropriation, and for the return of land confiscated from those involved in the August 1932 military rising. Clashes between the Civil Guard and the braceros increased daily.²²

Throughout January, long and often bitter discussions between the PSOE and the UGT leaderships about a possible revolutionary action in defence of the Republic culminated in the defeat of the cautious line. The leadership of the UGT passed to Largo Caballero and the younger elements who supported his ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric. With the PSOE, its youth movement – the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas – and now the UGT all in the hands of those advocating a radical line, a joint committee was immediately established to make preparations for a revolutionary movement. PSOE, UGT and FJS organizations in each province were sent seventy-three naive instructions for the creation of militias, the acquisition of arms, the establishment of links with sympathetic members of the army and the Civil Guard and the organization of technicians to run basic services. The replies received made clear the absurdly optimistic nature of these goals and, apart from the flurry of communications generated by the committee, little or no practical action was taken.²³

However, the various communications were anything but clandestine. Indeed, revolutionary rhetoric from the self-proclaimed ‘Bolshevizers’ was loudly indiscreet and provided ample evidence for right-wing exaggeration about the dangers of revolutionary socialism. The raucous radicalism of the younger Socialists would be used throughout the spring and summer of 1934 to justify harsh repression of strikes that were far from revolutionary in intent. The anything but secret plan was for the revolutionary movement to be launched in the event of the CEDA being invited to participate in government. There was no link between the vaguely discussed ‘revolutionary moment’ and the needs and activities of the workers’ movement. Indeed, no thought was given to ways of harnessing the energies of organized labour for the projected revolution. Rather, the trade unionist habits of a lifetime saw Largo Caballero persuade the new UGT executive on 3 February to do nothing to stop any conventional strike action which was then treated by the authorities as subversive.²⁴

One of the most far-reaching consequences of Largo Caballero’s confused swerve to the left would be visited upon the rural proletariat. At a meeting of the national committee of the landworkers’ union, the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra, on 30 January 1934, the moderate executive committee resigned and was replaced in its entirety by young radicals led by the representative of Navarre, Ricardo Zabalza Elorga.²⁵ The new secretary general Zabalza was a tall, handsome, bespectacled and rather shy thirty-six-year-old union official. He was born in Erratzu in the north of Navarre. The poverty of his family had obliged him, aged fifteen, to emigrate to Argentina. There, he had worked in appalling conditions which had impelled him to become a trade unionist. Always committed to self-education, he had managed to become a schoolteacher and eventually a headmaster. He returned to Spain in 1929. Living in Jaca in the Pyrenees, he had become an enthusiastic activist of the UGT. In 1932, he had moved to the Navarrese capital, Pamplona, where he worked hard to establish a local FNTT branch. The right in Navarre was among the most dominant and brutal of any province in Spain and had blatantly flouted Republic social and labour legislation. After the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition, in Navarre, as in the south, the local landlords refused work to union members and ignored existing social legislation.²⁶

The new Radical government was impelled, both by the inclinations of its more conservative members and by its dependence on CEDA votes, to defend the interests of the landowners. Its arrival in power just as the strength of fascism was growing in Germany and Italy fostered the belief within the Socialist movement that only a revolutionary insurrection could prevent the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship. Within the FNTT, Zabalza began to advocate a general strike in order to put a stop to the employers’ offensive. Older heads within the UGT were opposed to what they saw as a rash initiative which might, moreover, weaken a future rising against a possible attempt to establish an authoritarian state. Suspicion of the right’s intentions had intensified with the appointment at the beginning of March of the thirty-nine-year-old Rafael Salazar Alonso as Minister of the Interior.

Salazar Alonso hastened to convene those of his subordinates responsible for public order and outline his ‘anti-revolutionary’ plans. The head of the Civil Guard was Brigadier General Cecilio Bedia de la Cavallería. In charge of the police and the Assault Guards was the Director General of Security, Captain José Valdivia Garci-Borrón, a crony of Alejandro Lerroux and a man of strong reactionary instincts. Valdivia reassured Salazar Alonso that they could rely implicitly on the head of the Assault Guards, the hard-line Africanista Lieutenant Colonel Agustín Muñoz Grandes, a man who would rise to be Vice-President in Franco’s government. Valdivia reported equally favourably on the Civil Guard Captain Vicente Santiago Hodson, the fiercely anti-leftist head of the intelligence service founded by General Mola and a colleague of the sinister Julián Mauricio Carlavilla. To have such reactionary individuals at his command well suited Salazar Alonso’s repressive ambitions.²⁷ Salazar Alonso made it clear to a delighted General Bedia de la Cavallería that the Civil Guard need not be inhibited in its interventions in social conflicts.²⁸ It was hardly surprising that, when a series of strikes by individual unions took place in the spring of 1934, Salazar Alonso seized the excuse for heavy-handed action. One after another, in the printing, construction and metallurgical industries, the strikes led at best to stalemate, and often to ignominious defeat.

The right could hardly have been more pleased with Salazar Alonzo. On 7 March he declared a state of emergency and closed down the headquarters of the Socialist Youth, the Communist Party and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. His energy was applauded by Gil Robles, who declared that, as long as the Minister of the Interior thus defended the social order and strengthened the principle of authority, the government was assured of CEDA support. A series of articles in El Debate stressed that this meant severe measures against what the paper called the ‘subversion’ of workers who protested against wage cuts. When the CEDA press demanded the abolition of the right to strike, Lerroux’s government responded by announcing that strikes with political implications would be ruthlessly suppressed. For both the right-wing press and Salazar Alonso, all strikes were deemed to be political. On 22 March El Debate denounced stoppages by waiters in Seville and by transport workers in Valencia as ‘strikes against Spain’, and called for anti-strike legislation as draconian as that of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Salazar’s Portugal. The government extended its repressive armoury by expanding the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard and by re-establishing the death penalty, which had been abolished in 1932.²⁹

Not everyone on the right was as contented as Gil Robles. The co-creator of the fascist JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista), Onésimo Redondo, found comfort neither in the right’s electoral success of November 1933 nor in the efforts of Salazar Alonso. In January 1934, he wrote: ‘Get your weapons ready. Learn to love the metallic clunk of the pistol. Caress your dagger. Never be parted from your vengeful cudgel!’ ‘The young should be trained in physical struggle, must love violence as a way of life, must arm themselves with whatever they can and finish off by any means the few dozen Marxist swindlers who don’t let us live.’³⁰

The weakness of the JONS impelled Onésimo and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos to seek like-minded partners. This led, in mid-February 1934, to the fusion of the JONS with the Falange Española, the small fascist party led by the aristocratic José Antonio Primo de Rivera.³¹ Neither Redondo nor Ledesma Ramos was bothered that, two months before its official launch on Sunday 29 October 1933, Falange Española had accepted funding from the most conservative sectors of the old patrician right. The agreement known as the Pacto de El Escorial made by José Antonio Primo de Rivera with the monarchists of Renovación Española tied the Falange to the military conspiracy against the Republic.³² The monarchists’ were ready to finance the Falange because they saw its utility as an instrument of political destabilization.

Redondo and Ledesma Ramos were probably reassured by the fact that, when recruiting started for the Falange, new militants had been required to fill in a form which asked if they had a bicycle – a euphemism for pistol – and were then issued with a truncheon. The training of the Falange militia had been placed in the hands of the veteran Africanista Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who was also the National Inspector of the Requeté and heavily involved in conspiracy against the Republic.³³ In his inaugural speech, José Antonio declared the new party’s commitment to violence: ‘if our aims have to be achieved by violence, let us not hold back before violence … The dialectic is all very well as a first instrument of communication. But the only dialectic admissible when justice or the Fatherland is offended is the dialectic of fists and pistols.’³⁴ Although violence was becoming a commonplace of the politics of Spain in the 1930s, no party exceeded the Falange in its rhetoric of ‘the music of pistols and the barbaric drumbeat of lead’. The representation of political assassination as a beautiful act and death in street-fighting as a glorious martyrdom was central to the funeral rituals which, in emulation of the practice of the Italian Fascist Squadristi, followed the participation of Falangists in street violence.³⁵

The merger of the Falange and the JONS, under the interminable name of Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista, was announced in Valladolid on 4 March 1934 at the Teatro Calderón. Coachloads of Falangists from Madrid and the other Castilian provinces converged on Valladolid. The local left had declared a general strike, and mounted police in the streets outside held back hostile workers. Inside the theatre, bedecked with the black and red flags of FE de las JONS, a forest of stiffly outstretched arms greeted the orators with the fascist salute. The provocative speeches delivered by Onésimo and José Antonio Primo de Rivera fired up the audience to rush out and fight the workers in the streets. Shots were fired and, at the end of the day, with many broken heads on both sides, there was one Falangist dead. Those leftists involved who could be identified would be shot by the rebels during the Civil War.³⁶

Shortly after these events in Valladolid, a joint delegation of Alfonsine and Carlist monarchists would arrive in Rome on 31 March seeking financial help and weaponry for their attempts to overthrow the Republic. The delegation included Antonio Goicoechea, now head of the recently created party Renovación Española, which advocated the return of King Alfonso XIII, General Emilio Barrera, of the conspiratorial Unión Militar Española, and Antonio Lizarza Iribarren, the recruiter for the Carlist Requeté. Mussolini offered financial assistance to the tune of 1.5 million pesetas and 20,000 rifles, 20,000 hand grenades and 200 machine-guns which were delivered via Tripoli and Portugal. Arrangements were also made for several hundred Requetés (Carlist militiamen) to be trained by the Italian Army as instructors.³⁷ Under its newly elected leader, Manuel Fal Conde, the Carlist movement (the Comunión Tradicionalista) was creating a full-scale citizen army. For the Carlist youth organization, ‘sick of legality’, violence was seen as a quintessential part of the Carlist way of life. The result of the efforts of Rada and Colonel José Enrique Varela was that, by the spring of 1936, the Comunión Tradicionalista could offer the military conspirators a well-trained, well-armed force of 30,000 ‘red berets’. With 8,000 men in Navarre and 22,000 in Andalusia and elsewhere, the Requeté constituted a crucial military contribution to the rising.³⁸

On 22 April 1934, the youth organization of the CEDA, the Juventud de Acción Popular, organized a fascist-style rally at Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial, a choice of venue that was a provocatively anti-Republican gesture. In driving sleet, 20,000 gathered in a close replica of the Nazi rallies. They swore loyalty to Gil Robles ‘our supreme chief’ and chanted, ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’ – the Spanish equivalent of Duce. The JAP’s nineteen-point programme was recited, with emphasis on point two, ‘our leaders never make mistakes’, a direct borrowing from the Italian Fascist slogan ‘Il Duce sempre ha raggione.’ Luciano de la Calzada, CEDA deputy for Valladolid, spoke in Manichaean terms identical to those that would be used by the Francoists during the Civil War. He asserted that ‘Jews, heretics, Protestants, admirers of the French revolution, Freemasons, liberals and Marxists’ were ‘outside and against the Fatherland and are the anti-Fatherland’.³⁹

In April 1934, the monarchist aviator and playboy Juan Antonio Ansaldo had joined the Falange at the invitation of José Antonio. He was given the task of organizing terrorist squads. José Antonio particularly wanted reprisals for left-wing attacks on the vendors of the Falange newspaper, F.E. Ansaldo’s efforts to arrange more violent activities by the so-called ‘Falange of Blood’ were welcomed by the leaders of the JONS. Ledesma Ramos wrote: ‘His presence in the party was of undeniable utility because he mobilized that active, violent sector which the reactionary spirit produces everywhere as one of the most fertile ingredients for the national armed struggle. Remember what similar groups meant for German Hitlerism especially in its early stages.’ On 3 June, two thousand armed escuadristas gathered at Carabanchel aerodrome outside Madrid. A bus company which had refused to take a further three hundred to the meeting had two of its coaches destroyed by fire.⁴⁰

In fact, the right, at this stage, had little need for a violent fascist party. The CEDA’s landed backers had achieved a great victory with the definitive repeal of the law of municipal boundaries. The position of the CEDA had been strengthened on 25 April 1934 when Lerroux offered to resign in protest at Alcalá Zamora’s delay in signing the amnesty for those imprisoned after the Sanjurjada. It had not occurred to Lerroux that the President might accept his offer. When he did, Lerroux felt obliged, to avoid the possibility of Alcalá Zamora calling new elections, to give permission to Ricardo Samper to form a government. He did so in the confidence that Samper’s indecisiveness would let him continue to govern from the shadows. Lerroux’s support for the amnesty and the general rightwards trend of the Radical Party saw its deputy leader, Diego Martínez Barrio, leave, taking with him nineteen of its most liberal parliamentary deputies. Thus the Radical Party shifted even further to the right and was left even more dependent on Gil Robles. This made possible the repeal of the law of municipal boundaries on 23 May.⁴¹

Coming just before the harvest was due to start, this allowed the owners to bring in Portuguese and Galician labour to undercut the wages of local workers who already faced starvation. The last vestige of protection that left-wing landless labourers had for their jobs and their wages was that provided by the Socialist majorities on many town and village councils. Socialist mayors were the only hope that rural workers had of landowners being obliged to observe social legislation or of municipal funds being used for public works to provide some employment. When the Radicals came into power in late 1933, Lerroux’s first Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, removed thirty-five of them. Salazar Alonso began to remove many more, usually on flimsy pretexts such as ‘administrative irregularities’ – which often referred to debts inherited from their monarchist predecessors. As soon as he took up office, in response to petitions from local caciques, he ordered provincial civil governors to remove mayors who ‘did not inspire confidence in matters of public order’ – which usually meant Socialists. The legally elected mayor would then be replaced by a ‘government delegate’, usually a local conservative nominee.

Some of Salazar Alonso’s most drastic interventions were in Extremadura, which was partly explained by his infatuation with the local aristocracy. In his memoirs, he admitted removing 193 southern town councils over the next six months. The procedure was that, after a denunciation of some irregularity, however small or implausible, a ‘delegate’ of the Civil Governor, accompanied by the Civil Guard and representatives of the local right, would expel the Socialist mayor and councillors. The majority of the ‘delegates’ were either caciques or their appointees. The idea was to put an end to a situation in which Socialist councils endeavoured to ensure the implementation of social legislation, particularly work-sharing. Once the change had taken place, the new mayors did nothing to protect workers, either from the capricious employment policies of the caciques or from the attacks of their retainers and the Civil Guard.⁴²

Two significant cases of the removal of popular mayors in the province of Badajoz were those of José González Barrero of Zafra and Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro of Fuente de Cantos. González Barrero was a moderate Socialist, respected even by local conservatives because he owned a local hotel and served at Mass. He was widely regarded as an efficient and tolerant Mayor. However, Salazar Alonso, who well remembered their clash at Hornachos some months earlier, was determined to have him removed. Within ten days of his own appointment as Minister of the Interior, he had sent as inspector to Zafra one of his cronies, Regino Valencia, who predictably elaborated a series of charges to justify the suspension of González Barrero. The most serious was that improper methods had been used to raise funds for a road-building scheme to create work for the local unemployed. While in Zafra, Regino Valencia had admitted that the charges were flimsy and that he had been pressured by Salazar Alonso to come up with the required findings or else lose his job. The consequence was that, on 26 May 1934, the entire town council was removed and replaced by another, hand-picked and unelected. Its composition revealed the close links between the Radical Party and the landholding elite in the province. The new Mayor was an ex-member of Primo de Rivera’s Unión Patriótica and looked after the considerable interests in Zafra of the Duque de Medinaceli.⁴³

In Fuente de Cantos, the Socialist Mayor, Modesto José Lorenzana Macarro, was known for his humanity and for the efforts that he made to improve the town, particularly in terms of water supplies. He had used municipal funds to buy food to alleviate the hunger of the families of the unemployed. In June 1934, he was removed on the grounds of misuse of these funds.⁴⁴ As both cases showed, the intention was to diminish the protection afforded to the landless poor by Socialist town councils. The shameless illegality by which the democratic process was ignored, and the long-term consequences of giving the landowners free rein, massively intensified the festering social hatred in the southern countryside. José Lorenzana was to be murdered in September 1936. José González Barrero would be murdered in April 1939.

With tension in the countryside growing by the day, the right in most provinces used every means possible to pressurize the Civil Governor. In the provincial capitals, right-wingers, well dressed and well spoken, were able to honour the governor with lunches and dinners and, with the press on their side, were able to muster considerable influence. When that influence was converted into official acquiescence in the slashing of wages and discrimination against union labour, hungry labourers were reduced to stealing olives and other crops. Landowners and their representatives then complained loudly about anarchy in the countryside to justify the intervention of the Civil Guard. Even El Debate commented on the harshness of many landlords while still demanding that jobs be given only to affiliates of the Catholic unions which had emerged in the wake of the elections. To meet the twin objectives of cheap labour and the demobilization of left-wing unions, Acción Popular created Acción Obrerista in many southern towns. It was a right-wing association backed by the local owners which was thus able to hand out jobs, at well below the wage levels agreed in the wage agreements, to those prepared to renounce membership of the Socialist FNTT.⁴⁵

The result was an intensification of hardship and hatred. In Badajoz, starving labourers were begging in the streets of the towns. Rickets and tuberculosis were common. The monarchist expert on agrarian matters, the Vizconde de Eza, said that in May 1934 over 150,000 families lacked even the bare necessities of life. Workers who refused to rip up their union cards were denied work. The owners’ boycott of unionized labour was designed to reassert pre-1931 forms of social control and to ensure that the Republican–Socialist challenge to the system should never be repeated. In villages like Hornachos, this determination had been revealed by physical assaults on the Casa del Pueblo. A typical incident took place at Puebla de Don Fadrique, near Huéscar in the province of Granada. The Socialist Mayor was replaced by a retired army officer who was determined to put an end to what he saw as the workers’ indiscipline. He surrounded the Casa del Pueblo with a detachment of Civil Guard, and as the workers filed out they were beaten by the Guards and by retainers of the local owners.⁴⁶

The response of the FNTT was an illuminating example of how the newly revolutionized Socialists were reacting to increased aggression from the employers. The FNTT newspaper, El Obrero de la Tierra, had adopted a revolutionary line after the removal on 28 January 1934 of the union’s moderate executive. The paper asserted that the only solution to the misery of the rural working class was the socialization of the land. In the meantime, however, the new executive adopted practical policies every bit as conciliatory as those of their predecessors. The FNTT sent to the Ministers of Labour, Agriculture and the Interior a series of reasoned appeals for the application of the law regarding obligatory cultivation, work agreements, strict job rotation and labour exchanges, as well as protests at the systematic closures of the Casas del Pueblo. That was in the third week of March. When no response was received, and, indeed, the persecution of left-wing workers began to increase prior to the harvest, a respectful appeal was made to Alcalá Zamora – also to no avail. The FNTT declared that thousands were slowly dying of hunger and published long, detailed lists of villages where union members were being refused work and physically attacked. In the province of Badajoz, the FNTT calculated that there were 20,000 workers unemployed and that they and their families were dying of starvation. There were five hundred union members in prison.⁴⁷

Finally, in a mood of acute exasperation, the FNTT reluctantly decided on a strike. The first announcement of a possible strike was accompanied by an appeal to the authorities to impose respect for the work agreements and for equitable work-sharing.⁴⁸ The UGT executive committee advised the FNTT against calling a general strike of the peasantry for three reasons. In the first place, the harvest was ready at different times in each area, so any single date for the strike would lead to problems of co-ordination. Secondly, a general strike, as opposed to one limited to large estates, would cause hardship to leaseholders and sharecroppers who needed to hire one or two workers. Thirdly, there was concern that the provocative actions of the owners and the Civil Guard could push the peasants into violent confrontations which they could only lose. At a series of joint meetings throughout March and April, the UGT executive tried to persuade the FNTT leadership to move to a narrower strategy of staggered, partial strikes. The UGT pointed out that a nationwide peasant strike would be denounced by the government as revolutionary and risked a terrible repression, and Largo Caballero made it clear that there would be no solidarity strikes from industrial workers.⁴⁹

The FNTT leadership was caught between two fires. Zabalza and his comrades were fully aware of the dangers but they were under extreme pressure from a hungry rank and file pushed beyond endurance by the constant provocation of caciques and Civil Guard. For example, at Fuente del Maestre in Badajoz, union members returning from celebrating May Day in the country were singing the ‘Internationale’ and shouting revolutionary slogans. When stones were thrown at the houses of the richer landowners, the Civil Guard opened fire, killing four workers and wounding several more. A further forty were imprisoned.⁵⁰ In the province of Toledo, FNTT affiliates found it almost impossible to get work. Those who did find a job had to accept the most grinding conditions. The agreement on wages and conditions had decreed 4.50 pesetas for an eight-hour day. The owners were in fact paying 2.50 pesetas for sun-up to sun-down working. In parts of Salamanca, wages of 75 céntimos were being paid.⁵¹

The desperation of the hungry workers in the face of what they saw as the stony-hearted arrogance of the landowners led to minor acts of vandalism. The throwing of stones at landowners’ clubs (casinos) in several villages was redolent of impotent frustration. It came as no surprise when the FNTT executive told the UGT that it could no longer resist their rank and file’s demand for action and could not just abandon them to hunger wages, political persecution and lock-out. As El Obrero de la Tierra declared, ‘All of Spain is becoming Casas Viejas.’ On 28 April, the FNTT had appealed to the Minister of Labour to remedy the situation simply by enforcing the existing laws. When nothing was done, the FNTT national committee decided on 12 May to call strike action from 5 June. The strike declaration was made in strict accordance with the law, ten days’ notice being given. The manifesto pointed out that ‘this extreme measure’ was the culmination of a series of useless negotiations to persuade the relevant ministries to apply the surviving social legislation. Hundreds of appeals for the payment of the previous year’s harvest wages lay unheard at the Ministry of Labour. All over Spain, the work conditions agreed by the mixed juries were simply being ignored and protests were repressed by the Civil Guard.⁵²

The preparation of the strike had been legal and open and its ten objectives were hardly revolutionary. There were two basic aims: to secure an improvement of the brutal conditions being suffered by rural labourers and to protect unionized labour from the employers’ determination to destroy the rural unions. The ten demands were (1) application of the work agreements; (2) strict work rotation irrespective of political affiliation; (3) limitation on the use of machinery and outside labour, to ensure forty days’ work for the labourers of each province; (4) immediate measures against unemployment; (5) temporary take-over of land scheduled for expropriation by the Institute of Agrarian Reform, the technical body responsible for the implementation of the 1932 agrarian reform bill, so that it could be rented to the unemployed; (6) application of the law of collective leases; (7) recognition of the right of workers under the law of obligatory cultivation to work abandoned land; (8) the settlement before the autumn of those peasants for whom the Institute of Agrarian Reform had land available; (9) the creation of a credit fund to help the collective leaseholdings; and (10) the recovery of the common lands privatized by legal chicanery in the nineteenth century. The FNTT leader Ricardo Zabalza was hoping that the threat of strikes would be sufficient to oblige the government to do something to remedy the situation of mass hunger in the southern countryside. Certainly, the prospect of a strike led the Minister of Labour to make token gestures, calling on the mixed juries to elaborate work contracts and on government labour delegates to report the employers’ abuses of the law. Negotiations were also started with FNTT representatives.⁵³

Salazar Alonso, however, was determined not to lose his chance to aim a deadly blow at the largest section of the UGT. In his meetings with the head of the Civil Guard General Cecilio Bedia and the Director General of Security Captain Valdivia, he had started to make specific plans for the repression of such a strike.⁵⁴ Accordingly, just as Zabalza’s hopes of compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour were coming to fruition, Salazar Alonso issued a decree criminalizing the actions of the FNTT by declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. All meetings, demonstrations and propaganda connected with the strike were declared illegal. Draconian press censorship was imposed. El Obrero de la Tierra was closed down, not to reopen until 1936. In the Cortes debate on Salazar Alonso’s tough line, the CEDA votes, along with those of the Radicals and the monarchists, ensured a majority for the Minister of the Interior. Nevertheless, the points raised in the debate starkly illuminated the issues at stake.

José Prat García, PSOE deputy for Albacete, in a reasoned speech to the Cortes, pointed out the anti-constitutional nature of Salazar Alonso’s measures. He reiterated that the FNTT had followed due legal process in declaring its strike. The application of existing legislation would have been sufficient to solve the conflict, claimed Prat, but Salazar Alfonso had rejected a peaceful solution and resorted to repression. The Minister replied aggressively that, because the FNTT’s objective was to force the government to take action, the strike was subversive. When he stated, falsely, that the government was taking steps against owners who imposed hunger wages, José Prat replied that, on the contrary, he had frustrated all attempts at conciliation, by overruling the negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Labour and Agriculture. Prat concluded by stating that the strike aimed only to protect the rural labourers and to end situations such as that in Guadix (Granada) that had reduced workers to eating grass. José Antonio Trabal Sanz, of the Catalan Republican Left, declared that Salazar Alonso seemed to regard the wishes of the plutocracy and the national interest as synonymous. Cayetano Bolivar, Communist deputy for Málaga, claimed that the government’s provocation was closing the doors of legality and pushing the workers to revolution. When Bolivar mentioned the workers’ hunger, a right-wing deputy shouted that he and the rest of the majority were also hungry and the debate ended.⁵⁵

As his early preparations made with Bedia and Valdivia revealed, conciliation had not been uppermost in Salazar Alonso’s mind. His measures were now swift and ruthless to weaken the left in advance of the conflict. Workers’ leaders were rounded up before the strike had started. Other liberal and left-wing individuals in the country districts were arrested wholesale. On 31 May, José González Barrero, the recently removed Mayor of Zafra, was arrested on trumped-up charges. The Mayors of Olivenza and Llerena, also in Badajoz, were likewise arrested, as were numerous union officials, schoolteachers and lawyers, some of whom were beaten or tortured. Salazar Alonso had effectively militarized the landworkers when he had declared the harvest a national public service. Strikers were thus mutineers and were arrested in their thousands. Even four Socialist deputies, including Cayetano Bolívar, visiting prisoners in Jaén, were detained – in violation of the Constitution.⁵⁶

In the prison of Badajoz, with a normal capacity of eighty prisoners, six hundred were held in appalling conditions. There was similar overcrowding in the prisons of Almendralejo, Don Benito and other towns in the province. In addition to those arrested, several thousand peasants were simply loaded at gunpoint on to cattle trucks and deported hundreds of miles away from their homes and then left to make their own way back penniless and on foot. On 4 July, two hundred starving peasants from Badajoz who had been imprisoned in Burgos reached Madrid and congregated in the Puerta del Sol where they were violently dispersed by the police. The FNTT paid for them to return home, where many were rearrested.⁵⁷

Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils, especially in Badajoz and Cáceres, were removed, and the Mayor and councillors replaced by government nominees. The strike seems to have been almost complete in Jaén, Granada, Ciudad Real, Badajoz and Cáceres, and substantial elsewhere in the south. In Jaén and Badajoz, there were violent clashes in many villages between strikers and the permanent workers, the armed guards of the large estates and the Civil Guard. However, neither there nor in other less conflictive provinces could the strikers stop the owners drafting in outside labour, with Civil Guard protection, from Portugal, Galicia and elsewhere. The army was brought in to use threshing machines and the harvest was collected without serious interruption. The CNT did not join in the strike, which limited its impact in Seville and Córdoba although that did not protect anarchist workers from the subsequent repression. Although most of the labourers arrested on charges of sedition were released by the end of August, emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders, including González Barrero, to four or more years of imprisonment.⁵⁸

The Casas del Pueblo were not reopened and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936. In an uneven battle, the FNTT had suffered a terrible defeat. In several provinces, the remaining Socialist town councils were overturned and replaced by the caciques’ nominees. In Granada, the Civil Governor was removed at the behest of local landowners because he had made an effort to ensure that the remaining labour legislation was implemented after the strike.⁵⁹ In the Spanish countryside, the clock had effectively been put back to the 1920s by Salazar Alonso. There were no longer any rural unions, social legislation or municipal authorities to challenge the dominance of the caciques. The CEDA was delighted.⁶⁰

By choosing to regard a strike of limited material objectives as revolutionary, Salazar Alonso was able to justify his attack on Socialist councils. As has already been noted, he claimed that, by the end of the conflict, he had removed only 193 of them. However, the real figures were much higher. In Granada alone, during the period that the Radicals were in power, 127 were removed. In Badajoz, the figure was nearer 150.⁶¹ By his aggressively brutal action during the peasant strike, the Minister of the Interior had inflicted a terrible blow on the largest union within the UGT and left a festering legacy of hatred in the south. Local landowners were quick to reimpose more or less feudal conditions on workers whom they regarded as serfs. Wages were slashed and work given only to non-union workers regarded as ‘loyal’.

Shortly after entering the Ministry of the Interior, Salazar Alonso had crushed strikes in the metal, building and newspaper industries on the grounds that they were political. He had done so despite pleas from labour leaders that all these disputes had social and economic origins and were not meant to be revolutionary.⁶² In the summer of 1934, he had managed to escalate the harvest strike and smash the FNTT. Despite his success, Salazar Alonso was still some way from his long-term goal of destroying any and all elements that he considered to be a challenge to the government.

This was clear from a letter that he wrote to his lover Amparo at the end of July:

You can imagine what I’m going through. It could be said that this is the beginning of a revolutionary movement much more serious than the more frivolous might think. Conscious of the enormous responsibilities I bear, I am totally dedicated to the task of crushing it. It’s true that the campaign against me is building up. There are wall slogans saying ‘Salazar Alonso just like Dollfuss’ [the Austrian Chancellor who had repressed a revolutionary strike in Vienna in February]. The extremist press attacks and insults me, calls for me to be assassinated. I’m calmer than ever. I work ceaselessly. I’m organizing things. Today I had meetings with the Chief of Police, the Director General of Security, the head of the Assault Guard, and the Inspector General of the Civil Guard. I’m preparing everything carefully, technically just like the officer in charge of a General Staff. Needless to say, I don’t sleep. Even in bed I continue to plan my anti-revolutionary organization. Public opinion is turning in my favour. People believe in me, they turn to my puny figure and they see the man of providence who can save them.⁶³

Salazar Alonso referred to Amparo as his muse and to himself as the chieftain, using the word later adopted by Franco, ‘Caudillo’. He painted for her the self-portrait of a brilliant general about to go into battle against a powerful enemy. However, the nearest that Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS liaison committee had come to creating militias was to make a file-card index of the names of men who might be prepared to ‘take to the streets’. The lack of central co-ordination was demonstrated by Largo Caballero’s acquiescence in the erosion of the trade union movement’s strength in one disastrous strike after another. Young Socialists took part in Sunday excursions to practise military manoeuvres in the park outside Madrid, the Casa del Campo, armed with more enthusiasm than weapons, activities easily controlled by the police. Desultory forays into the arms market had seen the Socialists lose their scarce funds to unscrupulous arms-dealers and had produced only a few guns. The police were fully informed about the purchases, either by spies or by the arms-dealers themselves, and often arrived at Casas del Pueblo and Socialists’ homes with precise information about weapons hidden behind false walls, under floorboards or in wells. The one attempt at a major arms purchase, carried out by Indalecio Prieto, was a farcical failure. Only in the northern mining region of Asturias, where small arms were pilfered from local factories and dynamite from the mines, did the working class have significant weaponry.⁶⁴

On 10 June, while the peasants’ strike was taking place in the south, Ansaldo’s Falangist terror squads were involved in violent incidents in Madrid. They attacked a Sunday excursion of the Socialist Youth in El Pardo outside the capital. In the subsequent fight, a young Falangist was killed. Without waiting for authorization from José Antonio, Ansaldo requisitioned the car of Alfonso Merry del Val and set off to retaliate. Opening fire on other young Socialists returning to Madrid, they killed Juanita Rico and seriously wounded two others.⁶⁵ Margarita Nelken accused Salazar Alonso of covering up the Juanita Rico murder, and that of another Socialist, in the knowledge that they were carried out by Falangist terror squads.⁶⁶ Throughout the summer, Ansaldo was planning to blow up the Socialist headquarters in Madrid. Fifty kilos of dynamite was stolen and a tunnel dug from the sewers into the basement of the Casa del Pueblo. Ansaldo’s men murdered one of their squad suspected of being a police informer. Before the explosive device was ready, on 10 July, the police discovered large quantities of guns, ammunition, dynamite and bombs at the Falange headquarters. Eighty militants, mainly Jonsistas and Ansaldo’s men, were detained, but only for three weeks.⁶⁷ Although José Antonio formally expelled Ansaldo in July, the hit squads continued to carry out reprisals against the left with equal frequency and efficiency. In fact, Ansaldo went on working with them.

For Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso, the adventurism of the Falange was an irrelevance. The Socialists’ empty revolutionary threat had played neatly into their hands. Their readiness to take advantage of that rhetoric to alter the balance of power in favour of the right had been illustrated brutally during the printers’ and landworkers’ strikes. Gil Robles knew that the leadership of the Socialist movement, dominated by followers of Largo Caballero, had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. He also knew that, thanks to Salazar Alonso, the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Constant police activity throughout the summer dismantled most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee and seized most of the weapons that the left had managed to acquire. Gil Robles admitted later that he was keen to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’⁶⁸

A linked element of Gil Robles’s strategy in the late summer of 1934 was the expansion of the militia of the Juventud de Acción Popular under the banner of ‘civilian mobilization’. Essentially, with the forthcoming revolutionary showdown in mind, its purpose was strike-breaking and the guaranteeing of essential public services.⁶⁹ The man he chose to organize the ‘civilian mobilization’ and to train the paramilitary units was Lisardo Doval, the Civil Guard officer expelled from the service for his part in the Sanjurjo coup attempt of August 1932.⁷⁰

During the summer of 1934, political tension was heightened by a conflict over Catalonia which was skilfully manipulated by Gil Robles in such a way as to provoke the left. The right deeply resented the Republic’s granting of regional autonomy to Catalonia in 1932. This was reflected in the decision of the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees on 8 June to overrule a measure by the Catalan parliament to lengthen leases for smallholders. This delighted big landowners in Catalonia and elsewhere. Presenting the law unchanged to the parliament on 12 June, the President of the Generalitat (the Catalan regional government), Lluís Companys, described the Tribunal’s decision as yet another centralist attempt to reduce the region’s autonomy by ‘the lackeys of the Monarchy and of the monarchist-fascist hordes’.⁷¹

Salazar Alonso opposed those in the cabinet who favoured a compromise solution. Both the Left Republicans and many Socialists regarded Catalonia as the last remaining outpost of the ‘authentic’ Republic. The anti-Catalan statements being uttered by the CEDA left little doubt that Catalan autonomy would be under threat if the CEDA joined the government. Gil Robles spoke provocatively at an assembly organized by the Catalan landowners’ federation in Madrid on 8 September. The assembly, like others held by the CEDA’s agrarian financiers, argued for a restriction of union rights, the strengthening of the forces of authority and, more specifically, the crushing of the Generalitat’s ‘rebellion’.⁷²

On the following day, the Juventud de Acción Popular held a fascist-style rally at Covadonga in Asturias, the site of the battle in 722 considered to be the starting point for the long campaign to reconquer Spain from the Moors. The choice of venue symbolically associated the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and identified the working class with the Moorish invaders. Local Socialists declared a general strike and tried to block the roads to Covadonga, but the Civil Guard ensured that the rally went ahead as planned. The leader of the Asturian branch of Acción Popular, the retired army officer José María Fernández Ladreda, cited the reconquest of Spain as he introduced Gil Robles, who spoke belligerently of the need to crush the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque nationalists.⁷³ The wily Gil Robles knew only too well that such language, threatening key achievements of the Republican–Socialist coalition of 1931–3, would confirm the left in its determination to prevent the CEDA coming to power.

Salazar Alonso knew, as did Gil Robles, that the entry of the CEDA into the government was the detonator that would set off the Socialists’ revolutionary action and justify a definitive blow against them. On 11 September, at a deeply conflictive cabinet meeting, Salazar Alonso proposed a declaration of martial law precisely in order to provoke a premature outbreak of a revolutionary strike. Both the Prime Minister, Ricardo Samper, and the Minister of Agriculture, Cirilo del Río Rodríguez, protested at such irresponsible cynicism. The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, called for Salazar Alonso’s resignation.

Later that evening, Salazar Alonso wrote once more to his lover Amparo recounting what had happened earlier in the day. He made it clear that he thought the CEDA should join the government and that his objective was to provoke a reaction by the left precisely in order to smash it.

I explained the revolutionaries’ plan. I examined the Catalan question, pointing out objectively and honestly all the circumstances, the possibilities and the consequences of our decisions … The situation is serious. I couldn’t permit any action that was thoughtless or not properly prepared. I had to consider what was necessary to justify declaring martial law … The Government, opposed by the revolutionary left, lacks the backing of the parliamentary group [the CEDA] on whose votes it relies … Was this the Government with the authority to provoke the definitive revolutionary movement?⁷⁴

In his published account of his role, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was no less than that of starting the counter-revolutionary offensive to proceed with a work of decisive government to put an end to the evil.’ He aimed not just to smash the immediate revolutionary bid but to ensure that the left did not rise again.⁷⁵

Not long afterwards, Gil Robles admitted that he was aware of and indeed shared Salazar Alonso’s provocative intentions. He knew that the Socialists were committed to reacting violently to what they believed would be an attempt to establish a Dollfuss-type regime. He too was fully aware that the chances of revolutionary success were remote. Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:

I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.⁷⁶

The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, eventually came around to the point of view of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. At the end of September, he organized large-scale army manoeuvres in León, in an area contiguous, and of similar terrain, to Asturias, where he suspected the revolutionary bid would take place.⁷⁷ When the cabinet discussed cancelling the manoeuvres, Hidalgo argued that they were necessary precisely because of the imminent revolutionary threat. Certainly, once the revolutionary strike did break out in Asturias in early October, the astonishing speed with which the Spanish Foreign Legion was transported from Africa to Asturias suggests some prior consideration of the problem. As Hidalgo later admitted in the Cortes, three days before the manoeuvres started, he had ordered the Regiment No. 3 from Oviedo not to take part and to remain in the Asturian capital because he expected a revolutionary outbreak.⁷⁸ In any case, Gil Robles had secured confidential assurances from senior military figures that the army could crush any leftist uprising provoked by CEDA entry into the cabinet.⁷⁹

On 26 September, Gil Robles made his move with a communiqué stating that, in view of the present cabinet’s ‘weakness’ regarding social problems, and irrespective of the consequences, a strong government with CEDA participation had to be formed. In a sinuous speech in the Cortes on 1 October, claiming to be motivated by a desire for national stability he introduced an unmistakable threat: ‘we are conscious of our strength both here and elsewhere’. After the inevitable resignation of the cabinet, President Alcalá Zamora entrusted Lerroux with the task of forming a government, acknowledging the inevitability of CEDA participation, but hoping that it would be limited to one ministry. Gil Robles insisted on three in the knowledge that this would incite Socialist outrage.⁸⁰

Gil Robles’s provocation was carefully calibrated. His three choices for the cabinet announced on 4 October were José Oriol y Anguera de Sojo (Labour), Rafael Aizpún (Justice) and Manuel Giménez Fernández (Agriculture). Anguera de Sojo was an integrist Catholic (his mother was being considered by the Vatican for canonization), an expert on canon law and lawyer for the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat. He had been the public prosecutor responsible for a hundred confiscations and numerous fines suffered by El Socialista. Moreover, as a Catalan rightist, he was a bitter enemy of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the ruling party in the Generalitat. As a hard-line civil governor of Barcelona in 1931, his uncompromising strike-breaking policies had accelerated the CNT move to insurrectionism. The choice of Anguera could hardly have been more offensive. The Esquerra sent a deputation to see Alcalá Zamora and plead for his exclusion. Gil Robles refused point-blank the President’s suggestions.⁸¹ Aizpún, CEDA deputy for Pamplona, was close to the Carlists. Giménez Fernández, as deputy for Badajoz, was inevitably assumed to be as faithful a representative of the aggressive landlords of that province as Salazar Alonso had been and likely, as Minister of Agriculture, to intensify the awful repression that had followed the harvest strike. The suppositions about the Minister were wrong, since he was a moderate Christian Democrat, but those about the Badajoz landlords were right. Because of his relatively liberal policies, Giménez Fernández was rejected as a candidate for Badajoz in the 1936 elections and was forced to run in Segovia.⁸²

The Socialists had every reason to fear that the new cabinet would implement Salazar Alonso’s determination to impose reactionary rule. After all, on 222 of the 315 days of Radical government until the end of July, the country had been declared to be in a state of emergency, which meant the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Sixty of the ninety-three days on which there was constitutional normality had been during the electoral period of late 1933. Press censorship, fines and seizures of newspapers, limitation of the freedom of association, declaration of the illegality of almost all strikes, protection for fascist and monarchist activities, reduction of wages and the removal of freely elected Socialist town councils were seen as the establishment of a ‘regime of white terror’. These were the policies that Gil Robles, in his speech of 1 October, had denounced as weak. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he intended to impose more repressive ones.⁸³

In the last few days of September, still hoping to persuade the President to resolve the crisis by calling elections, the Socialist press had resorted to desperate – and empty – threats. El Socialista implied that preparation for the revolutionary action was well advanced: ‘We have our army waiting to be mobilized, and our international plans and our plans for socialism.’⁸⁴ At the end of the month, the paper’s editorial asked rhetorically: ‘Will it be necessary for us to say now, stating the obvious, that any backward step, any attempt to return to outmoded policies will inevitably face the resistance of the Socialists?’⁸⁵ Clearly, Julián Zugazagoitia, the thoughtful director of El Socialista, knew full well that the Socialist movement was utterly unprepared for a revolutionary confrontation with the state. If his editorials were not senseless irresponsibility – and Zugazagoitia, a faithful supporter of Prieto, was no extremist – they have to be seen as a last-ditch threat to the President.

Largo Caballero’s revolutionary committee made no preparations for the seizure of power and the ‘revolutionary militias’ had neither national leadership nor local organization. He placed his hopes on revolutionary bluster ensuring that Alcalá Zamora would not invite the CEDA into the government. Just before midnight on 3 October, when news reached the committee that a government was being formed with CEDA participation, Largo Caballero refused to believe it and ordered that no action be taken to start the movement. Even once the truth of the news could no longer be ignored, only with the greatest reluctance did he accept that there was no choice and the threatened revolution had to be launched.⁸⁶

Throughout 1934, the leaders of the PSOE and the CEDA had engaged in a war of manoeuvre. Gil Robles, with the support of Salazar Alonso, had enjoyed the stronger position and he had exploited it with skill and patience. The Socialists were forced by their relative weakness to resort to vacuous threats of revolution and were finally manoeuvred into a position in which they had to implement them. The results were catastrophic.

After defeat in strike after strike in the first nine months of 1934, Socialist intentions in the events that began on the morning of 4 October 1934 were necessarily limited. The objective was to defend the concept of the Republic developed between 1931 and 1933 against the authoritarian ambitions of the CEDA. The entry of the CEDA into the cabinet was followed by the existence for ten hours of an independent Catalan Republic; a desultory general strike in Madrid; and the establishment of a workers’ commune in Asturias. With the exception of the Asturian revolt, which held out against the armed forces during two weeks of fierce fighting and owed its ‘success’ to the mountainous terrain and the special skills of the miners, the keynote of the Spanish October was its half-heartedness. There is nothing about the events of that month, even those in Asturias, to suggest that the left had thoroughly prepared a rising. In fact, throughout the crisis, Socialist leaders were to be found restraining the revolutionary zeal of their followers.⁸⁷

To allow the President time to change his mind, on 4 October the UGT leadership gave the government twenty-four hours’ notice of a peaceful general strike in Madrid. Anarchist and Trotskyist offers of participation in a revolutionary bid were brusquely rebuffed. Accordingly, the new government was able with considerable ease to arrest workers’ leaders and detain suspect members of the police and the army. Without instructions to the contrary, Socialist and anarchist trade unionists in Madrid simply stayed away from work rather than mounting any show of force in the streets. The army took over basic services – conscripts were classified according to their peacetime occupations – and bakeries, right-wing newspapers and public transport were able to function with near normality. Those Socialist leaders who managed to avoid arrest either went into hiding, as did Largo Caballero, or went into exile, as did Prieto. Their followers were left standing on street corners awaiting instructions and within a week the strike had petered out. All the talk of a seizure of power by revolutionary militias came to nothing. Hopes of collaboration by sympathizers in the army did not materialize and the few militants with arms quickly abandoned them. In the capital, some scattered sniper fire and many arrests were the sum total of the revolutionary war unleashed.⁸⁸

In Catalonia, where anarchists and other left-wing groups collaborated with the Socialists in the Workers’ Alliance, events were rather more dramatic. Many of the local committees took over their villages and then waited for instructions from Barcelona, which never came.⁸⁹ In the Catalan capital, ill prepared and reluctant, Companys proclaimed an independent state of Catalonia ‘within the Federal Republic of Spain’ in protest against what was seen as the betrayal of the Republic. The motives behind his heroic gesture were complex and contradictory. He was certainly alarmed by developments in Madrid. He was also being pressured by extreme Catalan nationalists to meet popular demand for action against the central government. At the same time, he wanted to forestall revolution. Accordingly, he did not mobilize the Generalitat’s own forces against General Domingo Batet, the commander of military forces in Catalonia. The working class had also been denied arms. Accordingly, Batet, after trundling artillery through the narrow streets, was able to negotiate the surrender of the Generalitat after only ten hours of independence, in the early hours of 7 October.⁹⁰ The right in general, and Franco in particular, never forgave Batet for failing to make a bloody example of the Catalans.⁹¹

Asturias was a different matter. Once the news of the CEDA entry into the government reached the mining valleys in the late afternoon of 4 October, the rank-and-file workers took the lead. There, the solidarity of the miners had overcome partisan differences and the UGT, the CNT and, to a much lesser degree, the Communist Party were united in the Workers’ Alliance. It is illustrative of the fact that Socialist leaders had never really contemplated revolutionary action that, even in Asturias, the movement did not start in the stronghold of the party bureaucracy, at Oviedo, but was imposed upon it by outlying areas – Mieres, Sama de Langreo and Pola de Lena. Similarly, in the Basque country, the workers seized power only in small towns like Eibar and Mondragón. Mondragón was an exception, but in Bilbao and the rest of the region rank-and-file militants waited in vain for instructions from their leaders. Throughout the insurrection, the president of the Asturian mineworkers’ union, Amador Fernández, remained in Madrid, and on 14 October, without the knowledge of the rank and file, tried to negotiate a peaceful surrender.⁹²

The uncertainty demonstrated by the Socialist leadership was in dramatic contrast to the determination of Gil Robles. Indeed, his behaviour, both during and immediately after the October revolt, sustained his later admission that he had deliberately provoked the left. While Socialist hesitation on 5 October suggested a quest for compromise, the new Radical–CEDA government manifested no desire for conciliation and only a determination to crush the left. Gil Robles made it clear at a meeting with his three ministers that he had no faith in either the Chief of the General Staff, General Carlos Masquelet, whom he regarded as a dangerous liberal, or General Eduardo López Ochoa, who was put in charge of restoring order in Asturias. At the cabinet meeting on 6 October, however, their proposal to send Franco to take over operations in Asturias was overruled and the views of Alcalá Zamora, Lerroux and his more liberal cabinet colleagues prevailed.⁹³ However, in the event Franco was able to play a role that ensured that the rebellion would be repressed with considerable savagery.

Gil Robles demanded the harshest policy possible against the rebels. On 9 October, he rose in the Cortes to express his support for the government and to make the helpful suggestion that parliament be closed until the repression was over. Thus the anticipated crushing of the revolution would take place in silence. No questions could be asked in the Cortes and censorship was total for the left-wing press, although the right-wing newspapers were full of gruesome tales – never substantiated – of leftist barbarism. The new Minister of Agriculture, Manuel Giménez Fernández, one of the few sincere social Catholics within the CEDA, struck a dissident note when he told the staff of his Ministry on 12 October, ‘the disturbances which have taken place against the state have not started on the rebels’ side of the street but on ours, because the state itself has created many enemies by consistently neglecting its duties to all citizens’.⁹⁴ The violence on both sides during the events of October and the brutal persecution unleashed in the wake of the left-wing defeat would deepen existing social hatreds beyond anything previously imagined.

Initially, because of Franco’s reputation as a ferocious Africanista, President Alcalá Zamora rejected the proposal to put him formally in command of troops in Asturias. Nevertheless, the Minister of War, the Radical Diego Hidalgo, insisted and gave Franco informal control of operations, naming him his ‘personal technical adviser’, marginalizing his own General Staff and slavishly signing the orders drawn up by him.⁹⁵ The Minister’s decision was highly irregular but understandable. Franco had detailed knowledge of Asturias, its geography, communications and military organization. He had been stationed there, had taken part in the suppression of the general strike of 1917 and had been a regular visitor since his marriage to an Asturian woman, Carmen Polo. To the delight of the Spanish right, and as Alcalá Zamora had feared, Franco responded to the miners in Asturias as if he were dealing with the recalcitrant tribesmen of Morocco.

Franco’s approach to the events of Asturias was coloured by his conviction, fed by the regular bulletins he received from the Entente Anticommuniste of Geneva, that the workers’ uprising had been ‘carefully prepared by the agents of Moscow’ and that the Socialists, ‘with technical instructions from the Communists, thought they were going to be able to install a dictatorship’.⁹⁶ That belief justified for Franco and for many on the extreme right the use of troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy.

With a small command unit set up in the telegraph room of the Ministry of War in Madrid, Franco controlled the movement of the troops, ships and trains to be used in the suppression of the revolution.⁹⁷ Uninhibited by the humanitarian considerations which made some of the more liberal senior officers hesitate to use the full weight of the armed forces against civilians, Franco regarded the problem with the same icy ruthlessness that had underpinned his successes in the colonial wars. One of his first decisions was to order the bombing and artillery shelling of the working-class districts of the mining towns. Unmoved by the fact that the central symbol of rightist values was the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, he shipped Moroccan mercenaries to Asturias, the only part of Spain where the crescent had never flown. He saw no contradiction about using them because he regarded left-wing workers with the same racist contempt which had underlain his use of locally recruited mercenary troops, the Regulares Indígenas, against the Rif tribesmen. Visiting Oviedo after the rebellion had been defeated, he spoke to a journalist in terms that echoed the sentiments of Onésimo Redondo: ‘This war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism.’⁹⁸ Without apparent irony, despite Franco’s use in the north of colonial forces, the right-wing press portrayed the Asturian miners as puppets of a foreign, Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy.⁹⁹

The methods used by the colonial army, just as in Morocco, were aimed at paralysing the civilian enemy by terror. The African Army unleashed a wave of brutality that had more to do with their normal practice when entering Moroccan villages than any threat from the defeated Asturian rebels. The troops used left-wing prisoners as human shields to cover their advances. Innocent men, women and children were shot at random by the Moroccan units under the command of Franco’s crony, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe Blanco. This contributed to the demoralization of the poorly armed revolutionaries. More than fifty male and female prisoners, many of them wounded, were interrogated and immediately shot in the yard of Oviedo’s main hospital and their bodies burned in the crematorium oven. Several more were executed without trial in the Pelayo barracks. Other prisoners were tortured and women raped. In the mining village of Carbayín, twenty bodies were buried to hide evidence of torture. Houses and shops were looted of watches, jewellery and clothing, while anything not portable was smashed.¹⁰⁰

The behaviour of the colonial units provoked serious friction between General López Ochoa, on the one hand, and Franco and Yagüe, on the other. The austere López Ochoa had been placed in operational command of the forces in Asturias. He believed, rightly, that for Franco (below him in seniority) to have been placed in overall charge of the suppression of the rebellions of 1934 was improper, since its only basis was his friendship with Diego Hidalgo. Franco, Yagüe and many on the right were concerned that López Ochoa, as a Republican and a Freemason, would try to put down the rising with as little bloodshed as possible. Their suspicions were justified. Although he condoned the use of trucks of prisoners as a cover for his advances, López Ochoa did, in the main, conduct his operations with moderation. Yagüe sent an emissary to Madrid to complain to both Franco and Gil Robles about his humanitarian treatment of the miners. All three were infuriated by López Ochoa’s pact with the miners’ leader Belarmino Tomás, holding back the Legionarios and Regulares to permit an orderly and bloodless surrender.¹⁰¹ Franco’s mistrust of López Ochoa was matched by his confidence in Yagüe and his approval for the summary executions following the captures of Gijón and Oviedo.¹⁰²

On one occasion, Yagüe threatened López Ochoa with a pistol.¹⁰³ Some months later, López Ochoa spoke with Juan-Simeón Vidarte, the deputy secretary general of the PSOE, about his problems in restraining the murderous activities of the Foreign Legion:

One night, the legionarios took twenty-seven workers from the jail at Sama. They shot only three or four because, as the shots echoed in the mountains, they were afraid that guerrillas would appear. So, to avoid the danger, they acted even more cruelly, decapitating or hanging the prisoners. They cut off their feet, their hands, their ears, their tongues, even their genitals! A few days later, one of my most trusted officers told me that there were legionarios wearing wire necklaces from which dangled human ears from the victims of Carbayín. I immediately ordered their detention and execution. That was the basis of my conflict with Yagüe. I ordered him to take his men from the mining valleys and confine them in Oviedo. And I held him responsible for any deaths that might take place. To judge the rebels, there were the courts of justice. I also had to deal with the deeds of the Regulares of the tabor [battalion] from Ceuta: rapes, murders, looting. I ordered the execution of six Moors. It caused me problems. The Minister of War, all excited, demanded explanations: ‘How can you dare order anyone to be shot without a court martial?’ I answered: ‘I have subjected them to the same procedures to which they subjected their victims.’¹⁰⁴

The events of October 1934 escalated the hostility between the left and the forces of order, particularly the Civil Guard and parts of the army. The Asturian rebels knew that, to control the mining valleys, they had to overcome the Civil Guard. Accordingly, they assaulted various local barracks to neutralize them prior to an attack on the capital city of the province, Oviedo. These episodes were violent and protracted. The bloodiest took place in Sama de Langreo, seventeen miles east of Oviedo, and in Campomanes, fifty miles to the south. In Sama, the battle raged for thirty-six hours and thirty-eight Civil Guards were killed. In the battle at Campomanes, twelve Civil Guards were killed and seven wounded.¹⁰⁵ In total, the casualties of the Civil Guard in Asturias were eighty-six dead and seventy-seven wounded. The Assault Guards lost fifty-eight dead and fifty-four wounded. The army lost eighty-eight dead and 475 wounded. Other security forces lost twenty-four dead and thirty-three wounded. These figures may be compared with the nearly two thousand civilian dead, the large majority of them working class.¹⁰⁶

October 1934 saw only sporadic clashes elsewhere in Spain. However, there were casualties in Albacete, at both Villarobledo and Tarazona de la Mancha, during assaults on the town halls and other public buildings. In Villarobledo, four people were killed as order was restored by the Civil Guard, which suffered no casualties. In Tarazona, earlier in the summer, the Socialist Mayor had been removed from his post by the Civil Governor of Albacete, the Radical José Aparicio Albiñana. Now, his right-wing replacement was badly wounded in the struggle. Aparicio Albiñana responded to the situation by sending in reinforcements of the Civil Guard. One Civil Guard and several municipal policemen were killed during the defence of the town hall. The rest of the province was hardly affected by the revolutionary movement.¹⁰⁷

In the province of Zaragoza, the call for a general strike was ignored by the CNT and therefore a failure. However, there were bloody confrontations in Mallén, Ejea de los Caballeros, Tauste and Uncastillo in the area known as Las Cinco Villas, one of the parts of Aragon where social conflict was fiercest during the Republican years. It was a cereal-producing area of huge holdings, where a few landlords held many properties and the local day-labourers depended for survival on their access to common lands which had been enclosed by legal subterfuge in the nineteenth century. The bitterness of the election campaigns of November 1933 and the June harvest strike had contributed to the intensification of class hatred in the area and this was reflected in clashes on 5 and 6 October.¹⁰⁸ In Mallén, one Civil Guard was killed and another wounded and a villager shot dead. In Ejea, a Civil Guard and a villager were wounded. In Tauste, a revolutionary committee took over the village and the Civil Guard barracks was attacked. The revolutionaries were crushed by a regiment of the army which fired on them with machine-guns and an artillery piece. Six villagers were killed.¹⁰⁹

The most violent events in Cinco Villas took place at Uncastillo, an isolated village of barely three thousand inhabitants. In the early hours of the morning of Friday 5 October, emissaries arrived from the UGT in Zaragoza with instructions for the revolutionary general strike. The mild-mannered Socialist Mayor of Uncastillo, Antonio Plano Aznárez, told them that it would be madness. He was no revolutionary, but rather an unusually cultivated man adept at navigating the complex bureaucratic mechanisms of the agrarian reform. He had earned the hatred of the local landowners by dint of his success in introducing equitable job-sharing, in establishing reasonable working conditions, in recovering some common lands that had been taken from the village by legal subterfuges in the previous century and in improving the local school. Now, however, contrary to his advice, the urgings of the men from Zaragoza were enthusiastically taken up by the local labourers, many of whom were unemployed and whose families were starving.

At 6.00 a.m., when the strikers demanded the surrender of the village Civil Guard barracks, the commander, Sergeant Victorino Quiñones, refused. Plano himself spoke to Quiñones who said that his men were loyal to the Republic but would not surrender. Their conversation was cordial and Plano, albeit without much hope of success, undertook to try to dissuade his neighbours. In fact, as he left the barracks, the strikers surrounding the building opened fire and in the subsequent gunfight two of the seven Guards were killed, Sergeant Quiñones and another badly wounded and yet another blinded. The two remaining Guards fought on until the arrival of reinforcements. Antonio Plano came out of his house with a white flag and tried to talk to them but, when they opened fire, he fled into the surrounding countryside. In the course of the fighting, the home of one of the most powerful landowners, Antonio Mola, was assaulted when he refused to hand over arms to some of the strikers. In the subsequent skirmish, his niece was wounded and Mola shot dead one of the attackers who had burned down his garage and destroyed his car. The others were trying to burn him out when the Civil Guard arrived and drove them off. One of the many wounded strikers died on 8 October.¹¹⁰

In all of Spain, Civil Guard casualties in combating the insurrection of October 1934 were 111 killed and 182 wounded, the bulk of which were in Asturias.¹¹¹ The memory of this would influence the part played by the Civil Guard in the Civil War. More immediately, it had a profound effect on the way in which the revolutionaries were punished. Once the Asturian miners had surrendered, the subsequent repression was overseen by the forty-four-year-old Civil Guard Major Lisardo Doval Bravo, who had a record of bitter hostility to the left in Asturias. Indeed, he was widely considered in Civil Guard circles as an expert on left-wing subversion in Asturias. He had served in Oviedo from 1917 to 1922 and, having reached the rank of captain, he had commanded the Gijón garrison from 1926 until 1931. He earned notoriety for the ferocity with which he dealt with strikes and disorder. On 15 December 1930, during the failed general strike which was intended to bring down the dictatorship of General Berenguer, he had been involved in a bloody incident in Gijón. The strikers attempted to remove from the wall of a Jesuit church a plaque in honour of the Dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The Jesuits opened fire on the demonstrators, killing a worker and wounding another. In response, the mob set the church ablaze and the Civil Guard was called. Doval led a cavalry charge against the workers. Afterwards, he authorized the savage beating of strikers in his quest to identify the ringleaders. In April 1931, he planned to repel a workers’ attack on his barracks with banks of machine-guns. A man who knew him well, the conservative Republican Antonio Oliveros, editor of the Gijón newspaper El Noroeste, wrote: ‘In my opinion, Doval is a man of exceptional talents in the service of the State. Brave to the point of irresponsibility, his concept of duty leads him to the worst excesses and that accounts for his frequent abuse of suspects when trying to get proof of guilt.’¹¹²

Doval was subsequently involved in the abortive Sanjurjo coup in Seville in August 1932. Although suspended for his part therein, he had benefited from the amnesty for the conspirators passed on 24 April 1934. Until 19 September that year, when he was posted to Tetuán, he had been on secondment training the JAP militia. On 1 November, Doval was appointed ‘Special Delegate of the Ministry of War for Public Order in the Provinces of Asturias and León’. The appointment was made by Diego Hidalgo on the specific recommendation of Franco, who was fully aware of Doval’s methods and his reputation as a torturer. They had coincided as boys in Ferrol, in the Infantry Academy at Toledo and in Asturias in 1917.¹¹³ With an authorization signed by Hidalgo himself, Doval was given carte blanche to bypass any judicial, bureaucratic or military obstacles to his activities in Asturias. His fame as a crusader against the left had made him immensely popular among the upper and middle classes of the region.

As Franco knew he would, Doval carried out his task with a relish for brutality which provoked horror in the international press.¹¹⁴ It was not long before there were reports of his abuses. The Director General of Security, the deeply conservative José Valdivia Garci-Borrón, on 15 November, sent one of his subordinates, Inspector Adrover, to investigate. Adrover was violently expelled from Asturias by Doval. In view of this and of the stream of information about Doval’s excesses, Captain Valdivia pressed the new Minister of the Interior, the Radical Eloy Vaquero, for Doval’s removal. On 8 December, the special powers were revoked and five days later he was posted back to Tetuán.¹¹⁵

Meanwhile in Zaragoza, after the suppression of the uprising in Uncastillo, the fugitive Mayor Antonio Plano was captured and badly beaten by Civil Guards. Back in the village, 110 men were arrested and tortured by the Civil Guard before being taken to the provincial capital for trial.¹¹⁶ The achievements of Plano’s time as Mayor were overturned. Over the next year or so, the Civil Guard in Uncastillo took its revenge. Numerous detentions and beatings on the slightest pretext led to the new right-wing Mayor making an official complaint. Unsurprisingly, an official investigation found no grounds for action. The trial of 110 villagers accused of participation in the events of 5–6 October took place throughout February and March 1935. It was heavily weighted in favour of the Civil Guard and of the local cacique, Antonio Mola. The prosecution’s aim was to place the blame for everything firmly on the Mayor. To achieve this, the highly respected and conciliatory Plano was portrayed as a hate-fuelled traitor to the Republic. His defence lawyer pointed out that, if the Civil Guard could not stop the revolutionary events, it was absurd to have expected Plano to do so single-handed.

Nevertheless, the judgment of the court on 29 March 1935 was that Plano had been the ringleader and was guilty of military rebellion. Accordingly, he was condemned to death. Fourteen villagers, including the deputy Mayor, were sentenced to life imprisonment. Forty-eight villagers were given sentences ranging from twenty-five to twelve years. When the sentences were announced, confrontations between villagers and Civil Guards became increasingly bitter. After the victory of the left-liberal Popular Front coalition in the elections of February 1936, Antonio Plano and the others were amnestied and he was reinstated as Mayor and revived his reforms.¹¹⁷ The local caciques were furious and their revenge when the Civil War started would be terrible.

4

The Coming of War, 1934–1936

The hopes of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso had been fulfilled. While the military action in the north was still in train, there had been nationwide round-ups of workers’ leaders on a massive scale. On 11 October 1934, the CEDA daily, El Debate, reported that in Madrid alone there were already two thousand prisoners. Jails were soon full in areas where there was no revolutionary activity but where landowners had problems with their day-labourers. Workers’ clubs, the Casas del Pueblo, were closed down in towns and villages in every part of the country. The Socialist press was banned. On 8 October, in Alicante, a huge crowd demanded the liberation of the many prisoners being brought to the Castillo de Santa Bárbara. There were clashes with the police and José Alonso Mallol, the ex-Civil Governor of Seville and Asturias, and a number of other prominent Republicans were arrested. In the same session of 9 October in which Gil Robles had proposed the closing of parliament, the CEDA voted an increase in the forces of order and the re-establishment of the death penalty. At total of 1,134 Socialist town councils were simply removed and replaced by unelected right-wing nominees. There were many provincial capitals among them, including Albacete, Málaga and Oviedo.

The most scandalous case was that of Madrid, where the town council and its Republican Mayor, Pedro Rico, were suspended, falsely accused of failing to combat the strike. Control was briefly assumed by the head of the Agrarian Party, José Martínez de Velasco, as government delegate. He was replaced on 19 October by Salazar Alonso himself, who had been dropped from the new government because Lerroux felt that the presence of three CEDA ministers was already provocative enough. A week later, he took the title of alcalde (mayor).¹ In Málaga, the man chosen to lead the management committee that replaced the elected council was Benito Ortega Muñoz, a liberal member of the Radical Party. As a city councillor, he had successfully opposed the attempts of more left-wing Republicans to remove crosses from the municipal cemetery. That, together with his acceptance of the position of unelected Mayor in October 1934, would lead to his murder in 1936.²

The repression in Asturias after October 1934 was a major steppingstone from the terror of Morocco to the wartime terror exercised against the civilian population of the Republic. With Franco in overall command, the brutal Juan Yagüe leading the African forces and the sadistic Doval in charge of ‘public order’, Asturias saw the elaboration of the model that would be applied in southern Spain in the summer of 1936. The right applauded the actions of Franco against what was perceived as the ‘passions of the beast’, ‘the pillaging hordes’ and ‘the rabble unleashed’. As well as the 111 Civil Guards killed, thirty-three clergy, including seven seminary students, lost their lives.³ It was not surprising then that spine-chilling exaggerations of the revolutionaries’ crimes abounded. One of the leaders of Acción Española, Honorio Maura, described the miners as ‘putrefaction, scum, the dregs of humanity’, ‘repugnant jackals unfit to be Spaniards or even humans’. They were portrayed as murderers, thieves and rapists, with female accomplices described as ‘brazen women who incited their cruelties. Some were young and beautiful but their faces reflected moral perversion, a mixture of shamelessness and cruelty.’⁴

For the right, the use of the African Army against ‘inhuman’ leftists was entirely justified. Inevitably, within Spain and abroad, there was loud criticism of the use of Moorish troops in Asturias, the cradle of the Christian reconquest of Spain. José María Cid y Ruiz-Zorrilla, parliamentary deputy for the right-wing Agrarian Party for Zamora and Minister of Public Works, responded with a declaration of double-edged racism: ‘For those who committed so many acts of savagery, Moors were the least they deserved, because they deserved Moors and a lot else.’⁵ A book published by the Oviedo branch of Ángel Herrera Oria’s Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP) suggested in similar terms that the crimes committed against clerics by the revolutionaries were Moorish in character and deserved to be punished by exposure to Moorish atrocities.⁶ In the majority of Catholic writing about the events of October 1934, it was a commonplace that the revolution was an attack on Catholicism and that the suffering of religious personnel was analogous to the suffering of Christ at the hands of the Jews.⁷

In contrast to Asturias, the October rebellion in Catalonia was put down without savagery, thanks to the moderation and professionalism of Domingo Batet Mestres, the general commanding the Catalan Military Region. The Catalan government, the Generalitat, had found itself caught between extreme nationalists pushing for a separate Catalonia and a right-wing government in Madrid determined to curtail regional autonomy. The President, Lluís Companys, rashly declared independence on 6 October, in an attempt to forestall revolution. General Batet responded with patience and good sense to restore the authority of the central government and thereby prevented a potential bloodbath. Specifically, he bypassed Franco, who was advising the Minister of War Diego Hidalgo on the repression in Catalonia as well as Asturias. To Franco’s fury, Batet would deal only with Hidalgo and the Prime Minister, Lerroux. As the senior officer, he ignored Franco’s recommendation that he use the Foreign Legion to impose punishment on Catalonia like that inflicted by Yagüe on Asturias. Instead, he used a small number of troops to secure the surrender of the Generalitat with a minimum of casualties. Batet also prevented the bombardment of Barcelona by warships sent by Franco.⁸

When Batet explained in a radio broadcast how he had conducted operations, he did so in a regretful and conciliatory tone that was far from the vengeful spirit of the right. In parliament, José Antonio Primo de Rivera fulminated that Batet was ‘a general that didn’t believe in Spain’ and that his broadcast had ‘made us blush with shame’.⁹ Two years later, Franco would take his revenge for Batet’s moderation. In June 1936, Batet was to be given command of the VI Military Region, whose headquarters were in Burgos, one of the nerve centres of the uprising of 18 July. Faced with the virtually unanimous decision of his officers to join the rising, Batet would bravely refuse to join them. His commitment to his oath of loyalty to the Republic would guarantee his trial and execution. Franco maliciously intervened in the judicial process to ensure that Batet would be executed.¹⁰

Now, despite the triumph of the government, there were numerous civilians and army officers preparing to destroy the Republic. Onésimo Redondo was trying to build up an arsenal of small arms. He hired a sports ground on the banks of the Río Pisuerga where he would drill and train the local Falange militia. On Sundays, he led parades through Valladolid itself or other towns of the province. During October 1934, there had been bloody clashes in Valladolid between Falangists and picketing railway workers. In the aftermath, Onésimo Redondo distributed a pamphlet in which he advocated that Azaña, Largo Caballero, Prieto and Companys be hanged.¹¹

The activities of Onésimo Redondo and others on the extreme right showed that they were oblivious to the successes of a firmly right-wing government. Pushed by them or genuinely alarmed at what he perceived to be the moderate scale of the post-October repression, José Antonio Primo de Rivera committed the Falange to armed struggle to overthrow the democratic regime.¹² In early 1935, he had several meetings with Bartolomé Barba Hernández of the Unión Militar Española and an agreement was reached which also established links with the Carlists through Colonel Ricardo de Rada, who was training the militias of both groups. There was a surge in UME membership among junior officers after October 1934.¹³

In mid-June 1935, at a meeting of the Falange executive committee, the Junta Política, at the Parador in the Sierra de Gredos north of Madrid, the ‘official and binding decision was taken to proceed to holy civil war to rescue the Fatherland’. José Antonio reported on his contacts with the UME. He then put forward a plan for an uprising to take place near the Portuguese frontier at Fuentes de Oñoro in the province of Salamanca. An unnamed general, possibly Sanjurjo, would acquire 10,000 rifles in Portugal which would then be handed over to Falangist militants who would proceed to a ‘march on Madrid’.¹⁴ With the left already cowed by the repression and the most right-wing elements of the military in positions of power, there was no backing from senior military figures. Probably to José Antonio’s relief, the idea was dropped.¹⁵ The only practical consequence of the decision to move to armed struggle was the bid by José Antonio to get weapons from Barba Hernández’s UME.¹⁶

In fact, the successive defeats of both the June harvest strike and the October rising had left political and social tension at an all-time high. This was especially true in the south. The new Minister of Agriculture, the CEDA deputy for Badajoz, Manuel Giménez Fernández, hoped to alleviate the situation by implementing his social Catholic beliefs. Outraged landowners ensured that his aspirations came to naught. The rural population of Extremadura had suffered a long process of pauperization. While large landowners had been able to ride out crises of poor harvests and drought, the smaller owners had ended up in the hands of usurers (often the richer landowners). They had been forced to mortgage, and then lost, their farms. The problem was particularly acute for the yunteros or ploughmen who owned a yunta (yoke) of mules and rented land to farm.

A long-simmering hostility came to a head in November 1934. It had started in 1932, when the local landlords had systematically refused to grant leases to the yunteros, instead turning their land over to pasture for cattle. Their objective had been to force the yunteros to sell their oxen and tools and reduce them to the status of day-labourers. In desperation, in the autumn of 1932, the yunteros launched a series of invasions of the estates of the most recalcitrant landlords. With some ceremony, flags, bands and families, they would enter the estates at dawn and begin to plough the land. There was little violence and, when confronted by armed retainers or the Civil Guard, the yunteros would usually withdraw peacefully. Finally, on 1 November 1932, the Republican–Socialist coalition temporarily legalized the occupations for one year for 15,500 peasants in Cáceres and 18,500 in Badajoz, a measure renewed in 1933 for a further year. Big landowners in Badajoz, Cáceres and Salamanca, especially cattle-breeders, reacted with intense hostility to the ploughing of pasture.¹⁷

In late 1934, the issue of what to do about the 34,000 yunteros settled in November 1932 became urgent. The CEDA now had the opportunity to put into practice its much vaunted aim of combating revolution with social reform. As skilled farmers, with their own tools and animals, the yunteros of Extremadura were potential recruits for the social Catholic movement. They could easily have been converted into share-cropping smallholders.¹⁸ However, Giménez Fernández encountered the local right demanding their immediate eviction.¹⁹ Without attacking the agrarian problem at its root, the measures he proposed between November 1934 and March 1935 did attempt to mitigate some of its more appalling consequences. He met only the hostility of the extreme right and, in his own party, the CEDA, little solidarity and much vicious personal abuse. The bitter determination of landowners to bury his Law for the Protection of Yunteros and Small Farmers was revealed when he was visited on 16 October 1934 by a group of landowners from Cáceres accompanied by the three CEDA and four Radical deputies for the province and by Adolfo Rodríguez Jurado, CEDA deputy for Madrid and president of the landowners’ pressure group, the Agrupación Nacional de Propietarios de Fincas Rústicas. The ferocity of their objections was reflected in Giménez Fernández’s diary entry that more than one of them was a ‘fascist decided on sabotage’.²⁰

In January 1935, Giménez Fernández’s Law on Access to Ownership offered tenants the chance to buy land they had worked for twelve years. Mild as it was, the project provoked a parliamentary coalition of ultra-rightist deputies, led by the Carlist José María Lamamié de Clairac (Salamanca) and four CEDA deputies, Mateo Azpeitia Esteban (Zaragoza province), Cándido Casanueva y Gorjón (Salamanca), Luis Alarcón de la Lastra (Seville province) and, most ferociously of all, Rodríguez Jurado. They were virulent in their hostility to the idea of peasants being given access to property.²¹

Luis Alarcón de la Lastra was an artillery officer and Africanista who had left the army rather than take the oath of loyalty to the Republic. He was also an aristocrat, holding the titles of Conde de Gálvez and Marqués de Rende, and owned considerable property around Carmona, the area of Seville province with one of the greatest concentrations of large estates. He had become a CEDA deputy for Seville in 1933 but failed to gain a seat in the February 1936 elections. He would rejoin the army at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and serve in Yagüe’s African columns commanding the artillery that bombarded numerous towns. By 1938, he was commander of the artillery of the Moroccan Army Corps. At the end of March 1939, Franco rewarded him by naming him Civil Governor of Madrid and five months later Minister of Industry and Commerce.²²

Now, in session after session in the Cortes, Alarcón, Lamamié and the CEDA ultras stripped away the progressive features of Giménez Fernández’s law on rural leases and added clauses that permitted a spate of evictions. Gil Robles stated that only concessions made in a Christian spirit could prevent the revolution, yet stood back and watched his Minister being called a ‘white bolshevik’ and ‘a Marxist in disguise’. Moreover, Gil Robles placed Giménez Fernández’s fiercest enemies on the parliamentary committee examining the drafts of his laws. Lamamié de Clairac showed just how far his Catholic faith went when he declared that ‘if the Minister of Agriculture goes on quoting Papal Encyclicals in support of his projects, I can assure him that we will end up becoming Greek orthodox’.²³ When he next provoked a cabinet crisis, Gil Robles quietly dropped Giménez Fernández.

On 3 July 1935, Giménez Fernández’s successor, Nicasio Velayos Velayos, a conservative member of the Agrarian Party from Ávila, presented what came to be known as the ‘agrarian counter-reform’. It was so reactionary that it was denounced by José Antonio Primo de Rivera as well as by various Left Republicans and Radicals. Its most dramatic change was to drop the Inventory of Expropriable Property. This permitted landowners to avoid expropriation by putting their properties in other names. Henceforth, only those who wanted their property compulsorily purchased had to undergo expropriation. Moreover, compensation would be decided case by case by tribunals consisting of landowners, who would ensure that it would be at full market value.²⁴ In Extremadura, the local landowners began to evict the yunteros. In the village of Fregenal de la Sierra in Badajoz, one landowner alone evicted twenty families.²⁵

The consequent level of social tension in Badajoz was starkly revealed on 10 June 1935 when the twenty-six-year-old Socialist deputy for the province, Pedro Rubio Heredia, was shot dead in a restaurant by Regino Valencia, who worked for Salazar Alonso. It will be recalled that Regino Valencia had carried out the ‘inspection’ which led to the removal of José González Barrero as Mayor of Zafra. Rubio’s funeral was attended by thousands of members of the FNTT. At Valencia’s trial, on 27 June, he was defended by Manuel Baca Mateos, a CEDA deputy for Seville, who claimed that the death had come about as a result of a fight. The Socialist Juan-Simeón Vidarte, acting for the victim’s family, proved to the satisfaction of the court that the attack had been unprovoked. Valencia was sentenced to twelve years and a day in prison. He then appealed to the Supreme Court, where he was defended by Rafael Salazar Alonso in person. Vidarte wrote later: ‘knowing as I and the entire province did, that he [Salazar Alonso] was behind the murder, this hard-faced cheek shocked and disgusted me’. At the unsuccessful appeal at the end of December 1935, there was uproar when Vidarte said that Salazar Alonso should have been wearing not lawyer’s robes but convict’s overalls.²⁶

Despite being made Mayor of Madrid, Salazar Alonso’s political fortunes had plummeted since his removal from the Ministry of the Interior at the beginning of October 1934. Aware that the inclusion of three CEDA ministers in his cabinet would provoke fury on the left, Lerroux felt that he could not keep Salazar Alonso on. It was a gesture to secure President Alcalá Zamora’s approval for the new cabinet.²⁷ In the parliamentary debate on the revolutionary events in Asturias and Catalonia and their subsequent repression, the ex-Prime Minister Ricardo Samper declared that responsibility for what had happened lay with Salazar Alonso. Utterly mortified, Salazar Alonso got up and walked out of the Cortes.²⁸

Given that both in his private letters to Amparo and in his memoirs, Salazar Alonso boasted of provoking the workers’ uprising, his distress can have derived only from the fact that all had not turned out as well as he had hoped. The post-October repression brought a semblance of social peace, but violence was not far from the surface. The south was badly hit by drought in 1935, unemployment rose to more than 40 per cent in some places and beggars thronged the streets of the towns. The hungry agricultural labourers and the well-to-do rural middle and upper classes regarded each other with fear and resentment. The right-wing campaign for the elections of February 1936 prophesied that a left-wing victory would mean ‘uncontrolled looting and the common ownership of women’. Even without such apocalyptic provocation, natural disaster intensified social tension. After the prolonged drought of 1935, early 1936 brought fierce rainstorms that ruined the olive harvest and damaged wheat and barley crops. Across Andalusia and Extremadura, during the election campaign, the owners offered food and jobs to those who would vote for the right. To refuse could mean a beating or loss of work. In both urban and rural areas of unemployment, the local branches of Acción Popular began to open soup-kitchens and to distribute blankets to the poor. In many places, the right set out to buy votes.²⁹

In most southern provinces, the Casas del Pueblo were still closed sixteen months after the October revolution. In Granada, for example, the Republican newspapers mysteriously disappeared en route from Granada to outlying towns and villages, while the CEDA paper Ideal always got through. Ideal called on right-wingers to abandon their ‘suicidal inertia’, recommending a few beatings to keep the left quiet. In many provinces, caciques hired thugs who, often with the assistance of the Civil Guard, prevented the dissemination of left-wing propaganda. Republican posters were ripped down at gunpoint; Republican orators were turned away from villages by roadblocks or simply arrested. Rumours were spread that the peasants could not vote unless they had special documentation.³⁰

The atmosphere was captured with all its bitterness by Baldomero Díaz de Entresotos who was the land registrar in Puebla de Alcocer in the area in north-east Badajoz known as La Siberia Extremeña. Highly sympathetic to fascism, Díaz de Entresotos was affronted by the fact that a taxi firm in Castuera used second-hand cars to carry the local working class at reasonable prices. A landowner commented to him:

what we don’t need are elections and tolerance. It’s all well and good that we used to have such things when it was all kept between ourselves, just to decide whether liberals or conservatives or so-and-so or so-and-so would be in charge. But now, when it’s about law and order or revolution, we don’t need all this drivel about parliament and democracy. The answer here is to force this rabble to submit, by whatever means, if necessary cutting off their heads before they cut off ours.

One of Díaz de Entresotos’s close friends was a landowner, Alfonso Muñoz Lozano de Sosa, who was also an infantry lieutenant serving with the Assault Guards. On election day, 16 February, he came to Puebla de Alcocer with a machine-pistol. The village was also visited on that day by Ricardo Zabalza, the secretary general of the landworkers’ union, the FNTT, who was a Socialist candidate for Badajoz. Zabalza was eating alone at the local inn, with his head down, deeply aware of the hostility of his fellow middle-class customers. Díaz de Entresotos had lunch with Lieutenant Muñoz and wrote later of his visceral hatred of Zabalza (on the basis of this one sighting and without ever actually meeting him). Zabalza, a schoolmaster, was invariably neatly and cleanly dressed. However, such was Díaz de Entresotos’s paranoid loathing of the left that he saw only an abomination:

Zabalza looked just like what he was. Unkempt and repulsive, as befitted his damaging activities. He went around the villages advising riot and plunder. It was rumoured that, during the peasants’ strike of 1934, he had put a bomb on a railway line. I had no idea if this fact [sic] was true but, looking at this grim and dirty man, it seemed perfectly likely. How many times that day did I gaze on Muñoz’s machine-pistol, dwelling on the pleasure it would give me to open fire on that disgusting flesh!

When the election results began to come in, Muñoz commented ominously, ‘This has to be settled with bullets.’³¹ Their desire to see Zabalza dead would be satisfied four years later when he was executed by firing squad in a Francoist prison.³²

The narrowness of the left-wing electoral victory reflected the polarization of Spanish society. The working masses, especially in the countryside, were in no mood for compromise after the so-called ‘two black years’ of vindictive right-wing government from 1933 to 1935. Both the rural and urban working classes demanded reparation for the post-October repression and the swift implementation of the reform programme elaborated by the leaders of the Popular Front electoral coalition. Considerable alarm ran through the middle classes when crowds gathered at prisons in Asturias and elsewhere calling for the release of those imprisoned after October 1934 and when groups of labourers presented themselves for work at the large estates. In many rural towns, there were attacks on the casinos (landowners’ clubs). In others, churches were burned in reprisal for their priests having justified the repression and using their pulpits for right-wing propaganda during the electoral campaign.

The new Prime Minister Manuel Azaña was horrified by the violence of popular agitation and rapidly embarked on a programme of conciliation. On 20 February 1936, his first cabinet meeting approved the return of the elected town councils and decreed an amnesty for those imprisoned after October 1934. The following day, Azaña made a radio broadcast to the nation in which he undertook to ‘heal the wounds caused in recent times’ and promised that his government would not seek revenge for the injustices of the last two years. He was confident that the popular ferment was a temporary phenomenon, fruit of the euphoria that accompanied the electoral victory. With a view to calming the agitation, on 29 February his cabinet issued a decree obliging employers to readmit workers sacked because of their ideology or for participating in strikes after 1 January 1934 and to compensate them with their pay for a minimum of thirty-nine days or a maximum of six months. The immediate reaction of a huge group of employers’ organizations was to issue a statement that this constituted a ‘true economic catastrophe’. In the short term, it appeared that the right in general expected from Azaña, as the dramatist Ramón del Valle Inclán put it, ‘what the sick expect from cod-liver oil’.³³

However, Azaña faced debilitating problems. Despite his broadcast, the rural agitation continued. He was deeply depressed by news of events in Yecla in the north of Murcia, where seven churches, six houses and the property registry had been set alight.³⁴ His ability to control the situation was severely undermined by the refusal of Francisco Largo Caballero to permit Socialist participation in the cabinet. Distrustful of Republican moderation, he had been prepared to support the electoral coalition only to secure political amnesty for the victims of the repression. Embittered by right-wing obstruction of reform between 1931 and 1933, Largo Caballero believed that only an exclusively Socialist cabinet could transform Spanish society. His overconfident view was that the Left Republicans should pursue their own programme and effectively exhaust themselves in carrying out the bourgeois stage of the revolution. They would then either make way for a Socialist cabinet or be engulfed by a fascist uprising which would itself trigger a successful revolution.

On 3 April 1936, Largo Caballero was interviewed by the American journalist Louis Fischer and he told him complacently: ‘The reactionaries can come back into office only through a coup d’état.’³⁵ He was just mouthing revolutionary platitudes, but unfortunately the counterfeit nature of his revolutionary rhetoric was not perceived as such among the middle and upper classes. While their fears of revolution were intensified by right-wing propaganda, Largo Caballero’s policy prevented both revolution and strong government. It eventually ensured instead that an ineffectual Republican government would be in power while the military conspiracy was prepared.

The tension was such that Azaña felt obliged to calm things down. He wrote to his brother-in-law: ‘every night the left feared a military coup aimed at preventing communism. The right feared that the Soviet was on the horizon. I’ve never seen such panic or such a stupid situation. The Socialists have organized an intelligence system based on concierges, cleaners and chauffeurs, and they get all the below-stairs gossip.’ With the stock market falling and the streets deserted, on 3 April, Azaña made the first of only two major speeches to the new Cortes. In it, he mentioned the agitations and disturbances that had taken place in the countryside, stating that his cabinet had to deal with what he called ‘a national ulcer’.

Referring to the excesses of the first six weeks of his government, he asked: ‘can the masses, provoked and ill treated, those forced to starve for two years, those coming out of prison, be asked to behave, as we try to do, without resentment for the injustices which we remember only too well? We had to expect, and the Government did expect … that the first explosion of popular anger would see excesses that would undermine political authority and damage the Government.’ While condemning violent abuses, he also denounced those who sought to make political capital from them. He recognized that the tendency of Spaniards to resolve problems by violence engendered ‘a presumption of catastrophe’. ‘Many people are going around depressed,’ he declared, ‘imagining that Spain is going to wake up having been turned into a Soviet.’ While understanding how apolitical individuals might harbour such fears, he found it intolerable that the politically aware should foment panic in such a way as to create the atmosphere necessary for a coup d’état.

Azaña put the disorder into its proper context and went on to declare that his government aimed to remedy the disequilibrium at the heart of Spanish society. He acknowledged that this could mean harming the interests of those who benefited from ‘this horrendous imbalance’, adding that ‘we come to break up any abusive concentration of wealth wherever it may be’. While he did not expect an entire social class to commit suicide, he called on the wealthy to make sacrifices rather than face the consequences of the desperation provoked by social injustice. He ended prophetically, more so than he knew at the time, declaring that this was the last chance for the Republic because, if the redistribution of wealth he was advocating was opposed as the reforms of 1931–3 had been, then there would be no legal way forward. Astonishingly, the reaction to this ultimatum was widespread relief from the Communists to the extreme right. The stock market began to rise again and Azaña was regarded as a national hero.³⁶

Although lacking Socialist participation, Azaña’s new government was determined to proceed rapidly with meaningful agrarian change. The task was rendered all the more difficult because of a rise in unemployment by the end of February 1936 to 843,872, or 17 per cent of the working population.³⁷ The new Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes, announced his commitment to rapid agrarian reform. The resurgent landworkers’ union intended to make him keep his word. After the harsh rural repression of the previous two years, in 1936 the FNTT began to expand at a vertiginous rate. Its militant leadership was in no mood to tolerate delays from the government or obstruction from the big landowners.

Immediately after the elections, Ricardo Zabalza had written to Ruiz-Funes urging him to expedite the return of land to the leaseholders evicted in 1935 and to re-establish the mixed juries (arbitration committees) and the decree of obligatory cultivation. In a letter to the Minister of Labour, Enrique Ramos, Zabalza requested the introduction of a scheme for placing unemployed workers with landowners. A third letter, to Amós Salvador, Minister of the Interior, called for the disarming of the caciques. Seriously alarmed by the quantity of weapons held by landowners and their retainers, and by the support that they enjoyed from the Civil Guard, the FNTT soon called upon members to form militias to prevent a repetition of the persecution of 1934 and 1935. Before the Cortes opened in mid-March, peasant demonstrations all over Spain supported Zabalza’s requests.³⁸ The FNTT’s demands were not revolutionary but they still constituted a major challenge to the balance of rural economic power. Moreover, the events of the previous two years had exacerbated rural class hatred to a point which made the peaceful introduction of the desired social legislation highly unlikely. The economic situation ensured that the reforms, which were essential to alleviate the misery of the landless peasants, could not be absorbed by the owners without a significant redistribution of rural wealth. Constant rain between December 1935 and March 1936 had seriously damaged the grain harvest and reduced the profit margins of growers large and small. This natural disaster simply reinforced the reluctance of owners and workers alike to be conciliatory.

Anticipating the FNTT’s demands, CEDA propaganda had predicted that left-wing electoral success would be the prelude to the most hair-raising social disasters. Thus defeat on 16 February implied that landed and religious interests could not be defended legally and only violence would suffice. The Chief of the General Staff, Francisco Franco, believed that a left-wing election victory was the first stage of a Comintern plan to take over Spain. He had been convinced by the bulletins that he received from the Geneva Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale, bulletins which in turn drew on inflated reports from Mola’s crony, the corrupt policeman Mauricio Carlavilla. From the early hours of 17 February, Gil Robles had been working with Franco to have martial law declared to overthrow the results. They managed to get several garrisons to do so, but their efforts foundered when the Director General of the Civil Guard, Sebastián Pozas Perea, remained loyal to the Republic.

On 8 March, Franco and other senior generals met in Madrid to put in train the most extreme violence of all, a military coup. They agreed to make General Emilio Mola overall director of the conspiracy and Colonel Valentín Galarza Morante his liaison chief.³⁹ This was hardly surprising. In May 1935, when Gil Robles had become Minister of War, he had appointed Franco Chief of the General Staff and they had quietly established Mola in a secluded office in the Ministry of War to prepare operational plans for the use of the colonial army against the left on mainland Spain.⁴⁰ Mola was then made general in command of Melilla and shortly afterwards military commander of the entire Moroccan protectorate. Franco ensured that reliable reactionaries were posted to the command of many units in Morocco and in Spain itself. He boasted later that these officers were key pawns in the coup.⁴¹

In the meantime, Andalusia and Extremadura were facing bitter conflict because the landowners had flouted agreements on wages and working conditions and evicted the yunteros. After the elections, watched by seething rightists, joyful peasants paraded through the towns flying their union banners and red flags. The rural middle classes were appalled by such signs of popular jubilation and by attacks on casinos. Labour legislation began to be reinforced and, in the south, workers were ‘placed’ on uncultivated estates. Those imprisoned after the 1934 harvest strike and the October events were released and returned to their towns and villages, to the chagrin of the local Civil Guards who had arrested them. In Andalusian towns, demonstrators attacked right-wing centres and clubs.⁴²

The announcement of Azaña’s decrees of 20 February 1936 had been greeted cautiously, but their implementation provoked howls of outrage. The right-wing mayors imposed in 1934 by Salazar Alonso were unceremoniously expelled from the town councils of Badajoz and the deposed Socialists reinstated. Moreover, Salazar Alonso himself, the erstwhile champion of the Badajoz latifundistas, was a ruined man. In 1934, he had been heavily involved in the gambling fraud which eventually destroyed the Radical Party. He was one of several prominent Radicals who took bribes to help legalize the use of a rigged roulette wheel in Spanish casinos. The scandal that ensued in 1935 was called ‘Estraperlo’, from the names of the machine’s inventors, Strauss and Perlowitz. Salazar Alonso had been given a gold watch and 100,000 pesetas (about £35,000 in present-day values), and both his under-secretary at the Minister of the Interior, Eduardo Benzo, and the Director General of Security, José Valdivia, were paid 50,000 pesetas. Despite authorizing the use of the roulette wheel, Salazar Alonso, regarding the bribe as insufficient, arranged for a police raid when it was inaugurated at the San Sebastián casino. To get their revenge, the inventors leaked documents on the case to President Alcalá Zamora. In October 1935 in the subsequent parliamentary debate, Salazar Alonso was exonerated by 140 votes to 137, thanks to the support of the CEDA. When this was announced, José Antonio Primo de Rivera shouted, ‘¡Viva el Estraperlo!’⁴³ Although he was still Mayor of Madrid, Salazar Alonso’s political career was over. During the February 1936 election campaign, his speeches in Badajoz were interrupted by shouted witticisms about roulette wheels and gold watches. He was defeated and immediately claimed that the results had been falsified. He told Lerroux that he had serious financial problems (despite receiving his full ministerial salary, as did all ex-ministers). He became president of the right-wing newspaper Informaciones in April 1936.⁴⁴ In the early days of the Civil War, he went into hiding, was eventually arrested, summarily tried by a people’s tribunal and shot.

Feeling vulnerable, the richest local landowners abandoned their mansions. Throughout the entire south, Republican agrarian legislation was being revived. Mixed juries returned and obligatory cultivation of fallow land was reimposed. A variant of the legislation on municipal boundaries was activated, thereby preventing the local landowners from bringing in cheap outside labour to break union action. In many villages, the restored town councils decreed that municipal employees should be given back-pay to the date when they had been deposed. Workers were assigned to estates whose owners were expected to pay them. Needless to say, the possessing classes were outraged by the perceived injustice of such measures and by the impertinence of those that they expected to be subservient and respectful. Tension was exacerbated in some villages by mayors who prohibited traditional religious processions.⁴⁵

Landowners’ resentment at the ending of peasant servility often took the form of violent assaults on union leaders. In the province of Cáceres, between February and June, nine men died at the hands either of local Falangists or of the Civil Guard.⁴⁶ Right-wing violence was directed at those who were required to be submissive but were now assertively demonstrating their determination not to be cheated out of reform. In Salamanca, historically social conflict was endemic because the predominant activity of cattle-breeding required little manpower. The consequent unemployment was increased further because much arable land was also given over to hunting grounds. Although there were areas of smallholdings, to the west and south of the province, especially around Ledesma and Ciudad Rodrigo, land tenure was dominated by huge estates, the latifundios. The prospect in the spring of 1936 of a renewed push for a division of the great estates saw desperate efforts by the big landowners to block the reform. They quickly turned to violence and made contact with the military conspirators. Such was the case of Gonzalo de Aguilera, who simply shot his labourers.⁴⁷

Of the six victorious right-wing candidates in the February elections in Salamanca, Gil Robles, Cándido Casanueva, Ernesto Castaño and José Cimas Leal of the CEDA, and the Carlists José María Lamamié de Clairac and Ramón Olleros, three were implicated in soliciting the votes of the province’s wheat-growers by offering to buy up their surplus stocks. After scrutinizing the results, the committee on electoral validity, the Comisión de Actas, disqualified three, Castaño, Lamamié de Clairac and Olleros, and gave their parliamentary seats to the candidates with the next highest number of votes. Right-wing seats in Granada were also disqualified because of blatant electoral falsification. Claiming to be the target of persecution, the CEDA’s deputies withdrew en masse from the Cortes – although its value as a pulpit of propaganda saw them return quickly. The President of the Cortes, the conservative Republican Diego Martínez Barrio, believed that the right-wing reaction to the loss of the fraudulently gained seats heralded a turn to violence. Castaño, a prominent landowner, went to Valladolid, the headquarters of the VII Military Region to which Salamanca belonged, to advocate a military rising against the Republic.⁴⁸ Gil Robles was in touch directly with General Mola while his faithful deputy, Cándido Casanueva, acted as the CEDA liaison with Generals Goded and Fanjul.⁴⁹ Gonzalo de Aguilera may have been an extreme case, yet he was anything but an unrepresentative figure of the Salamanca landowning class.

Another local landowner, Diego Martín Veloz, was equally active in seeking military aid. He had tried hard to persuade the officers of the Salamanca garrison to join Sanjurjo’s coup in August 1932. The swarthy, pistol-toting Martín Veloz had been born in Cuba in 1875. He served as a soldier in the Philippines and Cuba and had been frequently arrested for violent indiscipline. After being invalided out of the army, he had returned penniless to the area to the east of Salamanca known as La Armuña. In the provincial capital, he had earned a living as a street vendor of items ranging from contraband watches to sheep. He had been a bouncer in a casino until he killed a client in a fight. His luck turned when he discovered an aptitude for gambling. Having made a fortune in Monte Carlo, he bought land and buildings in Salamanca. Investing in gambling and prostitution, he became the key figure in the brothels, casinos and gambling dens of Salamanca, Valladolid, Zamora and Palencia. He invested his profits in property and made a fortune, becoming one of the richest men in Salamanca. He owned a large area of the provincial capital and came to be known as ‘The boss [el amo] of Salamanca’. His antics ranged from the infantile, such as once breaking up a Corpus Christi procession by unleashing a string of donkeys into its midst, to the bloody, killing several men in gunfights. On one occasion, finding an army officer destitute in the street, he entered a gambling den and at gunpoint took up a collection for the unfortunate wretch. On another, refused entry to a club, he set off fireworks around the door.⁵⁰

First in Santander and later in Salamanca, he acquired a reputation as a thug. He was tried for murder in Santander and was absolved only after numerous senior military figures spoke on his behalf. This imposing, not to say gargantuan, figure was famous for his voracious appetites, both gastronomic and sexual. For a time fabulously rich, and wildly open-handed, Martín Veloz had cultivated friends in the military, inviting them to orgiastic parties at his estate in La Armuña, and paying off their debts. He was as notorious for the violence of his temper as he was for his generosity to his friends. Among his cronies were Generals Primo de Rivera, Queipo de Llano and Goded and Gonzalo de Aguilera. When the government began to close down his casinos, he built a political base, buying the newspaper La Voz de Castilla and creating the Farmers and Cattle-Breeders League, a party with widespread support throughout the province. His political factotum was Cándido Casanueva, the notary who was his link to Gil Robles. It was claimed that Martín Veloz bought votes for Casanueva, just as it was later alleged that Casanueva bought votes for Gil Robles. Martín Veloz’s own power base was Peñaranda de Bracamonte, east of Salamanca.⁵¹

As a powerful cacique, he had secured a parliamentary seat in 1919 and had been involved in numerous violent incidents in the Cortes. He threatened other deputies, including Indalecio Prieto, and once drew a gun on a rival from Salamanca. After the dictator Primo de Rivera had closed down casinos and gambling dens, Martín Veloz suffered financial difficulties and faced bankruptcy by the time the Second Republic was established. Nevertheless, he remained in contact with his military friends and during the Sanjurjada vainly tried to get the Salamanca garrison to rise. In the spring of 1936, he and Cándido Casanueva collaborated with the local military in the preparation of the uprising. In particular, Martín Veloz went to great lengths to persuade his friend Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to take part. He invited him to his estate at the end of May 1936 and harangued him on the need for a coup. Moreover, when the war began, Martín Veloz, like other landowners of Salamanca, would put enormous energy into recruiting peasants for the rebel forces.⁵²

In the province of Toledo, violence was kept under control by the Civil Governor, who ordered the Civil Guard not to shoot unless under attack. He also ordered the confiscation of all firearms and 10,000 shotguns were collected. This well-intentioned measure was severely damaging to the peasantry, who relied on their shotguns for hunting. The guns that were kept in Civil Guard posts were either destroyed or distributed to rightists when the military coup took place.⁵³ On 9 March, in Escalona in the north-west of Toledo, local Falangists shot four Socialist landworkers and wounded twelve more. On 5 March, in Quintanar de la Orden in the south of the province, thugs in the pay of the local cacique assaulted the house of the Socialist Mayor and pistol-whipped his wife and two small sons. They then tried to kill his elder daughter by throwing her down a well. In neither case were the perpetrators arrested.⁵⁴

Under pressure from the FNTT, on 3 March Ruiz-Funes issued a decree permitting the yunteros of Extremadura to reoccupy land that they had worked before being evicted. Its legal implementation would be complex and clearly take some time. But the yunteros were desperate and spring planting was a matter of urgency. Just before the new Cortes met, the FNTT called for a massive mobilization of the peasantry on Sunday 15 March to remind the Popular Front deputies of their electoral promises. The demands of the demonstrators were the immediate hand-over of land with credit for peasant collectives, the return of common lands, work for the unemployed, strict observation of agreed wages, working conditions and work-sharing, release of the remaining prisoners and the disarming of extreme rightists.⁵⁵

The call was obeyed in much of Castile and the north and throughout the south. Banners bearing these demands and red flags headed processions of labourers giving clenched-fist salutes and chanting the battle cry of the Asturian miners, ‘Unite, Proletarian Brothers!’ Díaz de Entresotos, who witnessed this and other demonstrations in Mérida, revealed his bitterness at the turning of the tables: ‘From the pavement, with desolation in their eyes and infinite anguish in their hearts, respectable folk watched the demonstrators pass. I was eaten up with a desperate suppressed rage. My head was bursting with murderous thoughts and I would have given my life to be able to kill that scum whose very presence constituted a humiliation and a challenge.’⁵⁶

The 15 March demonstration was a success in numerous villages of Cáceres, León, Zamora and Salamanca and even in Navarre, Valladolid and Burgos. In Salamanca, there were processions in many small towns. In most places, despite the anger of the local right, there were no major incidents. However, in the small village of Mancera de Abajo near Martín Veloz’s power base, Peñaranda de Bracamonte, the demonstration was attacked by right-wing thugs. A young Communist and a child were shot dead and, in the subsequent tumult, a local landowner was stabbed to death. The burial of the Communist in the provincial capital saw a massive turn-out of the left, led by the Mayor of Salamanca, Casto Prieto Carrasco of Azaña’s party, Izquierda Republicana. The outrage of the local right was inflamed further when, fearful of further disturbances, the new Civil Governor, Antonio Cepas López, also of Izquierda Republicana, prohibited religious processions scheduled for Holy Week. Over the following months, there were a number of clashes between Falangists and leftists during which innocent bystanders were hurt.⁵⁷

A major escalation took place at dawn on 25 March 1936. In torrential rain, more than 60,000 landless peasants occupied 1,934 mainly cattle-rearing estates in Badajoz and proceeded to carry out symbolic acts of ploughing. The initiative had been meticulously organized by the FNTT whose officials had arranged which families were to go to each estate. It was the union’s intention that the estates be cultivated as collectives.⁵⁸ In order to forestall violence, the Ministry of Agriculture quickly legalized the occupations and settled 50,000 families. In Cádiz, Toledo, Salamanca and the sierra of Córdoba, labourers also invaded estates, although on a smaller scale. Toledo saw the highest proportion of estates expropriated, and was third, behind Badajoz and Cáceres, in the proportion of peasants settled. This was reflected in the vengeance wreaked on the peasantry when the Francoist columns arrived early in the Civil War. When the Ministry declared the occupied estates ‘of public utility’, the landowner was guaranteed compensation in relation to potential rent. Nevertheless, this spontaneous imposition of agrarian reform infuriated the local owners, who sent in their armed retainers to reoccupy the estates. When the mixed juries sent workers to estates left fallow, they refused to pay their wages. It was a complex situation, with many of the smaller farmers facing real difficulties in paying unwanted workers. Inevitably, crop thefts increased. When the harvest was imminent, the owners refused to negotiate wage and working conditions with local branches of the FNTT. Those who refused to pay the workers were first fined and, if they still refused, in a few cases arrested.⁵⁹

Faced with incontrovertible evidence that the agrarian reforms of the Republic would be combated with violence, the FNTT echoed Zabalza’s call for the creation of people’s militias, complaining that:

the government policy of disarming all citizens is a joke. In fact, this means handing us over helpless to our enemies. For the last two years, the Civil Guard has been disarming us while leaving untouched the arsenals of the fascist elements, and when we speak of fascists, we mean the CEDA as well as the Falange. We know only too well that it is the Cedistas and other landowners who pay the Falangist squads. Thus, we face, armed to the teeth, all the landowners, their lackeys, their paid thugs, the shotgun-toting clergy, and backing them up, the Civil Guard, the bourgeois judiciary and government agronomists.⁶⁰

One of the factors that did most to increase social tension during the spring of 1936 was anti-clericalism. Religious hatred was most intense in the towns and villages where the clergy had been vocal in support of the CEDA and of the post-1934 repression. Revenge sometimes took the form of the newly reinstated mayors preventing Catholic burials, baptisms and weddings or charging for bells to be rung. In Rute in southern Córdoba, the Socialist Mayor fined the parish priest for carrying the viaticum through the streets without having applied for a licence to do so. In several places, religious statues and monumental crucifixes were destroyed. This was especially true in Andalusia and the Levante where there was a rash of church burnings and the tombs of clergy were profaned. In several villages in La Mancha, religious processions were interrupted and the faithful harassed by young workers as they left Mass. In Santa Cruz de Mudela, in the south of Ciudad Real, in mid-March, an attempt to set fire to the parish church was prevented by the Civil Guard. Over the next two months, the Mayor closed two Catholic schools, prohibited Catholic burials, prevented children from wearing their first Holy Communion outfits in the village and even hung religious medals from the collars of dogs that he loosed among people leaving Sunday Mass. In Cúllar de Baza in Granada, in June, the Mayor allegedly broke into the church at night and dug up the body of the recently deceased parish priest in order to bury him in the civil cemetery. These were extreme cases. In most places, the Holy Week processions went ahead without incident and manifestations of anti-clericalism diminished after the end of May. Nevertheless, the religious clashes that did take place were an important factor in the political polarization and the incitement of violence. There were instances of trigger-happy clergy (curas trabucaires). In Cehegín (Murcia), when his residence was surrounded, the parish priest opened fire on demonstrators, killing one of them. In Piñeres (Santander), a priest shot at villagers and wounded one. The parish priest of Freijo (Orense) possessed a Winchester rifle, a Mauser pistol and a Remington revolver.⁶¹

Confrontation intensified greatly when work conditions were negotiated in April. The landowners were angered that the Popular Front town councils intended to impose substantial fines on those who flouted the agreements reached by the mixed juries.⁶² The agreements were largely ignored in Badajoz, Córdoba, Ciudad Real, Málaga and Toledo. Throughout Badajoz, the owners refused to hire workers and used machinery to bring in the harvest by night. In Almendralejo in the south of the province, a prosperous area, more than two thousand men had no work because the local owners refused to employ FNTT members. Moreover, the unity of the landlords was maintained by threats that any of their number who negotiated with the union would be killed. Nevertheless, the Civil Governor ordered the arrest of four of the richest owners. The tension in the town would explode into bloody violence when the Civil War broke out.⁶³ In Zafra, the reinstated Mayor, José González Barrero, chaired a mixed committee of landowners and workers which arranged for the placing of unemployed labourers in the area. When the Francoist column entered Zafra on 7 August, four of the five worker representatives on the committee were murdered.⁶⁴

During the cereal harvest in Jaén, the owners brought in non-unionized labour from Galicia and elsewhere. This scab labour was protected by the Civil Guard, which also colluded as the owners armed their own estate guards. When the owners in Badajoz bypassed local unions by importing cheap labour from Portugal or using machinery, migrant labourers were assaulted and machines sabotaged. With the harvest on the verge of ruin, the local authorities arranged for it to be brought in by non-union labour under police protection. Seeing this as an affront to their property rights, the owners refused the wages demanded and ordered their armed guards to expel the workers from the fields. In some cases, crops were destroyed by the owners to thwart the workers. The Association of Rural Estate-Owners claimed that landowners were faced with annihilation or suicide. In Carrión de los Condes to the north of Palencia, the president of the Casa del Pueblo was hanged by local landowners. In many parts of Córdoba, the workers’ organizations tried to impose the strict rota of workers to be placed on estates. In Palma del Río, there was serious conflict when one of the principal landowners, Félix Moreno Ardanuy, refused to pay the workers ‘placed’ on his estates. He was imprisoned and ordered to pay the 121,500 pesetas owed. When he refused, the town council confiscated 2,450 of his pigs, cows and horses. His son and other local Falangists then rioted in the town. When the military rebels took the town, his revenge would be ferocious. In Palenciana, in the south of Córdoba, a guard interrupted a meeting in the Casa del Pueblo and attempted to arrest the speaker. A scuffle ensued and he was stabbed to death. His comrades opened fire, killing one worker and wounding three more.⁶⁵

In the province of Seville, the Civil Governor, José María Varela Rendueles, noticed that landowners called for the Civil Guard to expel those who had invaded estates only after they had brought in the harvest. Thus, when the Civil Guard had done its work, the owners had had their crops collected free of charge.⁶⁶ Conflict between the forcibly imposed workers and the landowners in Seville was particularly acute. The smaller towns of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants were dominated by the FNTT, while the larger ones were in the hands of the CNT. In one of the latter, Lebrija, on 23 April, anarchist labourers, protesting that they had not been paid enough, were confronted by the local Civil Guard commander, Lieutenant Francisco López Cepero. Stones were thrown, the commander fell and he was beaten to death by the mob. This was the prelude to the burning down of two churches, three convents, the headquarters of Acción Popular and the houses of several landowners.⁶⁷ The conflict in the countryside was utterly disorganized and lacked any co-ordinated revolutionary plan for the seizure of power. That, however, did not diminish the alarm of the rural middle and upper classes.

Violence was not confined to rural areas. Indeed, it is unlikely that the situation in the countryside would alone have secured sufficient support for a military coup. The plotters needed to mobilize urban popular opinion and that required the provocation of violence in the streets, especially those of Madrid. The capital, where diplomats and newspaper correspondents were stationed, would be used to convince international opinion that all of Spain was a victim of uncontrolled violence. Provocation was to be undertaken by the Falange, whose leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera had no inhibitions about violence against the left. Irked by the ebullience of Madrid workers celebrating the Popular Front victory in Madrid, he commented to his friend Dionisio Ridruejo: ‘With a couple of good marksmen, a demonstration like that can be dissolved in ten minutes.’ José Antonio resented the fact that it was taken for granted that the Falange would accept ‘the role of guerrillas or the light cavalry of other craftier parties’. As he said to Ridruejo, ‘Let’s hope that they finally wise up. We are ready to take the risks, no? Well, let them, at least, provide the money.’⁶⁸

In fact, the undermining of government authority by street violence went hand in hand with the military conspiracy for which it provided the justification. Having gained only 0.4 per cent of the vote in the February elections (about 45,000 votes), it was obvious that the Falange had little popular support. José Antonio was already committed to a violent seizure of power and, as his comments to Ridruejo showed, he was ready to contribute a Falangist strategy of tension to the wider conspiracy.⁶⁹ Within a month of the elections, there were armed attacks in Madrid on prominent left-wing and liberal politicians. Numerous incidents were provoked in which Falangists and left-wingers fought in the streets of the capital. On 11 March, a Falangist law student, Juan José Olano, was shot dead. The following day, in reprisal, a three-man Falangist hit squad, almost certainly acting with José Antonio’s knowledge, tried to kill the Socialist law professor Luis Jiménez Asúa. Jiménez Asúa survived but his police bodyguard was killed. On the day of his funeral, the left reacted by setting fire to two churches and the offices of the Renovación Española newspaper La Nación, which belonged to one of the Falange’s backers, Manuel Delgado Barreto. The consequence was that, on 14 March, the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, ordered José Antonio and other members of the senior leadership of FE de las JONS to be arrested for illegal possession of weapons.⁷⁰

Azaña was shocked that Largo Caballero had expressed no concern about Jiménez Asúa – a stark indication of Socialist divisions. Nevertheless, in reprisal for José Antonio’s arrest, on 16 March, Largo Caballero’s house was fired upon by a Falangist terror squad. This prompted a cunning display of hypocrisy from Gil Robles. On 17 March, he went to see the Minister of the Interior, Amós Salvador, to protest about the disorder, citing the attack on Largo Caballero’s home as a symptom. The CEDA also tabled a debate on the subject in the Cortes, blaming the government and the left.⁷¹ Knowing that the army was not yet ready to seize power and aware that full-scale obstruction of Azaña’s government could only lead to an all-Socialist government, Gil Robles devoted his energies to building up the atmosphere of fear. The objective was that the middle classes, terrified by the spectre of disorder, would eventually turn to the army as their only saviour.

José Antonio was detained on a technicality because his involvement in the attempt on Jiménez Asúa’s life could not be proven. However, there is little doubt that he approved of it. The erstwhile leader of the Falange action squads, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, visited him in his Madrid prison, the Cárcel Modelo, to discuss plans to get the three would-be assassins out of Spain. Ansaldo got them to France, but they were arrested and extradited back to Spain. On 8 April, they were tried for the murder of the bodyguard and the attempted murder of Jiménez Asúa. Their leader, Alberto Ortega, was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment and his two accomplices to six years each. At the highest level of the Falange – which meant the imprisoned leadership – a decision was taken to respond with a revenge attack on the judge, Manuel Pedregal, who was shot dead on 13 April as a deadly warning to judges in any future trials of Falangists.⁷² On 12 April, José Antonio called off a plan elaborated by the Falange action squads to murder Largo Caballero at the hospital where his wife was terminally ill. Since he visited her without his escort, it was regarded as simple for Falangists disguised as medical staff to kill him in the deserted corridor outside her room. José Antonio explained to a friend that his caution derived from the belief that the Falange would be destroyed by the consequent left-wing backlash. He was also uneasy about the public impact of the murder of a sixty-six-year-old man visiting his dying wife.⁷³

Two days later, there took place an incident which played into the hands of the Falange and of the Unión Militar Española. In Madrid’s broad Avenida de la Castellana, there was a military parade to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A loud explosion and the sound of machine-gun fire near the presidential platform alarmed the assembled dignitaries and their police escorts. In fact, the noises came from powerful fireworks placed by Falangists. Then, as the Civil Guard marched past, jeers and chants were heard. These included ‘Down with the Civil Guard!’ and ‘¡UHP!’ (Uníos, Hermanos Proletarios – Unite, Proletarian Brothers), recalling the brutal Asturian repression. Shots were fired and, in the mêlée, a Civil Guard lieutenant in plain clothes, Anastasio de los Reyes López, was fatally wounded by unknown assailants. Subsequently, the left-wing press claimed that he had been shot as a result of a ‘fascist provocation’. Whoever the culprit was, the right was successful in squeezing the greatest advantage from the incident.⁷⁴

The government tried to have Reyes buried discreetly but the head of his unit, Lieutenant Colonel Florentino González Vallés, turned the funeral into a massive anti-Republican demonstration. Fernando Primo de Rivera, José Antonio’s brother, met representatives of the UME to discuss the role of Falangists and was told that they were expected to carry guns. Flouting government orders to the contrary, González Vallés, himself a Falangist sympathizer, ordered, in an anti-Republican gesture, that the funeral procession should follow the same route as the 14 April military parade. Despite this illegality, Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo led the cortège. As it came down the Castellana, several shots were fired at the procession. It is not known if the culprits were leftists or right-wing agents provocateurs. When the Falangists tried to turn the procession into an attack on the Cortes, there was a clash with Assault Guards in which Andrés Sáenz de Heredia, a cousin of José Antonio, was killed. Thereafter, the commander of the Guards, Lieutenant José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada, received death threats.⁷⁵ The UME saw the events of 16 April as a boost for recruitment. Prieto commented: ‘Yesterday, it was shown that fascism has taken hold really strongly in our military organizations.’⁷⁶

Disorder was certainly on the increase during the spring of 1936, but its scale was greatly inflated by the right-wing press and in the parliamentary speeches of Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo, which placed the blame exclusively on the left. However, only two groups stood to benefit, even in theory, from the proliferation of indiscriminate lawlessness – the extreme left of the anarchist movement and the ‘catastrophist’ right who backed military conspiracy. The Popular Front tactic imposed by Moscow meant that Communists had no plans to undermine public order and seize power. In the Socialist Party, both El Socialista, the newspaper of the Prieto wing, and Claridad, the mouthpiece of Largo Caballero, warned their readers to ignore rightist provocation.⁷⁷ None of the Popular Front parties had any need to provoke violence in order to take power. The creation of an atmosphere of turmoil and disorder could, on the other hand, justify the use of force to establish a dictatorship of the right. It is difficult to distinguish between provocation and reprisal in street fights between Communists or Socialists and Falangists or members of Gil Robles’s youth movement, the JAP. However, it is noteworthy that José Antonio’s close friend Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval boasted that, in the violence following Reyes’s funeral procession, ‘the mortuary welcomed, for every one of ours, ten of theirs’.⁷⁸

Significantly, wealthy conservatives who had previously financed Gil Robles to defend their interests were now switching funds to the Falange and the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres. In March, ABC had opened a subscription for a hitherto unknown Federación Española de Trabajadores, behind which could be discerned Ramón Sales, the self-styled fascist agent provocateur who had become famous in the political gangsterism of 1919–23. By late April the fund had reached 350,000 pesetas, donated by aristocrats, landowners, industrialists and many anonymous ‘fascists’ and Falangists. Since the money was never used for trade union purposes and a substantial number of those arrested for acts of violence were members of the Sindicatos Libres, the left had no doubts that this was a fund to finance agents provocateurs. Professional gunmen were being hired by the right and their operations were designed to provoke the widest repercussions.⁷⁹

The attacks on Jiménez de Asúa and Largo Caballero were clearly among those aimed at provoking reprisals. The most successful operation of this kind was carried out in Granada on 9–10 March. A squad of Falangist gunmen fired on a group of workers and their families, wounding many women and children. The local CNT, the UGT, the Partido Comunista de España (PCE) and the Partido Sindicalista united in calling a general strike in the course of which there was considerable violence. Two churches and the offices of both the Falange and Acción Popular were set on fire, and the ACNP newspaper, Ideal, was destroyed. Throughout the day, Falangist snipers fired from rooftops on left-wing demonstrators and also on firemen to stop them controlling the fires. In Granada and elsewhere, incidents were often caused by strangers who disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. When the military rebels took power at the beginning of the Civil War, some of the most radical anarchists and Communists in Granada revealed themselves as Falangist agents provocateurs. Throughout Spain, leftist municipal authorities worked hard to maintain order. They were not helped by the fact that conservative members of the judiciary sympathized with Falangist activities. Judges who did take a strong line against rightist gunmen were, in their turn, selected as targets.⁸⁰

On 15 April, when Azaña presented his moderate programme of government to the Cortes, Calvo Sotelo declared that any cabinet that relied on PSOE votes was effectively under Russian dominance. Less stridently, Gil Robles produced a masterpiece of hypocrisy. He patronizingly recognized Azaña’s good intentions and denied that the conflictive situation in the countryside owed anything to CEDA policies. Forgetting the humiliation to which Giménez Fernández had been subjected, he claimed that his party was committed to the elimination of social injustice and to the equitable redistribution of wealth. He went on to endorse Calvo Sotelo’s claim that the government was impotent before a wave of disorder caused entirely by the left. Blaming the violence of agents provocateurs on governmental weakness, he said that his followers were already taking up arms in self-defence. He declared that he would soon have to tell them to expect nothing from legality and to join parties that offered them ‘the lure of revenge’. In apocalyptic terms, he issued a dire warning: ‘Half the nation will not resign itself to die. If it cannot defend itself by one path, it will defend itself by another … When civil war breaks out in Spain, let it be known that the weapons have been loaded by the negligence of a government which has not been able to fulfil its duty towards groups which have stayed within the strictest legality.’ He ended with a resounding battle cry: ‘It is better to know how to die in the street than to be trampled on as a coward.’

Gil Robles was effectively threatening war if the Popular Front did not drop its commitment to thorough reform of the social and economic structure. Because parliamentary speeches could not be censored, Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo larded theirs with exaggerations of disorder. They knew that, reported in full in the press, their predictions of doom would generate an atmosphere of terror among sectors of the middle and upper classes, who would look to the army for salvation. Gil Robles’s remarks in the Cortes of 15 April and his assiduous attendance at the funerals of Falangist gunmen projected the impression that political violence was the exclusive responsibility of the left. Behind his rhetoric of concern for public order, the CEDA was organizing motorized machine-gun assault groups and, as the spring wore on, ever more rightist youths arrested for acts of violence were members of the Juventud de Acción Popular.⁸¹

Gil Robles admitted in his memoirs that the principal function of the CEDA was to make propaganda in parliament and to act as a shield for more violent groups. He quoted approvingly a comment that the perpetrators of right-wing terrorism in the spring of 1936 were ‘of the highest nobility and spiritual quality’. In a newpaper interview, he expressed approval of those who left the CEDA ‘to take the path of violence, believing it to be the way to solve national problems’.⁸² Almost immediately after the elections, the majority of one of key sections of the CEDA, the Derecha Regional Valenciana, had rejected the moderation of their leader, Luis Lucia, in favour of direct action. Under the leadership of the party’s secretary general, José María Costa Serrano, the DRV was collecting arms and organizing a clandestine militia. Links were established with the local Falange, Renovación Española and the Unión Militar Española. The DRV’s youth section drilled and held shooting practice. Throughout the spring, at least 15,000 members of JAP joined the Falange. Nothing was done to dissuade them and no efforts were made to recruit replacements. Many of those remaining with the CEDA were in active contact with groups committed to violence. And, when the war broke out, thousands of CEDA members joined the Carlists.⁸³

As confrontation in the countryside increased, fears of military conspiracy abounded. On 1 May, the moderate Socialist Indalecio Prieto laid out the problem in a speech at Cuenca, where there was a by-election. He went to Cuenca ‘worried about an imminent fascist uprising about which I had been making warnings to no avail other than to bring upon myself abuse and contempt’. It was thought prudent for him to have an armed escort provided by a group of the Socialist Youth known as the Motorizada. On the eve of his arrival, there had been fighting between local leftists and rightists and ashes were still blowing about from the burning of the casino, the local landowners’ club.⁸⁴ He underlined the uncertainty provoked by disorder and the attendant dangers of a military coup. In a passionately patriotic speech, he laid out a plan for social justice based on well-planned economic growth to be implemented by a strong government. He denounced right-wing provocation and left-wing agitation – ‘what no nation can sustain is the attrition of its government and of its own economic vitality while being forced to live with unease, nerves and anxiety’.⁸⁵

An opportunity to strengthen the government arose in early May with the impeachment of Alcalá Zamora and his replacement as President by Manuel Azaña. It was widely hoped that a combination of a strong President and an equally strong Prime Minister could defend the Republic against military subversion. However, when Azaña asked him to form a government, Prieto made the tactical error of twice consulting the PSOE parliamentary group of which Largo Caballero was president. At meetings on 11 and 12 May, Largo Caballero and his followers opposed him and he capitulated quietly. Despite their opposition, Prieto could have formed a government with the support of the Republican parties and about a third of PSOE deputies. However, he was not prepared to split the PSOE.⁸⁶

By blocking the plan for a Prieto-led government, Largo Caballero had effectively destroyed the last chance of avoiding civil war. A powerful argument in favour of a coup used within the officer corps was that Largo Caballero, once in power, would dissolve the army. Prieto realized, as his rival apparently did not, that attempts at full-scale revolutionary social change would drive the middle classes to fascism and armed counter-revolution. Instead, Prieto, ever the pragmatist, was convinced that the answer was to restore order and accelerate reform. He had plans to remove unreliable military commanders, to reduce the power of the Civil Guard, to appoint a trusted officer as Director General of Security and to disarm the fascist terror squads.⁸⁷ Largo Caballero prevented this and ensured that the strongest party of the Popular Front could not participate actively in using the apparatus of the state to defend the Republic. Azaña turned to his fellow Left Republican Santiago Casares Quiroga, who lacked the stature to deal with the problems he was called upon to solve. Prieto wrote later, ‘My role was thus reduced to constantly issuing warnings about the danger, and trying to ensure that, within our camp, naive and blind obstinacy, typical of a lamentable revolutionary infantilism, did not go on creating an atmosphere favourable to fascism because that was all that absurd acts of disorder brought about.’⁸⁸

On 19 May, Casares Quiroga, Azaña’s successor as Prime Minister, presented his programme to the Cortes. Gil Robles responded with a virtuoso display of ambiguity. As on 15 April, an apparent appeal for moderation was in reality a justification of violence. Without mentioning names, he dwelled gloatingly on Azaña’s failure to get a broadly based Popular Front government under Prieto, stating that the Republican government was ‘reduced to the sad role, in relation to those groups [pointing to the Socialist benches], of being today the servant, tomorrow the victim’. Regarding Casares Quiroga’s declared hostility to fascism, he pointed out that disorder made fascist solutions relevant. While criticizing fascism in theory because of its foreign origins and its elements of state socialism, he justified the violence of those denounced as fascists, saying that there was no other way for them to defend their interests. He had nothing to say about how the present political disorder had been incited by the repressive and vindictive policies carried out by Radical–CEDA cabinets. Declaring that democracy was dead, he praised the trend to fascism as growing out of ‘a sense of patriotism, perhaps badly focused but profoundly hurt to see that the rhythm of politics is dictated not by great national interests but by you [turning to the Socialist deputies] with orders from Moscow’. It was an endorsement of the flight of the JAP masses into the Falange. Ending with a provocative challenge to Largo Caballero’s followers, he made a sarcastic reference to ‘you ferocious revolutionaries who do nothing but talk’.⁸⁹

Gil Robles’s denunciations of the breakdown of public order were seen on the left as a hypocritical attempt to discredit the government and justify a military coup. Those speeches also fed on the Falangist strategy of tension, directed from prison by José Antonio Primo de Rivera. After his arrest, his party went underground and the bloody cycle of provocation and reprisal was intensified dramatically. On 7 May, ripples of the Reyes funeral three weeks earlier could be seen in the murder, by a joint UME–Falangist squad, of Captain Carlos Faraudo, the Republican engineers officer who drilled the Socialist militias. The following day, there was a failed attempt on the life of the conservative Republican ex-Minister José María Álvarez Mendizábal. José Antonio told his friend Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval: ‘I don’t want any more Falangists in jail. I will use all my authority as Jefe Nacional [national leader] of the Falange to expel anyone who comes here without a good reason, such as having killed Azaña or Largo Caballero.’ The consequent disorder was the basis of the appeals of Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo for military intervention.⁹⁰

Within the government apparatus, the man most concerned by the links between military conspiracy and Falangist violence was the Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol. Since being appointed in February, Alonso Mallol had worked tirelessly to combat Falangist terrorism and to monitor the activities of hostile officers. One of his innovations was to place telephone taps on the houses and the barracks where the coup was being hatched. José Antonio’s correspondence with the conspirators was also intercepted. By May, Alonso Mallol was able to give President Azaña and the Prime Minister Casares Quiroga a list of more than five hundred conspirators whom he believed should be arrested immediately. Fearful of the possible reactions, Azaña and Casares failed to act and the coup went ahead.⁹¹

In fact, as José Antonio boasted to the monarchist Antonio Goicoechea on 20 May 1936, being in prison was no impediment to directing the Falange’s role in the preparations for civil war. From his cell, he liaised with Carlists and with Renovación Española.⁹² He had already met General Mola on 8 March to offer the services of the Falange. Also in early March, José Antonio’s friend Ramón Serrano Suñer had put him in touch with other senior military figures including Yagüe, Mola’s key to the participation of the Moroccan Army.⁹³ The role of the Falange would be to carry out acts of terrorism to provoke left-wing reprisals, the two things combining to justify right-wing jeremiads about disorder. From prison, José Antonio issued on 20 May the first of three clandestine leaflets with the title No Importa. Boletín de los Días de Persecución (No Matter. Bulletin of the Days of Persecution). Urging his followers to intensify their attacks on leftists, he wrote on 6 June, ‘Tomorrow, when brighter days dawn, the Falange will receive the laurels earned by being first in this holy crusade of violence.’ In the same issue, there was a call for the assassinations of the judge who had sent him to prison and of the Socialist parliamentary deputy for Cáceres, Luis Romero Solano, for his part in the arrest of José Luna, the Falange leader in Extremadura.⁹⁴

The principal orchestrator of the coup, General Mola, had been posted to Navarre in March. The government hoped thereby to neutralize him but, confident of the most influential officers in Morocco and of his police network, he still held the key strands of the rebellion. It was assumed that Mola would have few dealings with the deeply reactionary local Carlists. In fact, within three days of his arrival in Pamplona on 14 March, local officers introduced him to B. Félix Maíz, a thirty-six-year-old local businessman who was to be his liaison with the Carlists. Discovering a shared enthusiasm for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they hit it off immediately. To Maíz’s delight, Mola, who was still receiving paranoiac anti-Communist reports from the White Russians in Paris, told him that ‘we confront an enemy that is not Spanish’. Maíz, who took The Protocols as genuine, believed that a war to the death was imminent between Christians and the stooges of the Jews ‘the great beast – tightly knit hordes emerging from the swamp of evil’. His view of the political situation was even more disturbing: ‘all over Spain, there are gangs of creatures injected with rabies who are seeking Christian flesh in which to sink their teeth’.⁹⁵

The fantasies of Maíz were merely an extreme version of a carefully prepared fiction intended to justify the military coup and the subsequent repression. ‘Secret documents’ were concocted to ‘prove’ that a Soviet take-over in Spain was imminent. A kind of Spanish equivalent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, these ‘documents’ were intended to generate fear and indignation, not least because they contained blacklists of right-wingers intended to be murdered as soon as the alleged Communist take-over was completed.⁹⁶ Such inventions presented a military coup as a patriotic act to save Spain from the assault masterminded by the dark hand of Judaism. With such a view of the enemy, it was but a short step to Mola’s first secret instructions to his fellow conspirators, issued in April. He wrote, ‘It has to be borne in mind that the action has to be violent in the extreme so as to subdue as soon as possible the enemy which is strong and well organized. It goes without saying that all leaders of political parties, societies and trade unions not part of the movement will be imprisoned and exemplary punishment carried out on them in order to choke off any rebellion or strikes.’⁹⁷ Mola, as a hardened Africanista, placed a high value on the value of terror in paralysing opponents. However, it was not just a question of gaining power but also the first step to ‘purifying’ Spain of the noxious elements of the left.

José Antonio was transferred to the prison in Alicante on the night of 5 June, and he immediately sent an emissary to Pamplona to reassure Mola that he remained committed to the coup and to offer four thousand Falangists as a shock force for the first days of the uprising.⁹⁸ In a further testimony to the links between the military and street violence, the monarchist politician Antonio Goicoechea wrote on 14 June to the Italian government on behalf of the Falange, Renovación Española and the Comunión Tradicionalista to request funding for terrorist squads. Commenting that the military coup was well advanced, he wrote of ‘the unavoidable need to organize the atmosphere of violence’.⁹⁹

Despite mounting rural violence, the FNTT managed to maintain the discipline of its members, even after a bloody incident at the end of May near the town of Yeste in the south of Albacete. The fraudulent enclosure of communal lands by local caciques had condemned the peasants to desperate poverty. Many had lost their livelihood as a result of the construction of a reservoir near by in 1931, which took fertile land out of production and prevented local woodmen transporting timber via the Rivers Tus and Segura. In the spring of 1936, the efforts of the newly restored Republican–Socialist town council to place unemployed workers on estates had met with furious resistance. On 28 May, a group of workers and their families from the hamlet of La Graya cut down trees for charcoal and then began to plough on an estate called La Umbría. Once common land, La Umbría now belonged to the most powerful cacique, Antonio Alfaro. On his instructions, twenty-two Civil Guards arrived.

Most of the villagers fled but six remained. After beating them, the Civil Guards took them to La Graya, where they were further mistreated. At dawn the next day, a crowd of labourers from surrounding hamlets followed as the prisoners were being taken to the nearby town of Yeste to ensure that they would not be shot ‘trying to escape’ (the ley de fugas). The crowd swelled and, as they reached Yeste, it was agreed that the prisoners should be released into the custody of the Mayor. When the crowd pressed forward to greet the prisoners, a Civil Guard panicked and fired a shot. In the ensuing mêlée, a Civil Guard was killed. His companions opened fire on the crowd and then pursued fleeing peasants into the surrounding hills, killing seventeen people, including the deputy Mayor, and wounding many more. Fearing that the Civil Guards would return and burn La Graya, many villagers took refuge in nearby hamlets. Fifty FNTT members were arrested, including the Socialist Mayor of Yeste.¹⁰⁰ Yeste and other clashes could have led to bloodshed on a large scale. However, the FNTT leadership restrained the rank and file, urging them to put their faith in the government’s accelerated agrarian reform. Faced with the new determination of the Popular Front, the large landowners began to look to the military for their protection.

A similar scale of belligerence from the landowners was revealed in Badajoz when the Civil Governor took the extraordinary step on 20 May of closing the provincial headquarters of the Association of Rural Estate-Owners which was co-ordinating efforts to sabotage the harvest and to mount a lock-out of unionized labour.¹⁰¹ It was to no avail; many landowners preferred to let the cereal harvest rot in order to impose discipline on the workers. To their fury, the Civil Governor decreed that the workers should bring in the harvest and keep part of the crop in lieu of wages.¹⁰² In the province of Cáceres, a systematic policy of provocation was carried out by well-armed Falangists. Among the rightists arrested there for public order offences in the spring and summer of 1936 were several members of the JAP.¹⁰³

It was a short step from the exasperation of starving labourers to disorder. The scale of hunger in rural Spain in 1936 is almost unimaginable today. On 21 April, the Civil Governor of Madrid was informed that the only available protein for peasants in the province was lizards and that children were fainting from malnutrition in their schools. The Civil Governor of Ciudad Real reported that in the south of the province peasants were living off boiled weeds. In Quintanar de la Orden in Toledo, men and women were found lying in the streets having collapsed from inanition. In many villages, and not only in the south, hunger provoked mass invasions of estates to steal crops or livestock. Attacks on food shops were not uncommon. In Fuente de Cantos in Badajoz, in May 1936, a meeting to discuss local unemployment was addressed by the local Socialist leader. Appalled by the evident distress of the men, women and children of his audience, he called on them to follow him to where there was food for all. He led them to one of the estates of the biggest owner in the area, the Conde de la Corte. The estate was largely given over to the pasture of pigs and sheep. The starving townspeople fell upon the pigs and, after killing them with sticks and knives, returned to Fuente de Cantos, bloodstained and staggering under the weight of the slaughtered pigs. Further to the north of Badajoz, in Quintana de la Serena, day-labourers entered an estate, stealing sheep to feed their families.¹⁰⁴

In the very different conditions of conservative Old Castile, it was more difficult to stir up disorder. Segovia was a predominantly agrarian province where the organized working class was relatively tiny, its exiguous strength resting mainly on railway workers.¹⁰⁵ In the provincial capital, a clash on 8 March was provoked when members of the JAP and a few Falangists attacked workers enjoying a Sunday dance. A workers’ protest march was fired upon by JAP snipers. This provoked a left-wing attack on the headquarters of Acción Popular. Despite the JAP’s involvement in gun-related incidents, most clashes did not go beyond verbal insults. In the town of Cuéllar to the north of the province, building labourers who refused to join the union were prevented from working by UGT members. In the village of Otero de los Herreros, in the south, workers returning from a demonstration made a local Falangist kiss their red flag. The ‘victim’ later led the local repression and organized the shaving of the heads of left-wing girls.

Although there were some minor anti-clerical incidents, with fire-crackers placed at the door of the convent of the Carmelite Fathers, Holy Week celebrations in the first week of April went ahead in most churches in the provincial capital. Segovia’s right-wing newspaper, El Adelantado, even commented on the respect shown by non-Catholics to those taking part in the various ceremonies and religious services. In June, however, the ecclesiastical authorities suspended the traditional Corpus Christi procession, instead holding a solemn celebration within the Cathedral. The reason was simply outrage that the left should have the effrontery to put up its posters and organize demonstrations with flags flying and slogans shouted. Despite the relative calm, the tensions were later used to justify the repression.¹⁰⁶ In fact, as early as April, the military plotters in Segovia had called upon the local Falangist leader, Dionisio Ridruejo, to have his men, few as they were, ready to take part in the coup.¹⁰⁷

At a national level, on 16 June, in the Cortes, Gil Robles screwed up the tension with a denunciation of the government in the guise of a call for ‘the speedy adoption of measures to end the state of subversion in which Spain is living’. Superficially couched as an appeal for moderation, his speech was essentially a declaration to middle-class opinion that nothing could be expected from the democratic regime. Knowing that the army’s preparations were well advanced, he read out a catalogue of disorder alleged to have taken place since the elections. He placed the entire responsibility on the government for his list of 269 murders, beatings, robberies, church-burnings and strikes (statistics to which, on 15 July, he would add another sixty-one dead). Some of it was true, some of it invention and all dispensed in bloodcurdling terms. He gave no indication that the right had played any part in what he described or that many of the dead were workers killed by the Civil Guard or other forces of order. In contrast, he protested about the imprisonment of Falangist and JAP terrorists and the imposition of fines on recalcitrant employers. As long as the government relied on the votes of Socialists and Communists, thundered Gil Robles, there could never be one minute’s peace in Spain. He ended by declaring that ‘today, we are witnessing the funeral of democracy’.¹⁰⁸

There has been considerable debate about the accuracy of Gil Robles’s figures. The most exhaustive recent study, by Eduardo González Calleja, reached the figure of 351 dead. Significantly, the highest figures – sixty-seven for Madrid, and Seville with thirty-four – were reached in cities where Falangist gunmen were at their most active. The next highest are Santander with twenty-three and Málaga with twenty. Other southern provinces produced substantial numbers, such as Granada with fourteen, Murcia with thirteen, Córdoba with eleven, Cáceres with ten and Huelva with eight. Other highly conflictive provinces produced surprisingly low figures, such as Jaén with one, Badajoz and Cádiz each with four and Almería with three. However, focus on numbers of fatal victims, important though it is, misses the wider issue of the daily violence of grinding poverty and social abuse. Another study, by Rafael Cruz, claims that 43 per cent of all deaths were caused by the forces of order. They were the result of overreaction in repressing pacific demonstrations, the victims of which were almost exclusively of the left. Those same forces of order were to support the military uprising despite the fact that the highest number of deaths was in March and that thereafter the level of fatalities gradually diminished.¹⁰⁹

Disorder was frequent but sporadic and hardly universal. A picture of total anarchy was being painted in the press and the speeches of Gil Robles and others by simply grouping together as ‘social disorders’ all brawls, fights and strikes, however insignificant. Incidents were magnified and statistics inflated. In Madrid, the American Ambassador Claude Bowers was told tales of uncontrolled mobs butchering monarchists and feeding their bodies to pigs.¹¹⁰ Fear of violence and disorder was generated by what was read about other places. Some of those who expressed their disgust at the breakdown of law and order also spoke of their relief that, thankfully, it had not reached their own towns.¹¹¹

The statistics are meaningless without their social context. For instance, in Torrevieja (Alicante) in early March, it was reported that ‘extremists’ had burned down a hermitage, a hotel, the club of the Radical Party and the municipal registry. What happened was that shots were fired from the hotel balcony on a peaceful demonstration complete with brass band that was passing and one of the demonstrators was wounded. This provoked the attack on the hotel and the other crimes. Among those arrested and accused of responsibility for the shooting were the owner of the hotel, the parish priest and two of his brothers and a teacher from the town’s Catholic school.¹¹²

As late as 1 July, Mola complained that ‘there have been efforts to provoke violence between right and left that we could use as an excuse to proceed but so far – despite the help of some political elements – it has not fully materialized because there are still idiots who believe in coexistence with representatives of the masses who dominate the Popular Front’.¹¹³ The perfect conditions for a coup may not have been achieved to Mola’s satisfaction, but the violence of right-wing gunmen, incendiary speeches by Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles and the gloss put on events by the rightist media had gone a long way towards pushing the middle classes into the arms of the military conspirators.

Gil Robles’s public pronouncements should be seen in the light of his clandestine support of the military conspiracy, which he described as ‘a legitimate resistance movement against the anarchy which threatened the very life of the country’. At the end of May, he advised the American journalist Edward Knoblaugh to take his holidays in early July so as to be back in time to cover the military coup.¹¹⁴ On 27 February 1942, he sent from Lisbon a signed declaration to the Francoist authorities about his role in the coup, stating that he had ‘co-operated with advice, with moral stimulus, with secret orders for collaboration, and even with economic assistance, taken in appreciable quantities from the party’s electoral funds’. This last was a reference to 500,000 pesetas which he gave to Mola, confident that its original donors would have approved of his action. Part of the money was used to pay the Falangists and Carlist Requetés who joined the military rebels in Pamplona on 19 July.¹¹⁵ Gil Robles also tried to help Mola in negotiating the terms of the Carlist role in the uprising. In early July, he accompanied the owner of ABC, Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, to Saint Jean de Luz, in a vain attempt to persuade the Carlist leader, Manuel Fal Conde, to drop his demand for the rebels to carry the monarchist flag and adopt the monarchist anthem.¹¹⁶

Throughout June and July, Gil Robles instructed provincial CEDA leaders that, on the outbreak of the rising, all party members were to join the military immediately, party organizations were to offer full collaboration, youth sections were to join the army and not form separate militias, party members were not to take part in reprisals against the left, power struggles with other rightist groups were to be avoided, and the maximum financial aid was to be given to the authorities. Only the instruction about reprisals was ignored, and CEDA members were prominent in the repression, especially in Granada and the cities of Old Castile. The first section of the CEDA to join the rising was the Derecha Regional Valenciana. Its moderate Christian Democrat leader Luis Lucia had been marginalized by the secretary general, José María Costa Serrano. When General Mola was finalizing civilian participation in June, Costa Serrano offered 1,250 men for the early moments of the rising and promised 10,000 after five hours and 50,000 after five days. Alongside local sections of the Falange, Renovación Española and the Carlists, the radical wing of the DRV was placed by Costa Serrano under the orders of the military junta. At the beginning of the war, Lucia issued a statement condemning the coup. As a right-wing politician, he went into hiding from the anarchists only to be caught and imprisoned in Barcelona. Nevertheless, in 1939 he was tried and sentenced to death by the Francoists for the alleged offence of military rebellion. His sentence was later commuted to thirty years in prison.¹¹⁷

Military intervention came to seem an ever more urgent necessity in the eyes of landowners as a result of the Socialist campaign for the recovery of common lands which enjoyed the support of the Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes.¹¹⁸ The rhetoric of the landowners, and that of their press, generated an apocalyptic sense of utter catastrophe. On 10 July, ABC lamented that 80 per cent of the land would be in the hands of municipalities and that there would be towns where private property would disappear.¹¹⁹ The younger members of landowning families joined the Falange. Anticipating the coup, many owners moved into their homes in the larger towns of the province, or to Madrid or Seville, or, in the case of the very rich, even to Biarritz or Paris, where they contributed finance and expectantly awaited news of the military plot. Behind them they left gangs of Falangists who attacked local Socialists with the protection of the Civil Guard. In Don Benito, the Civil Guard helped local Falangists when they firebombed the Casa del Pueblo.¹²⁰ The FNTT frequently complained that the victims of the Civil Guard were always workers and denounced the stockpiling of arms by the landowners. It was claimed that, in Puebla de Almoradiel in the south of Toledo, the local right had two hundred shotguns, three hundred pistols and more than fifty rifles.¹²¹ When workers tried to collect unpaid wages from the landowners, they were often confronted by the Civil Guard. Those who had made such demands were invariably among the victims of the right-wing columns that captured their towns in the early months of the Civil War.¹²²

The hatred between the landless peasants and the owners and their administrators was part of daily life in the south. One major landowner from Seville, Rafael de Medina, wrote of ‘the incomprehension of the haves and the envy of the have-nots’, of those who walked in rope sandals (alpargatas) and those who travelled by car. As he and his father drove past labourers walking along a country road, they noted their ‘grimfaced look, of such profound contempt and such outright bitterness, that it had the force of a thunderbolt’. Medina always carried a pistol at meetings to discuss working conditions with union leaders.¹²³

The hatred was explained by the Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Many of the really big owners, dukes, counts and even very rich non-aristocratic owners, lived in Paris or Biarritz or Madrid. They visited their lands occasionally to hunt and to show them off to their friends. While there, their contempt for the labourers was manifest. They, like the less grand landowners who lived on their estates, would often laughingly take advantage of the wives, sisters and daughters of their labourers. Their administrators ran the estates, hiring and firing arbitrarily, ignoring the law. After the abuses of 1933–5, the return of left-wing town councils after the February 1936 elections saw a reversal of fortunes. The prevailing spirit was one not of conciliation but of outright hatred. As Varela Rendueles put it, the landless labourers wanted to follow the example of their ‘betters’: ‘all they wanted to do was to repeat the barbaric lessons that they had been taught’.¹²⁴

A key element of the hatred between the rural poor and the rich, Varela Rendueles noted, was the way in which proletarian women were used and abused. Baldomero Díaz de Entresotos expressed the patronizing and exploitative attitude of the rural middle classes when he wrote indignantly of those who tried to break free of the prostitution into which they had been forced:

You lived off the romantic adventures of the señorito … Those señoritos, once your friends, used to live for you just as you lived for them. You think they stole municipal funds? I don’t think so but if they did the people’s money returned to the people as represented by pretty proletarian women. The señoritos were unable to stay away. At siesta time, they came to your whorehouses, sat in their shirtsleeves in the shade of trailing vines and left you banknotes on the beer crates. They livened up the tedium of your nights with wine and music. They were real democrats. Is there any greater democracy than to sleep in the arms of the daughters of the people? Generous, truly Andalusian, señoritos.¹²⁵

The perception and empathy with which Varela Rendueles interpreted rural tensions was rare. In notes for his unfinished autobiography, General Sanjurjo made the revealing comment: ‘In reality, the agrarian problem in the name of which so many mistakes are made to the detriment of landowners and against the overall economy of Spain, exists only in Madrid on the lips of demagogues who use it as a way of exciting and manipulating the rural population. The agrarian problem was an invention of people like Margarita Nelken.’¹²⁶

Mola had complained on 1 July that the planned spiral of provocation and reprisal had not persuaded public opinion to consider a military uprising legitimate. Less than two weeks later that goal was reached. On the evening of 12 July, Falangist gunmen murdered a lieutenant of the Assault Guards, José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada.¹²⁷ This crime derived much of its catastrophic impact from the fact that, two months earlier, on 7 May, Castillo’s friend Captain Carlos Faraudo de Miches had been shot dead by a Falangist squad. On that same day, the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, showed his adjutant, Major Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros of the air force, a right-wing blacklist of fourteen members of the Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista, which had been created in late 1935 to combat the activities of the UME. Faraudo was number one, Castillo number two and Hidalgo de Cisneros fourth.¹²⁸

After Faraudo’s murder, calls for reprisals had been silenced. However, when Castillo was also assassinated, fellow Assault Guards from the Pontejos barracks just behind the Dirección General de Seguridad in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were determined on revenge. In the early hours of the following day, they set out to take revenge on a prominent right-wing politician. Failing to find Gil Robles who was holidaying in Biarritz, they kidnapped Calvo Sotelo and, shortly after he got into the truck, one of them shot him. His body was then taken to the municipal cemetery where it was discovered the next morning.¹²⁹ Republican and Socialist leaders were appalled and the authorities immediately began a thorough investigation. For the right, it was the opportunity to launch the coup for which the lengthy preparations were on the point of fruition.

At Calvo Sotelo’s burial, Antonio Goicoechea swore to ‘imitate your example, avenge your death and save Spain’. Even more bellicose was the speech made to the standing committee of the Cortes on 15 July by the Conde de Vallellano, on behalf of the Carlists and Renovación Española. Vallellano, referring rather inaccurately to ‘this unprecedented crime in our political history’, claimed that Calvo Sotelo had opposed all violence. Accusing the Popular Front deputies collectively of responsibility, he announced the monarchist abandonment of parliament. In what was to be his last parliamentary intervention, Gil Robles expressed his agreement with Vallellano and blamed both the violence of recent months and the assassination on the government. Knowing full well the objectives of the imminent military uprising, he declared that the parties of the Popular Front would be the first victims of the coming backlash.¹³⁰

PART TWO

5

Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South

The assassination of Calvo Sotelo seemed to confirm the direst predictions of the right-wing press, and the military conspirators pressed ahead. Yet only six weeks earlier, Mola, at his headquarters in Pamplona, had been so depressed by fear that the coup might fail and be followed by the revenge of the left-wing masses that he contemplated resigning his command and retiring to Cuba. He was assailed by doubts about the crucial participation of Spain’s Moroccan forces – the locally recruited mercenaries of the Native Regulars (Regulares Indígenas) and the two sections into which the Spanish Foreign Legion (Tercio de Extranjeros) was organized. Mola’s alarm had been triggered on 2 June 1936 when the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, removed a key conspirator, Lieutenant Colonel Heli Rolando de Tella, from command of the First Legion based in Melilla on the Mediterranean coast of Spanish Morocco. Even more worrying was the fact that, the next day, Casares Quiroga sent for Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe, who had been placed in overall charge of the uprising in the colony.¹

While waiting to hear Yagüe’s fate, Mola enjoyed a major stroke of luck on 3 June. The Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, swooped on Pamplona with a dozen police-filled trucks to search for arms. However, the plotters, warned in advance by Mola’s collaborator, the police superintendent Santiago Martín Báguenas, ensured that no evidence was found.² They were even more fortunate two weeks later when Yagüe was left in post. Having practised extraordinary brutality during the repression in Asturias in October 1934, Yagüe was bitterly hated on the left. He in turn had ample reason to resent the Republic, having been demoted in 1932 from lieutenant colonel to major by Azaña’s military reforms, which had reversed many of the rapid promotions enjoyed by the Africanistas. Humiliated by losing eighty-two places in the seniority list, he had had to wait a year before being restored to the rank of lieutenant colonel.³ Yagüe commanded the Second Legion in Ceuta on the southern side of the Straits of Gibraltar. Loudly indiscreet in his hostility to the government, he enjoyed the unquestioning loyalty of the tattooed mercenaries under his command.

Leading Socialists had repeatedly warned Casares Quiroga that it was dangerous to leave Yagüe in post. Yet, when he arrived on 12 June, he was offered a transfer either to a desirable post on the Spanish mainland or to a plum position as a military attaché in Rome. Yagüe replied curtly that he would burn his uniform rather than leave the Legion. To Mola’s relief, Casares weakly acquiesced and let him return to Morocco. After their meeting, Casares said to his adjutant, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, ‘Yagüe is a gentleman, a perfect officer, and I am sure that he would never betray the Republic. He has given me his word of honour and his promise as an officer that he will always loyally serve the Republic. And men like Yagüe keep their word.’ It was a major political error.⁴

In the event, Mola was persuaded by senior Carlists to stay aboard and, regaining his resolve, began to make every effort to ensure the rising’s success. Nevertheless, in the second week of July, during the fiesta of San Fermín, Mola was again plunged into despair by news brought to Pamplona by his younger brother Ramón. The thirty-nine-year-old Ramón, an infantry captain in Barcelona, was Emilio’s liaison with the plotters there. The Generalitat’s security services had uncovered the plans for the rising in Catalonia and a deeply pessimistic Ramón begged his brother to desist. Emilio replied that it was too late and ordered Ramón to return to Barcelona. It was a virtual death sentence. When the coup failed, as Ramón had predicted, he shot himself. This contributed to the further brutalization of Mola. In contrast, he would be unmoved by the fact that the President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, saved the life of his father, the eighty-three-year-old retired General of the Civil Guard Emilio Mola López.⁵

The first of Mola’s secret instructions, issued in April, echoed the practice of the Africanistas against the Rif tribesmen, calling for extreme violence to shock the left into paralysis. Throughout the army as a whole, commitment to the conspiracy was far from unanimous. If it had been, it is unlikely that there would have been a civil war. Thus, Mola’s third secret instruction ordered the immediate execution of officers who opposed, or refused to join, the coup. The fifth instruction, of 20 June, had declared that ‘the timid and the hesitant should be warned that he who is not with us is against us and will be treated as an enemy’.⁶ Thus the first victims executed by the military rebels would be fellow army officers.

On 24 June, Mola sent specific instructions to Yagüe. He urged three main principles: extreme violence, tempo and high mobility: ‘Vacillations lead only to failure.’⁷ Six days later, Yagüe received a more detailed set of twenty-five instructions about the organization of the repression. They included the following: use Moorish forces; delegate control of public order and security in the cities to the Falange; arrest all suspect authorities; eliminate all leftist elements (Communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Masons and so on); shut down all public meeting places; prohibit all demonstrations, strikes and public and private meetings.⁸ These instructions were the blueprint for the repression unleashed on Spain’s Moroccan territories on the night of 17 July. By sheer force of personality, Yagüe entirely dominated the overall commander of forces in Morocco, General Agustín Gómez Morato. Between 5 and 12 July, in the Llano Amarillo in the Ketama Valley, manoeuvres involving 20,000 troops from the Legion and the Regulares saw Yagüe’s tent become the epicentre of the African end of the conspiracy as he briefed the principal rebel officers. The manoeuvres concluded with Falangist chants.⁹

On 17 July, at Melilla, headquarters of the Second Legion, the general in command, Manuel Romerales Quintero, having refused to join the plotters, was arrested and shot for his ‘extremist ideas’. The rebels, headed by Colonel Luis Solans-Labedán, very soon had nearly one thousand prisoners in a concentration camp. When the overall commander General Gómez Morato flew to Melilla, he was immediately arrested. In Tetuán, in the western half of the Protectorate, Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Asensio Cabanillas detained the acting High Commissioner, Arturo Álvarez Buylla, who was shot some time later. On the night of 17–18 July, the rebels shot 225 soldiers and civilians in Morocco.¹⁰

Among the first of them was one of the most brilliant officers in the Spanish forces, Captain Virgilio Leret Ruiz, a thirty-four-year-old pilot and an aeronautical engineer of genius, the commander of the Atalayón seaplane base at Melilla. He had opposed the rebels, been detained and shot after a summary trial. His wife Carlota O’Neill, a left-wing feminist, dramatist and journalist, was arrested and separated from her daughters Carlota and Mariela. Many other wives and daughters of Republicans were seized, raped and tortured by Falangists. This was central to the reign of terror initiated by Luis Solans. In late September, a gang of Falangists came to the prison with the intention of killing all the female detainees to celebrate the rebel capture of Toledo. The director of the prison reprimanded them, saying, ‘it’s outrageous to kill them all at once. When you want to kill women, by all means come and get them, but one at a time.’ They left with several victims who were never seen again. After eighteen months in prison, Carlota O’Neill was court-martialled, accused of speaking Russian, of subversion and of responsibility for her husband’s actions on 17 July 1937. Nevertheless, she was sentenced to ‘only’ six years.¹¹

Having secured their Moroccan base, the rebels’ next objective was Cádiz, the crucial port where the African Army would disembark. At 1.00 a.m. on 18 July, the military commander of Cádiz, Brigadier General José López-Pinto, assured the Civil Governor, Mariano Zapico, of his loyalty to the Republic. Three hours later, he declared for the rebels, imposed martial law and ordered the release of Brigadier General José Enrique Varela Iglesias. Arrested by the Republican authorities on 17 July rightly suspected of military conspiracy, Varela would play a central role in the rebel cause. The civilian plotters in Cádiz were led by a prominent landowner, José de Mora-Figueroa, the Marqués de Tamarón. Mora-Figueroa was head of the Falange in Cádiz; his brother Manuel, a naval officer, led its militia. In liaison with one of the key plotters in Seville, Ramón de Carranza, a retired naval captain, who was also Marqués de Soto Hermoso, the Mora-Figueroa brothers had been busy purchasing and stockpiling weapons.

Now, López Pinto and Varela were quickly joined by Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. The Republican authorities took refuge in the town hall and the offices of the Civil Governor. They were defended by several hundred sparsely armed civilian Republicans and about fifty Assault Guards. López Pinto and Varela had about three hundred soldiers, fifty-odd Falangists and Carlist Requetés and a dozen Civil Guards. The buildings were subjected to artillery bombardment but held out until the arrival from Ceuta, late on the night of 18 July, of the destroyer Churruca and a merchant steamer carrying a unit of Regulares.¹² Thereafter, the coup was certain of success in the city.

One after another the following morning, the town hall, the Civil Governor’s offices, the telephone exchange, the main post office and the headquarters of left-wing parties and trades unions surrendered virtually without resistance. All those within were detained and numerous members of the town council murdered without even a semblance of a trial. The Mayor, Manuel de la Pinta Leal, was not in Cádiz at the time of the coup and thus in no position to oppose it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in Córdoba in September, taken to Cádiz and shot. Over the days following the capture of Cádiz, the Civil Governor, the President of the provincial assembly (Diputación) and numerous officers who had refused to join the rebellion were accused of military rebellion. While detained, they wrote statements pointing out the absurdity of the accusations, since they were obeying the orders of the legal government and had merely defended themselves. Before any trials could take place, they and several others, including a Socialist parliamentary deputy and the town-hall lawyer, were simply taken from prison and murdered on or about 16 August, on the orders of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, rebel commander of the south.¹³

The annihilation of less prominent leftists took place as follows. The rebels first closed off the narrow tongue of land that connected Cádiz to the rest of Spain. Groups of Falangists, Civil Guards and Regulares then searched and looted houses. Liberals and leftists, Freemasons and trade unionists, were arrested en masse. Some were shot directly in the street. Others were taken to Falange headquarters in the Casino where they were subjected to sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a litre of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and breadcrumbs. In acute abdominal pain, they were savagely beaten. A so-called ‘Tribunal of Blood’ was established and each day would select twenty-five of the detainees for execution. Over six hundred of those arrested in Cádiz were executed in the next five months and more than one thousand in the course of the war. A further three hundred would be executed between the end of the war and 1945. These figures do not include those who died in prison as a result of torture.¹⁴

The conquest of the remainder of the province was carried out with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class, many of whose younger elements had already joined the Falange or the Requeté. In Alcalá de los Gazules, to the east of Cádiz, local Falangists and Civil Guards took control of the town immediately, murdering the Mayor and town councillors, along with fifty others. In the surrounding villages, Popular Front Committees had been formed. They had detained those rightists known to support the coup and began to distribute grain and cattle among the families of landless labourers. The local landlords responded immediately by providing horses for a mounted squad to recover their property. Moving south-west, through Roche and Campano between Chiclana and Conil, the squad recaptured numerous estates that had been occupied by peasant families. Men, women and children were seized and taken back to Alcalá de los Gazules, many to be killed.¹⁵

After the fall of Cádiz, José Mora-Figueroa took his men to Jérez de la Frontera where the rising had triumphed immediately thanks to the decisive action of the military commander, another scion of a local landowning family, Major Salvador de Arizón Mejía, the Marqués de Casa Arizón, director of the army’s horse-breeding and training establishment. He and his brother, Captain Juan de Arizón Mejía, used the horses from their unit to ride out in columns to take control of the surrounding areas.¹⁶ Mora-Figueroa also organized mounted groups with friends and their employees, which he put at the disposal of the military authorities in Cádiz.¹⁷ The aim was not just to crush opposition to the rising but also to reverse the agrarian conquests of the previous years.

Most of the other principal towns of the province fell quickly. On 19 July, Salvador Arizón Mejía sent troops from Jérez to seize the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the north. Supporters of the Popular Front held them off until, on 21 July, a force of Regulares entered the town, killing twelve citizens including nine in one house. Executions began immediately, although a few leftists escaped in small boats. Eighty people were shot over the next five months.¹⁸ In Rota, nothing happened on 18 July. The following day, having been deceived into believing that the Civil Guard and Carabineros were loyal, the town’s anarchists, Socialists and Communists joined in declaring a general strike and establishing an anti-fascist committee. Falangists and other rightists were detained and roads into the town barricaded. When the Civil Guard declared in favour of the rebels, the anti-fascist committee surrendered without a fight. Despite the absence of left-wing violence, the Falange and the Civil Guard set about the systematic annihilation of the town’s relatively few liberals and leftists. They were tortured and forced to drink castor oil, and over sixty were shot at night, their ears cut off as trophies.¹⁹

The ambience in Jérez itself could be deduced from a broadcast on Radio Jérez on 24 July by the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán. He sang a hymn of praise to the war against what he called ‘hordes of barbarian invaders’. The implicit comparison of the working-class left with the Berber invaders of 711 was emphasized when he declared, ‘The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.’²⁰

An experienced Africanista, Captain Mariano Gómez de Zamalloa, arrived in Jérez from Ceuta to take overall charge of the landowners’ mounted columns.²¹ The recovery of estates in the surrounding area seized by leftists fell to the column led by the Marqués de Casa Arizón. Another column was organized by José Mora-Figueroa’s brother Manuel, with the scions of other aristocratic and landowning families and of sherry magnates, like the Duque de Medina-Sidonia and Estanislao Domecq y González. The self-styled Tercio Mora-Figueroa was made up initially of three hundred young rightists, Falangists, sons of landowners and workers from the Catholic unions.

As if on a hunting party, Mora-Figueroa and his men, accompanied by Civil Guards and Requetés, set out eastwards towards Arcos de la Frontera, where his family owned land. Despite the fact that Arcos had fallen without violence, a terrible repression was unleashed which saw the deaths of eighty-six Republicans.²² The column attacked villages to the north-east of Cádiz still in Popular Front hands and recaptured estates occupied by their workers. From Arcos, Gómez de Zamalloa’s column of Regulares and Mora-Figueroa’s men moved on to Algodonales and Olvera, where the repression was fierce.²³ On 13 August, Mora-Figueroa’s group reached Villamartín, which had been under the control of the Civil Guard since 19 July. There had been a few isolated incidents of left-wing violence but the repression was disproportionately severe. The landowners of Villamartín were determined to annihilate all members of trade unions and of the Socialist and Republican parties and any Republican who had held any elected office.

Despite the protests of the parish priest, men and women were tortured and shot without trial for reasons as capricious as having advocated improved working conditions or for having taken part in a carnival involving a spoof funeral of Gil Robles and songs ridiculing the right. One seventeen-year-old was shot because his father was a Socialist and a sixteen-year-old because his anarcho-syndicalist father had fled. Altogether four teenagers were murdered. A couple aged seventy-three and sixty-three were shot because their anarcho-syndicalist son had also escaped. Married couples were shot, their young children left to starve. In another case, Cristóbal Alza and his wife were arrested, their heads were shaved and they were given castor oil. Believing that they were now safe, they stayed in the town but were arrested again. Cristóbal’s brother Francisco pleaded for their lives with the Captain of the Civil Guard, who replied that he would spare only one and that Francisco must choose. He chose his brother. Between July 1936 and February 1937, a total of 102 men and nine women were executed in Villamartín.²⁴ Three women were murdered in Bornos, two in Espera, one in Puerto Serrano, one in Arcos de la Frontera, at least ten in Ubrique and five in Olvera.²⁵

These first killings were carried out under the umbrella of the proclamation of martial law, the Bando de Guerra, based on that issued by Queipo de Llano on 18 July. In every town and province across Western Andalusia, although the wording might vary slightly, the sweeping terms of the edict (bando) effectively decreed that anyone who opposed the rising would be shot.²⁶ Those who carried out the killings could then claim airily that they were ‘applying the Bando de Guerra’. With no judicial basis, men were taken out and shot, their bodies left by the roadside to rot. In fact, Queipo de Llano had no authority to issue such an edict.²⁷

Queipo de Llano wrote to López Pinto on 4 August urging him to speed up the process of eliminating the left in Cádiz. With the first African columns having left Seville for Madrid on 2 and 3 August, he wrote: ‘This will be over soon! It won’t last more than another ten days. By then it is crucial that you have finished off all the gunmen and communists in your province.’ When a new judge made inquiries about the progress of the trial of the prominent Republicans in Cádiz, he was informed that it had been shelved ‘as a result of the death of the individuals concerned by dint of the application to them of the edict of martial law of 18 July 1936’.²⁸

Queipo de Llano’s letter reflected a key moment in the repression. The towns and villages of Cádiz, Huelva and Seville and much of Córdoba and Granada had fallen to the insurgents. The population of this territory was predominantly Republican, Socialist and anarcho-syndicalist in its sympathies. To prevent any rebellion in the rear as the columns moved north, the repression was to be intensified. Prisoners were to be killed. Two days after sending the letter, Queipo de Llano backed up its sentiments by posting the retired Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Valera Valverde to be Civil Governor of the province of Cádiz. Valera was instructed to ‘proceed with greater energy’. In Sanlúcar de Barrameda the occupying forces began more systematic executions from 8 August. In Puerto Real, near the provincial capital, the Mayor had prevented anti-clerical disturbances and the burning of a convent on the night of 18 July. Nevertheless, he had been arrested the following day. He was a bookseller, a moderate Republican of Azaña’s Izquierda Republicana. Despite pleas on his behalf by the Mother Superior of the convent, he was killed without any trial on 21 August. Two months later, his bookshop, already ransacked by Falangists, was confiscated.²⁹

In the meantime, in the villages between Villamartín and Ubrique, such as Benamahoma, the Mora-Figueroa column arrested the mayors and imposed new town councils. Using Olvera as their base, they advanced over the provincial border into Seville and conquered the town of Pruna on 18 August, and the villages of Villanueva de San Juan and Algámitas four days later. The local landowners and right-wingers who had been placed in protective custody by the Popular Front authorities claimed that the column had arrived just in time to save them from horrendous atrocities. It was not explained why the left had waited so long before contemplating such atrocities.³⁰

The repression in Benamahoma was undertaken by a notorious gang known as the ‘Lions of Rota’, consisting of self-declared Falangists led by Fernando Zamacola, a man from Galicia with a record of assault and armed robbery. At a post-war investigation into Zamacola’s crimes, it was revealed that more than fifty people had been executed including several women. The town postman was shot along with his fifteen-year-old son. Members of the Lions testified that Juan Vadillo, the local commander of the Civil Guard, had ordered the shootings to cover up the appalling beatings inflicted on those arrested. As well as murders, there was also considerable theft of the property of those detained and sexual abuse of the wives of men who had fled or been shot. These women were forced to clean the Civil Guard barracks and the offices of the Falange and made to dance at parties organized by Zamacola’s men. As well as cases of head-shaving and the use of castor oil, several were raped by both Vadillo and Zamacola.³¹ Zamacola was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando.³²

Meanwhile, Mora-Figueroa’s column made daily expeditions to mop up after the troops who conquered the smaller towns to the north of the province, Ubrique, Alcalá del Valle and Setenil. Many local Republicans and trade unionists had fled to the sierra around Ubrique, fearing reprisals. However, when on 24 July a light aeroplane dropped leaflets announcing that anyone without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, many of them returned. Most of these trusting souls, including the Mayor, were shot in the course of the following weeks. A member of Izquierda Republicana, the Mayor owned a prosperous bakery and olive press. By providing cheap bread for the poor, he had earned the enmity of the local oligarchy. He was tortured and forced to hand over substantial sums of money before being shot. At least 149 people were executed in Ubrique.³³

In nearby Alcalá del Valle, the local Civil Guard had handed over its guns to a rapidly created Comité de Defensa. Weapons held by local rightists were confiscated and several of the men were imprisoned but none was physically harmed. The parish church was requisitioned as the Comité’s headquarters, its altar, statues and religious images destroyed. The town was briefly occupied on 25 August by a force of twenty Civil Guards and Manuel Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. After it had been driven off, a group of anarchist militia arrived from Ronda in the neighbouring province of Málaga and began to loot the houses of local right-wingers until they were stopped by the Comité de Defensa. On 18 September, the town was finally reoccupied by rebel units including Mora-Figueroa’s column. The repression in Alcalá del Valle was sweeping, aiming to eradicate left-wing individuals, organizations and ideas. Knowing what the columns had done in nearby towns, many inhabitants of Alcalá del Valle had already fled. These included those who had held posts in Republican parties, trade unions or institutions. The victims were thus those who had stayed confident that, being guilty of no crimes, they had nothing to fear. There was no pretence of trials. Twenty-six men and four women were picked up off the street or from their houses, tortured and then shot.³⁴

While the various paramilitary forces purged the province of Cádiz, a similar process was taking place in Seville. There the right-wing victory was attributed by Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to his personal daring and brilliance. Within a year of the events, he claimed that he had captured the city against overwhelming odds with the help of only 130 soldiers and fifteen civilians. In a radio broadcast on 1 February 1938, he made an even wilder exaggeration, declaring that he had taken the city with fourteen or fifteen men.³⁵ He claimed that he been opposed by a force of over 100,000 well-armed ‘communists’. In fact, the defeated workers had had between them only eighty rifles and little ammunition and were armed, if at all, with hunting shotguns, ancient pistols and knives.³⁶

Far from being an act of spontaneous heroism, the coup had been meticulously planned by a major of the General Staff stationed in Seville, José Cuesta Monereo, and was carried out by a force of four thousand men. The commander of the Seville Military Region, General José de Fernández Villa-Abrille, and his senior staff were aware of what was being hatched. They did nothing to impede the plot, despite the pleas of the Civil Governor, José María Varela Rendueles.³⁷ Nevertheless, Queipo had them arrested and tried for military rebellion. The majority of the Seville garrison were involved in the coup, including units of artillery, cavalry, communications, transport and the Civil Guard. This is clear even from the lists included in the hymn of praise to Queipo composed by the journalist Enrique Vila.³⁸ After artillery bombardment, this large force seized the telephone exchange, the town hall and the Civil Governor’s headquarters, blocked the main access routes into the centre and then applied indiscriminate terror.³⁹

The subsequent crushing of working-class resistance was undertaken by Major Antonio Castejón Espinosa. According to Castejón himself, with fifty Legionarios, fifty Carlist Requetés, fifty Falangists and another fifty Civil Guards, they immediately began the bloody suppression of the workers’ districts of Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos. Castejón’s artillery was organized by Captain Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, the CEDA deputy and landowner from Carmona, who had immediately placed himself under the orders of Queipo.⁴⁰ The Falangists came mainly from the Círculo de Labradores, the rich landowners’ club. Civilian participation in the rising was organized by prominent members of the Círculo like Ramón de Carranza, Pedro Parias González and the bullfighter Pepe el Algabeño (José García Carranza). Queipo de Llano rewarded them by making Carranza Mayor and Parias Civil Governor of Seville. Pepe el Algabeño, who had been the target of an assassination attempt by anarchists in Málaga in March 1934, headed a group of bullfighters who placed themselves at the disposal of Queipo de Llano.⁴¹ On the morning of 19 July, armed gangs led by Carranza imposed what he called ‘brutal punishment’ on working-class districts around the city.⁴²

Despite artillery bombardment, the working-class districts resisted doggedly. Finally, Queipo’s forces, using women and children as human shields, were able to enter and begin the repression in earnest. Women and children, as well as their menfolk, were were put to the sword. After the subjugation of Triana, the new Mayor Carranza strode through the streets with a megaphone ordering that all pro-Republican and anti-fascist graffiti be cleaned from the walls. He set a ten-minute deadline, after which the residents of any house whose walls carried slogans would be shot. With fathers, husbands, brothers and sons dead or dying in the streets around them, the surviving men, women and children began frantically scrubbing at the walls while the victorious rebels gloated.⁴³ For his final attack on La Macarena, on 22 July, Queipo used aircraft to bomb and strafe the district. He published a warning in the press demanding that weapons be thrown into the street and windows and doors be covered in white sheets to ‘avoid the damage that could be caused by air attacks and the forces of the Army’.⁴⁴

On 16 August, the bodies of two Falangists were found in Triana. In reprisal, seventy men from the surrounding streets were arrested at random. They were shot in the cemetery without any form of trial two days later.⁴⁵ When the actor Edmundo Barbero reached Seville in August, he would find the city (and many of its inhabitants) entirely plastered in Falangist symbols. Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos were full of the rubble of houses destroyed by the artillery barrages. Barbero was appalled by the terror-stricken faces and the fact that all the women wore black, despite Queipo’s prohibition of public mourning, incessantly and threateningly repeated in the press and on the radio. Elsewhere, in the pueblos, Falangist patrols ensured that no houses carried emblems of mourning and that laments of grief could not be heard.⁴⁶

After the initial slaughter, a more systematic repression began. On 23 July, Queipo de Llano issued another edict which stated that any strike leaders caught would be shot along with an equal number of strikers chosen at the discretion of the military authorities. Anyone who disobeyed his edicts was to be shot without trial. The following day, Queipo issued his sixth edict, which stated that ‘on discovering acts of cruelty against individuals in any town or village, the leaders of the Marxist or Communist organizations that exist there will be shot. In the event of them not being found, an equal number of their members, arbitrarily selected, will be shot without this prejudicing the sentences that will be passed against the guilty ones.’⁴⁷ This edict was used to justify the execution of large numbers of men, women and children who were innocent of any ‘acts of cruelty’.

To take charge of the process, Queipo de Llano chose an Africanista, the infantry Captain Manuel Díaz Criado. He had served with the Foreign Legion in the 1920s and organized the Guardiá Cívica that murdered four workers in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in 1931; he had also been involved in Carlavilla’s attempt to murder Azaña in May 1936. On 25 July, Queipo gave Díaz Criado the title of Military Delegate for Andalusia and Extremadura with the power of life and death over the people of the region. He chose as his right-hand man an equally brutal Civil Guard, Sergeant Major José Rebollo Montiel. Rebollo supervised the torture and interrogation of prisoners. Díaz Criado was described by Edmundo Barbero as ‘a cruel and sadistic drunk’.⁴⁸ On his orders, the working-class districts of Triana and La Macarena were stripped of their male populations. Among hundreds of prisoners taken and herded into the provincial prison were children and old men. Most were quickly taken out and shot without any pretence of judicial procedure. Others were taken to rot in the fetid prison ship Cabo Carvoeiro.⁴⁹

When working-class leaders could not be found, members of their families were taken as hostages. The Communist leader of the Seville dockworkers, Saturnino Barneto Atienza, went into hiding and eventually reached the Republican zone. His sister, his wife, his infant daughter and his mother-in-law were detained in inhuman conditions for the duration of the war. His seventy-two-year-old mother, Isabel Atienza, a devout Catholic, was arrested and interrogated. On 8 October, she was forced to witness a shooting in the cemetery and then, seriously disturbed, was taken to a square near her home and shot. Her body was left in the street for a day.⁵⁰ On the night of 10 August, a number of murders were committed to commemorate the anniversary of General Sanjurjo’s failed military coup in 1932. Among the victims were the Andalusian intellectual Blas Infante and the Republican Mayor José González Fernández de Labandera, who had helped foil the Sanjurjada.

Queipo de Llano gave Díaz Criado unlimited powers and would hear no complaints against him. Díaz Criado himself refused to be bothered by details concerning the innocence or previous good deeds of his victims. On 12 August, the local press was issued a note prohibiting intercessions in favour of those arrested. It stated that ‘not only those who oppose our cause, but also those who support them or speak up for them will be regarded as enemies’.⁵¹ Díaz Criado was widely regarded as a degenerate who used his position to satisfy his bloodlust, to get rich and for sexual gratification. The head of Queipo’s propaganda apparatus, Antonio Bahamonde, whose disgust at what he witnessed eventually led to his defection, was appalled by Díaz Criado. He wrote:

Criado usually arrived around six in the evening. In an hour or less, he would go through the files, signing death sentences (about sixty per day) usually without hearing the accused. To anaesthetize his conscience or for whatever reason, he was always drunk. As dawn broke every day, he was to be seen, surrounded by his courtiers in the restaurant of the Pasaje del Duque, where he dined every night. He was an habitual client of the night clubs where he could be seen with admiring friends, flamenco singers and dancers, sad women trying to appear gay. He used to say that, once started, it was all the same to him to sign one hundred or three hundred death sentences and the important thing was to ‘cleanse Spain of Marxists’. I have heard him say: ‘Here, for decades to come, no one will dare move.’ He did not receive visits; only young women were allowed into his office. I know cases of women who saved their loved ones by submitting to his demands.⁵²

Francisco Gonzálbez Ruiz, one-time Civil Governor of Murcia, had similar recollections of Díaz Criado: ‘in the small hours, after an orgy, still accompanied by prostitutes, and with unimaginable sadism, he would haphazardly apply his fateful mark “X2” to the files of those who were thus condemned to immediate execution’.⁵³ One of Díaz Criado’s closest friends was a prostitute known as Doña Mariquita who had hidden him when he was on the run after his attempt to kill Azaña. Knowing this, many people paid her to intercede for their loved ones. Edmundo Barbero was present at gatherings in the early hours of the morning at which Díaz Criado, Sergeant Rebollo and Doña Mariquita would discuss the sexual and financial offers made on behalf of prisoners. On one such occasion, a bored Díaz Criado decided to take those present to a dawn execution. To his irritation, they arrived just as the echoes of the shots were dying away. However, he was mollified when the commander of the firing squad offered the women of the party his gun for them to finish off the dying. A sergeant of the Regulares then proceeded to remove gold teeth from the dead by bashing their heads with a stone.⁵⁴

Bahamonde saw Díaz Criado drunk in a bar, signing death sentences. One of the few who survived to tell the tale later was the last Republican Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Díaz Criado began his interrogation with the words: ‘I have to say that I regret that you have not yet been shot. I would like to see your family in mourning.’ He said the same to Varela Rendueles’s mother some days later. Díaz Criado falsely accused Varela Rendueles of distributing arms to the workers. The only ‘proof’ that he could produce was a pistol once known to have been in Varela Rendueles’s possession found on a worker shot resisting the coup. The pistol had been stolen when Varela Rendueles’s office was looted. However, only after his successor as Civil Governor, Pedro Parias, had corroborated this did Díaz Criado grudgingly withdraw the accusation.⁵⁵ Díaz Criado’s slipshod manner inevitably led to problems.

According to the usually reliable Bahamonde, ‘A friend of General Mola was shot, despite the fact that Mola himself had taken a great interest in his case, even telephoning Díaz Criado personally. Since he usually just signed the death sentences after barely flicking through the files, Díaz Criado failed to notice that on the day in question he had signed the death sentence of Mola’s friend.’⁵⁶ Even so, Queipo tolerated Díaz Criado’s excesses; but, in mid-November 1936, Franco himself insisted on his removal. The immediate trigger had been that he had accused the Portuguese Vice-Consul in Seville, Alberto Magno Rodrigues, of espionage. Given the scale of Portuguese help to the rebel cause, and the efforts of Salazar’s government to secure international recognition for Franco, the accusation was acutely embarrassing. Moreover, it was absurd since Rodrigues was actually compiling information about German and Italian arms deliveries at the request of Franco’s brother, Nicolás. An enraged Queipo de Llano was forced to apologize to Rodrigues in front of Nicolás Franco. Now known as the ‘Caudillo’, Franco personally signed Díaz Criado’s posting to the Legion on the Madrid front, where he employed his brutal temperament against the soldiers under his command.⁵⁷

Díaz Criado’s replacement by the Civil Guard Major Santiago Garrigós Bernabéu brought little relief to the terrorized population. Indeed, it was fatal for those who had been saved by the bribery of Doña Mariquita or by sexual submission to Díaz Criado himself. Francisco Gonzálbez Ruiz commented on the situation: ‘since some fortunate ones were saved by the opportune intervention of a female friend or by dint of paying a goodly sum, of course, when Díaz Criado was sacked, his successor felt the need to review the cases. Because the procedure followed had been corrupt, those who had been freed were now shot. Needless to say, nothing could help the thousands of innocents already dead.’⁵⁸

One reason for which people were executed was having opposed the military coup of 10 August 1932. Among those murdered on these grounds were the then Mayor, José González Fernández de Labandera, the first Republican Mayor of Seville in April 1931 and Socialist deputy at the time, Hermenegildo Casas Jiménez, the then Civil Governor, Ramón González Sicilia, and the President of the Provincial Assembly, José Manuel Puelles de los Santos. After Puelles, a liberal and much loved doctor, had been arrested, his clinic was ransacked and he was murdered on 5 August. A similar fate awaited numerous other municipal and provincial officials.⁵⁹

As soon as the ‘pacification’ of Cádiz and Seville was under way, Queipo de Llano could turn his attention to the neighbouring province of Huelva. Initially, because of the firm stance of the Civil Governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, the Mayor, Salvador Moreno Márquez, and the local commanders of the Civil Guard, Lieutenant Colonel Julio Orts Flor, and of the Carabineros, Lieutenant Colonel Alfonso López Vicencio, the coup failed. Arms were distributed to working-class organizations but every effort was made to maintain order. Local rightists were detained for their safety and their weapons confiscated. Given the chaos and the hatred provoked by the uprising, it is a tribute to the success of the measures implemented by the Republican authorities that the number of right-wingers assassinated by uncontrolled elements in Huelva was limited to six.

Such was the confidence of the Madrid government that, on 19 July, the newly appointed Minister of the Interior, General Sebastián Pozas Perea, cabled the Civil Governor, Jiménez Castellano, and Lieutenant Colonel Orts Flor: ‘I recommend that you mobilize the miners to use explosives to annihilate these terrorist gangs. You can be confident that the military column advancing triumphantly on Córdoba and Seville will shortly wipe out the last few seditious traitors who, in their last throes, have unleashed the most cruel and disgusting vandalism.’ In response to this wildly over-optimistic telegram, the text of which would later be falsified by the rebels, it was decided to send a column from the city to attack Queipo de Llano in Seville. The column consisted of sixty Civil Guards, sixty Carabineros and Assault Guards plus about 350 left-wing volunteers from various towns, including Socialist miners. It was accompanied by two of Huelva’s parliamentary deputies, the Socialists Juan Gutiérrez Prieto and Luis Cordero Bel.

In fact, the police, the Civil Guard and the army in Huelva were heavily infiltrated by conspirators. One of the most untrustworthy, Major Gregorio Haro Lumbreras of the Civil Guard, was placed in command of the force being sent to attack Queipo. Haro had been involved in the Sanjurjada and was in close touch with José Cuesta Monereo, who had planned the military coup in Seville. To prevent his real plans being frustrated by the workers in the column, Haro Lumbreras and his men had left for Seville several hours before the civilian volunteers. Along the sixty-two miles separating the two cities, his force was swelled by Civil Guards from other posts. On reaching Seville, Haro Lumbreras liaised with Queipo and Cuesta Monereo then retraced his steps to set up an ambush of the militias coming from Huelva. On 19 July, at a crossroads known as La Pañoleta, his men opened fire on the miners with machine-guns. Twenty-five were killed and seventy-one were taken prisoner, of whom three soon died of their wounds. The remainder, including the Socialist deputies, escaped. Haro’s men suffered no casualties apart from one man who broke his leg getting out of a truck. The prisoners were taken to the hold of the prison ship Cabo Carvoeiro anchored in the River Guadalquivir. At the end of August, they would be ‘tried’ and found guilty of the surrealistic crime of military rebellion against ‘the only legitimately constituted power in Spain’. The sixty-eight prisoners were then divided into six groups, taken to six areas of Seville where working-class resistance had been significant, and shot. Their bodies were left in the streets for several hours to terrorize further a population which had already seen more than seven hundred people executed since Queipo de Llano’s triumph.⁶⁰

Huelva itself would not fall for another ten days. In the meantime, the conquest of the territory between Huelva and Seville was carried out by columns organized by the military and financed by wealthy volunteers with access to cars and weaponry. After taking part in the suppression of the working-class areas of Seville, a Carlist column organized by a retired Major Luis Redondo García attacked small towns to the south-east of Seville.⁶¹ Another typical column was put together by the wealthy landowner Ramón de Carranza. He had been involved in the preparations for the coup and, with a group of friends, some from the Aero Club and the landowners’ casino, had taken part in the repression of the working-class districts of Triana and La Macarena. Queipo rewarded him by making him Mayor of Seville. Carranza was the son of the cacique of Cádiz, Admiral Ramón de Carranza, the Marqués de Villapesadilla, who owned 5,600 acres in estates near Algeciras and in Chiclana.⁶² From 23 July until late August, Carranza alternated his administrative duties with the leadership of a column that occupied the towns and villages in the Aljarafe region to the west of Seville.

It was no coincidence that in many of these municipalities extensive properties were owned by Carranza and other wealthy members of the column such as his friend Rafael de Medina. Their itineraries were often dictated by the location of their estates. In most villages, a Popular Front committee had been set up, with representation of all Republican and left-wing groups, usually under the chairmanship of the mayor. They arrested known sympathizers of the military rebels and confiscated their weapons. This was an area of big estates, producing wheat and olives, with large areas of cork oaks around which cattle, sheep, goats and pigs grazed. The committees centralized food supplies and, in some cases, collectivized estates. The owners had a burning interest in the recovery of the farms that now fed their left-wing enemies.

Carranza’s column moved into the Aljarafe, attacking towns and villages such as Saltares, Camas, Valencina, Bollullos and Aznalcázar. Armed with mortars and machine-guns, they met little resistance from labourers armed only with hunting shotguns or farm implements. At one of the first villages reached, Castilleja, Medina liberated estates belonging to his friend the Marqués de las Torres de la Presa. In Aznalcázar, the Socialist Mayor, who, according to Medina’s own account, handed over the pueblo with great dignity and grace, was taken to Seville and shot. Moving on to Pilas and Villamanrique, the column recaptured estates owned by Medina himself and his father. Eventually, on 25 July, they went as far as Almonte in Huelva. As each village fell, Carranza would arrest the municipal authorities, establish new town councils, shut down trade union offices and take truckloads of prisoners back to Seville for execution.⁶³

On 27 July, Carranza’s column reached one such town, Rociana in Huelva, where the left had taken over in response to news of the military coup. There had been no casualties but a ritual destruction of the symbols of right-wing power, the premises of the landowners’ association and two clubs, one used by the local Falange. Twenty-five sheep belonging to a wealthy local landowner were stolen. The parish church and rectory had been set alight, but the parish priest, the sixty-year-old Eduardo Martínez Laorden, his niece and her daughter who lived with him had been saved by local Socialists and given refuge in the house of the Mayor. On 28 July, Father Martínez Laorden made a speech from the balcony of the town hall: ‘You all no doubt believe that, because I am a priest, I have come with words of forgiveness and repentance. Not at all! War against all of them until the last trace has been eliminated.’ A large number of men and women were arrested. The women had their heads shaved and one, known as La Maestra Herrera, was dragged around the town by a donkey, before being murdered. Over the next three months, sixty were shot. In January 1937, Father Martínez Laorden made an official complaint that the repression had been too lenient.⁶⁴

When Gonzalo de Aguilera shot six labourers in Salamanca, he perceived himself to be taking retaliatory measures in advance. Many landowners did the same by joining or financing mixed columns like that of Carranza. They also played an active role in selecting victims to be executed in captured villages. In a report to Lisbon, in early August, the Portuguese Consul in Seville praised these columns. Like the Italian Consul, he had been given gory accounts of unspeakable outrages allegedly committed against women and children by armed leftist desperadoes. Accordingly, he reported with satisfaction that, ‘in punishing these monstrosities, a harsh summary military justice is applied. In these towns, not a single one of the Communist rebels is left alive, because they are all shot in the town square.’⁶⁵ In fact, these shootings reflected no justice, military or otherwise, but rather the determination of the landowners to put the clock back. Thus, when labourers were shot, they were made to dig their own graves first, and Falangist señoritos shouted at them, ‘Didn’t you ask for land? Now you’re going to have some, and for ever!’⁶⁶

The atrocities carried out by the various columns were regarded with relish by Queipo de Llano. In a broadcast on 23 July, he declared, ‘We are determined to apply the law without flinching. Morón, Utrera, Puente Genil, Castro del Río, start digging graves. I authorize you to kill like a dog anyone who dares oppose you and I say that, if you act in this way, you will be free of all blame.’ In part of the speech that the censorship felt was too explicit to be printed, Queipo de Llano said, ‘Our brave Legionarios and Regulares have shown the red cowards what it means to be a man. And incidentally the wives of the reds too. These Communist and anarchist women, after all, have made themselves fair game by their doctrine of free love. And now they have at least made the acquaintance of real men, not wimpish militiamen. Kicking their legs about and squealing won’t save them.’⁶⁷

Queipo de Llano’s speeches were larded with sexual references. On 26 July, he declared: ‘Sevillanos! I don’t have to urge you on because I know your bravery. I tell you to kill like a dog any queer or pervert who criticizes this glorious national movement.’⁶⁸ Arthur Koestler interviewed Queipo de Llano at the beginning of September 1936: ‘For some ten minutes he described in a steady flood of words, which now and then became extremely racy, how the Marxists slit open the stomachs of pregnant women and speared the foetuses; how they had tied two eight-year-old girls on to their father’s knees, violated them, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. This went on and on, unceasingly, one story following another – a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology.’ Koestler commented on the broadcasts: ‘General Queipo de Llano describes scenes of rape with a coarse relish that is an indirect incitement to a repetition of such scenes.’⁶⁹ Queipo’s comments can be contrasted with an incident in Castilleja del Campo when a truckload of prisoners was brought for execution from the mining town of Aznalcóllar, which had been occupied on 17 August by Carranza’s column. Among them were two women tied together, a mother and her daughter who was in the final stages of pregnancy and gave birth as she was shot. The executioners killed the baby with their rifle butts.⁷⁰

The most important of the columns carrying out Queipo’s bidding was commanded by the stocky Major Antonio Castejón Espinosa. After taking part in the repression of Triana and La Macarena in Seville itself, and prior to setting out on the march to Madrid, Castejón made a number of rapid daily sorties to both the east and west of the city. In its war on the landless peasantry, Castejón’s column drew on the training and experience of the Legion and the Civil Guard and had the added advantage of the artillery directed by Alarcón de la Lastra. Fulfilling Queipo’s threats, to the east the column conquered Alcalá de Guadaira, Arahal, La Puebla de Cazalla, Morón de la Frontera, reaching Écija before moving south to Osuna, Estepa and La Roda, advancing as far as Puente Genil in Córdoba, seventy-five miles from Seville. To the west, at Valencina del Alcor, just outside Seville, Castejón’s forces liberated the estate of a rich retired bullfighter, Emilio Torres Reina, known as ‘Bombita’. ‘Bombita’ himself enthusiastically joined in the fighting and the subsequent ‘punishment’ of the prisoners. Castejón went as far as La Palma del Condado in Huelva, thirty-four miles from Seville. First the town was bombed, which provoked the murder of fifteen right-wing prisoners by enraged anarchists. On 26 July, La Palma was captured in a pincer action by the columns of both Castejón and Carranza, who bitterly disputed the credit of being first.⁷¹

When forces of the Legion sent by Queipo de Llano finally took Huelva itself on 29 July, they discovered that the Mayor and many of the Republican authorities had managed to flee on a steamer to Casablanca. The city fell after brief resistance in the Socialist headquarters (the Casa del Pueblo). Seventeen citizens were killed in the fighting and nearly four hundred prisoners were taken. Executions began immediately. Corpses were regularly found in the gutters. Still basking in the glory of the massacre of the miners at La Pañoleta, Major Haro Lumbreras was named both Civil and Military Governor of Huelva. Those Republican civil and military authorities who had not managed to escape – the Civil Governor and the commanders of the Civil Guard and the Carabineros – were put on trial on 2 August, charged with military rebellion. Haro testified against his immediate superior, Lieutenant Colonel Orts Flor, who had organized the miners’ column sent to Seville.

To inflate his own heroism, and inadvertently revealing his own obsessions, Haro claimed that the orders from General Pozas passed on by Orts which had instigated the expedition were to ‘blow up Seville and fuck the wives of the fascists’. Unsurprisingly, the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death. Numerous conservatives and clerics whose lives had been saved by the Civil Governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, sent telegrams to Seville on 4 August desperately pleading for clemency. Queipo de Llano replied: ‘I regret that I cannot respond to your petition for pardon for the criminals condemned to death, because the critical situation through which Spain is passing means that justice cannot be obstructed, for the guilty must be punished and an example made of them.’ Diego Jiménez Castellano, Julio Orts Flor and Alfonso López Vicencio were shot shortly after 6.00 p.m. on 4 August.⁷²

With Huelva itself in rebel hands, the process began, as it had in Cádiz and Seville, of columns being sent out to mop up the remainder of the province. Carranza’s column was involved in the taking of nearby towns to the south like Lepe, Isla Cristina and Ayamonte. Many of the Republicans who were arrested and taken to Huelva for trial were murdered along the way.⁷³ In the north, the rebels already had a bridgehead in the town of Encinasola, where the rising had triumphed immediately. The right could count on support from Barrancos across the Portuguese frontier.⁷⁴ With considerable bloodshed, a major role in the capture of towns and villages to the east and north of the capital was played by Luis Redondo’s column of Carlists from Seville. The mining towns of the north were centres of obdurate resistance, holding out for some weeks despite artillery bombardment. Higuera de la Sierra fell on 15 August. Zalamea la Real on the edge of the Riotinto mining district fell the next day. The capture of these villages was followed by indiscriminate shootings.⁷⁵

The savagery increased as the columns entered Riotinto. The inhabitants had fled from the village of El Campillo. Finding it deserted, Redondo gave the order to burn it to the ground. Queipo de Llano broadcast the absurd lie that the local anarchists had burned twenty-two rightists alive and then set fire to their own homes. An air raid on Nerva on 20 August killed seven women, four men, a ten-year-old boy and six-month-old girl. One right-winger had been killed before the arrival of Redondo. The Communist Mayor ensured that twenty-five others who were in protective custody were unharmed, despite the popular outrage after the bombing raid. When the village was taken, Redondo’s men executed 288 people. In Aroche, ten right-wingers were killed and, when Redondo’s column arrived on 28 August, despite the fact that many leftists had fled north towards Badajoz, his men executed 133 men and ten women. The town’s female population was subjected to humiliation and sexual extortion. Reports of this terror ensured that resistance elsewhere would be dogged. The siege of El Cerro de Andévalo lasted over three weeks and required the contribution of three columns of Civil Guards, Falangists and Requetés. There the local CNT committee or Junta had protected the nuns in a local convent but were unable to prevent attacks on church property. The repression when the town fell on 22 September was ferocious. In nearby Silos de Calañas, women and children were shot along with the men. Large numbers of refugees now headed north towards the small area in Badajoz still not conquered by the rebels.⁷⁶

Meanwhile, in Moguer to the south of the province, and in Palos de la Frontera to the east of the provincial capital, members of the clergy and local rightists had been taken into protective custody. In Moguer, as news filtered through of the repression in Seville, on 22 July the parish church was set on fire and a retired lieutenant colonel of the army was murdered after his house was attacked and looted by a large mob. The Mayor, Antonio Batista, managed to prevent any further deaths. In Palos, the Socialist Mayor, Eduardo Molina Martos, and the PSOE deputy Juan Gutiérrez Prieto tried unsuccessfully to stop the local CNT burning down church buildings including the historic monastery of La Rábida but did prevent any executions. On 28 July, Palos was captured by the Civil Guard without opposition and, on 6 August, Falangists from Huelva began a series of extra-judicial executions.

Gutiérrez Prieto, a talented and highly popular lawyer, was captured in Huelva on 29 July and tried on 10 August. In addition to military rebellion, he was accused of responsibility for virtually every action of the left in the province and sentenced to death. Numerous conservatives and ecclesiastical dignitaries interceded on his behalf. To counteract these pleas, Haro Lumbreras made a statement to the press which echoed the sexual obsessions of his distortion of General Pozas’s orders. No right-wingers had been harmed in Palos, yet he stated:

The enemy who burns alive entire families, who crucifies and burns alive the Bishop of Sigüenza in a town square, who cuts open the bellies of pregnant women, who murders innocent children, who steals, attacks buildings, burns, stains the honour of defenceless virgins, throws two hundred and fifty people into pits in Constantina and then throws in dynamite to finish them off, cannot and must not plead for mercy before those who would be his first victims if he got the chance.

Gutiérrez Prieto was shot on 11 August. To silence opposition to his execution, thirty inhabitants of Palos, including his uncle, were shot, along with twelve people from other towns. In Moguer, the arrival of the rebels unleashed a sweeping and well-planned repression that saw the homes of Republicans looted and women raped and claimed the lives of 146 people, including women and twelve-year-old boys. More than 5 per cent of the adult male population was murdered.⁷⁷

In the light of Haro Lumbreras’s declaration, it is worth recalling that the total number of right-wingers assassinated in the province from 18 July until it was totally in rebel control was forty-four, in nine locations. A further 101 died in armed clashes with the defenders of the Republic. The subsequent repression was of a different order of magnitude, not a vengeful response to prior left-wing violence but the implementation of a plan for extermination. In seventy-five of Huelva’s seventy-eight towns, a total of 6,019 were executed.⁷⁸ In the days between the military coup and the fall of Huelva to the rebels, the Republican authorities had made every effort to protect those rightists arrested in the immediate wake of the military coup. There had been calls for serenity and respect for the law from the Civil Governor, the Mayor, Salvador Moreno Márquez, and Republican and Socialist parliamentary deputies for the province. One hundred and seventy-eight local extreme rightists, including Falangists and the most hated landowners and industrialists, were arrested. All were safe and well when the city was conquered. However, during the previous eleven days, six people were murdered. This was the only excuse that Haro Lumbreras needed to launch a bloody repression. There were nightly shootings without even the farce of a ‘trial’. Many of those of the right who had been saved by the Republican authorities protested. Haro was eventually removed on 6 February 1937 when it came to light that he had misappropriated donations of jewellery and money made to the rebel cause. Specifically, it appeared that he had used these funds to pay for the services of prostitutes. Evidence was produced showing that, over the previous fifteen years, he had frequently been guilty of theft and other abuses of his position. When he left Huelva, his luggage, carried in three trucks, consisted of ninety-three trunks and suitcases. After serving in Zaragoza, Teruel and Galicia, he became head of the Civil Guard in León. He was killed on 16 February 1941 by one of his junior officers. It was rumoured that the young man’s wife had been the unwilling object of Haro’s attentions.⁷⁹

In Seville, as in Huelva, the ‘the red terror’ was a much exaggerated justification for the repression, often no more than a contrived and feeble excuse. That the savagery visited upon the towns conquered by Spanish colonial forces was a repetition of what they did when they attacked a Moroccan village was proudly recognized by the rebels themselves. The first town taken by Castejón’s column was Alcalá de Guadaira to the south-east of the provincial capital. His official chronicler, Cándido Ortiz de Villajos, said of Castejón’s men recently arrived from Morocco that it was as if ‘they had brought with them, as well as the determination to fight for the salvation of Spain, the deadly, terrible, fatal and efficacious principles of the justice of the Qur’an’.⁸⁰ The crimes during the four days of the so-called ‘red domination’ were cited to justify the repression carried out by the column. Among these ‘crimes’ was the death on the night of 17 July of Agustín Alcalá y Henke, one of the town’s principal olive-producers. A moderate and socially conscious Catholic, Alcalá y Henke had a long-term rivalry with another landowner, Pedro Gutiérrez Calderón, a supporter of the military uprising. Moreover, other employers had been infuriated when Alcalá y Henke had urged them to meet the demands of striking workers in the olive industry. He was shot by an unknown assassin. Many believed that he had been eliminated for betraying the employers’ interests and/or as an expendable victim to justify the imminent coup. When news of the military coup reached the town, a Popular Front Committee established under the chairmanship of the Mayor immediately appealed for calm. Since the local Civil Guard had pledged its loyalty to the Republic, it was not disarmed.⁸¹

However, against the wishes of the Committee, the anarchist CNT–FAI organized a militia force. Two churches, a convent and seminary were set on fire and some religious images destroyed. Three private houses and three right-wing clubs had been searched and property thrown into the street – a situation eagerly exploited by criminal elements. Between 19 and 21 July, the Committee had detained thirty-eight right-wingers for their own protection. None was harmed and there were no more deaths after Alcalá y Henke. Anarchist efforts to burn the municipal jail were successfully repelled. When Castejón’s column reached Alcalá de Guadaira in the early evening of 21 July, it was joined by the local Civil Guard. The town fell after a successful artillery bombardment by Alarcón de la Lastra. In the words of his enthusiastic chronicler, ‘all the Communist leaders were killed while Castejón punished or rather liberated the town of Alcalá’. ‘Punishment’ was the Africanista euphemism for savage repression. The alleged ‘Communist leaders’ were actually four unconnected individuals. Three were shot by the advancing column: two of them young men who had come from Seville to buy bread and the third an agricultural labourer who ran in panic when he saw the Legionarios. The fourth was Miguel Ángel Troncoso, the head of the local police, who, according to his son, was shot in the town hall by Castejón himself. None could be remotely described as Communist leaders. Thirteen men captured in the town hall were taken to Seville, where at least six of them would be killed. Alcalá de Guadaira was then left in the hands of local rightists and a process of revenge began which saw the murders of a further 137 men. Another 350 were imprisoned and tortured, many of whom died. The belongings of the murdered and imprisoned were stolen by the new masters of the town.⁸²

In Carmona, to the east of Seville, local landowners bitterly resented the intense pressure put on them to accept work and wage agreements with their labourers. When news arrived of the coup, the Mayor was on official business in Madrid. A Defence Committee was set up with representatives of the Socialist and Communist parties, the CNT and the moderate liberal party Unión Republicana – the latter being the Municipal Police chief, Manuel Gómez Montes. The commander of the Civil Guard, Lieutenant Rafael Martín Cerezo, and Gómez Montes helped the Popular Front Committee gather available weapons and assign groups to defend the roads leading into the town. A convent was ransacked, but the nuns were evacuated unharmed.

On 21 July, a company of Regulares, accompanied by a local right-winger, Emilio Villa Baena, attempted to take the town. Initially repelled, the Moorish mercenaries took refuge in the town theatre with nineteen hostages. They then sent Villa Baena and three prisoners to negotiate a truce. Just as he began to negotiate with members of the Committee, Villa Baeza was shot by an anarchist from Constantina. The column withdrew back to Seville using the other sixteen hostages as human shields. The Committee now searched the houses of the town’s rightists and, in one of them, found six cases of pistols. Eighteen right-wingers were locked in the cellars of the town hall. A landowner was shot dead when he tried to flee over the rooftops. That night, in his broadcast, Queipo de Llano gave a wildly exaggerated account of these events, followed by a horrifying threat:

Faithful to their usual tactics, the Regulares repelled the aggression with such terrible violence that they left about one hundred dead and wounded among their aggressors. This madness is suicidal since I guarantee that Carmona will soon be punished as the treachery of its citizens deserves … the outrages they have committed against men and women of the right must be severely punished. Things have been done in Carmona that call for exemplary punishments and I will impose them in a way that will make history and will ensure that Carmona will long remember the Regulares.⁸³

The following day, after first being bombed three times, the town was attacked by two substantial columns commanded by Major Emilio Álvarez de Rementería, accompanied by the bullfighter Pepe el Algabeño. The first, equipped with two artillery pieces and a section of machine-gunners, consisted of Regulares, Legionarios and Civil Guards, the second of Falangists. Cannon and machine-gun fire dispersed the poorly armed defenders and the town was captured quickly. That day, twelve were killed, their demise later registered as ‘violent death’. Over two hundred people fled. Lieutenant Martín Cerezo was arrested and shot and his replacement set about avenging the two deaths of Emilio Villa and Gregorio Rodríguez. Over the next four months, he ordered the executions of 201 men, some of them barely in their teens and others past retirement, and sixteen women. There were no trials and the only ‘legal’ veneer was an airy reference to the edict of martial law. Where men had fled, their relatives were shot. In many cases, after the heads of families were killed, their houses were confiscated and their wives and young children thrown on to the street. Another seventeen people from Carmona were executed in Seville and Málaga. Large numbers of men were conscripted into the rebel forces.⁸⁴

The victims were largely selected by the local caciques, because they were known to be Republicans or union members or had shown disrespect. One man was shot because he was the bill poster who had stuck up left-wing election posters in February 1936. As in virtually every conquered town in the south, women had their heads shaved, were given castor oil to make them soil themselves and, led by a brass band, were paraded around the streets to be mocked.⁸⁵ The perpetrators of the murders and the other abuses included Civil Guards and estate employees who had swiftly joined the Falange. Their motives ranged from psychotic enjoyment to money, some boasting of being paid 15 pesetas for every killing. For others, involvement reflected gratitude for patronage received or shared religious views, as well as shared fears and anger. They all perceived savagery as ‘services for the Fatherland’. Men and women, and many teenagers, were arrested either by the Civil Guard or by the Falangists. Sometimes, victims were picked up at random, or because these thugs coveted their wife or their property, or simply because they were bored or drunk. Sometimes those arrested were shot immediately, sometimes taken to jail where they were beaten and tortured before being eventually murdered. After the shootings, the caciques, the recent Falangist converts and the younger landowners would meet in a bar and comment with satisfaction that there would be no more wage claims from those just despatched. On one occasion, unable to find a young man who in fact was hiding under the floor of his parents’ shack, they burned down the dwelling with all three inside.⁸⁶

When the parish priest of Carmona protested at the murders, he was told that those executed had been found guilty by a tribunal consisting of the local landowners. When he pointed out that this did not constitute any kind of legal process, he was threatened. By 1938, those responsible experienced sufficient guilt to feel the need to falsify the circumstances of the murders committed in 1936. Witness statements to the ‘tribunal’ were fabricated, apparently ‘justifying’ the shootings. Many deaths were registered as having been caused by ‘military operations in the town’. Nevertheless, there were more executions when those who had fled came back at the end of the war.⁸⁷

In Cantillana, a wealthy farming community to the north-east of Seville, there had been little history of social tension despite stark inequalities in landownership (four men owned more than 24 per cent of the land, and one of them over 11 per cent, while three-quarters of the farmers owned only 6 per cent). In the wake of the military coup, an Anti-Fascist Popular Front Defence Committee administered the town under the Socialist Mayor. The nearest to revolutionary drama was the use of clenched-fist salutes and greetings such as ‘Salud camarada’; firearms were confiscated from landowners and fines were imposed on those who refused to take on unemployed labourers. To guarantee the feeding of the town, wheat and cattle were requisitioned without compensation. The owners were furious but otherwise unmolested. Rich and poor alike were given rations as was the local Civil Guard contingent, which had been confined to its barracks. Only one man was arrested on suspicion of being in cahoots with the military conspirators. A few houses were looted and, on 25 July, the parish church was set alight although the priest was unharmed.

A substantial column of Legionarios, Falangists and Requetés sent by Queipo de Llano was gradually moving north-eastwards up the Valley of the Guadalquivir, taking town after town. They appeared in Cantillana at midday on 30 July. After the usual artillery bombardment, they entered the town unopposed. The defenders had only a few shotguns and soon the surrounding fields were thronged with people fleeing. Despite having been well treated, the local Civil Guard commander began the first of around two hundred executions without trial. Large numbers of townspeople were imprisoned and, over the next few months, more than sixty people including three women and the Mayor would be taken away and shot in Seville. After the Civil War, the parish priest of Cantillana was removed in punishment for a sermon in which he said: ‘If the church is damaged, it can be repaired; if statues have been burned, they can be replaced; but the husband or son who has been killed can never be replaced.’⁸⁸

In his broadcast of 30 August, Queipo declared that the search for Republican criminals would go on for ten or twenty years. He also claimed that, in the rebel zone, there had been no atrocities. With no sense of irony, he reiterated his view that any killing done according to his edict was therefore legal: ‘We might shoot someone who committed crimes but no one could possibly say that in any town, anywhere, a single person had been murdered. Those responsible have been shot without hesitation. This was done following the dictates of the edict not for the fun of killing like they did, with the greatest cruelty, burning people alive, throwing them into wells and dynamiting them, putting out people’s eyes, cutting off women’s breasts.’⁸⁹

In fact, what is known of such broadcasts by Queipo de Llano derives from the following day’s press reports, together with occasional snippets noted down by those who heard them. Comparisons, when possible, between the two suggest that the texts printed by the press were a pale reflection of the obscenity of the originals. Newspaper editors knew better than to print the more outrageous incitements to rape and murder. Indeed, there was concern that Queipo’s excesses might be damaging to the rebel cause abroad. Accordingly, the instinctive self-censorship of the press was reinforced on 7 September when Major José Cuesta Monereo issued detailed instructions regarding foreign sensibilities. Most of his fourteen points were routine, to prevent the publication of sensitive military information. However, they specifically ordered that the printed version of the radio broadcasts be expurgated: ‘In the broadcast chats by the General, any concept, phrase or insult, even though accurate, and doubtless the result of excessive zeal in the expression of his patriotism, whose publication is not appropriate or convenient, for reasons of discretion that will easily be appreciated by our intelligent journalists, shall be suppressed.’ Similarly, in the reporting of the repression, specific details of the slaughter were prohibited. Instead, journalists were obliged to use euphemisms like ‘justice was carried out’, ‘a deserved punishment was inflicted’, ‘the law was applied’.⁹⁰

The censorship may well have been designed to limit awareness of Queipo’s incitement to the sexual abuse of left-wing women, but the extent to which the rebels considered it legitimate could be seen from what happened in Fuentes de Andalucía, a small town to the east of Seville. It had surrendered without resistance, on 19 July, to Civil Guards. With the help of Falangists and other right-wingers, a Guardia Cívica (a right-wing volunteer police force) was created which set about rounding up the town’s leftists. The houses of those arrested were looted as many of the Falangists stole sewing machines for their mothers and girlfriends. On 25 July, the Socialist Mayor and three Communist councillors were shot. It was the beginning of a massacre. In one case, that of a family called Medrano, the parents were arrested, and their three children, José aged twenty, Mercedes aged eighteen and Manuel aged sixteen, were shot. The family’s shack was burned down and the fourth child, Juan, aged eight, was abandoned to his fate. A truckload of women prisoners was taken to an estate outside the town of La Campana further north. Among them were four young girls, aged between eighteen and fourteen. The women were obliged to cook and serve a meal for their captors who then sexually assaulted them before shooting them and throwing their bodies down a well. When the Civil Guard returned to Fuentes de Andalucía, they marched through the town waving rifles adorned with the underwear of the murdered women.⁹¹

It will be recalled that on 23 July Queipo had made his most explicit incitement to rape. The following day, he commented with relish on the savagery inflicted by Castejón’s column when it captured Arahal, a small town of 12,500 inhabitants to the south of Carmona. When news of the military rebellion reached Arahal, thirty-six local right-wingers had been locked up in the town hall. On 22 July, when a Socialist town councillor went to release them, thirteen left but twenty-three preferred to remain, fearful that it was a ruse to shoot them. With the town being bombarded with artillery, some armed men from Seville then set fire to the building and twenty-two of the rightists were burned to death, only the priest escaping with his life. When Castejón’s column entered Arahal, they reacted to this atrocity with an orgy of indiscriminate violence. Accounts of the numbers of the town’s inhabitants killed vary wildly from 146 to 1,600. Young women considered to be of the left were repeatedly raped. The Socialist Mayor, a seventy-one-year-old cobbler, who had worked hard to prevent violence, was shot.⁹²

Further south, in Morón de la Frontera, the local Republican elements had created a Defence Committee as soon as they heard news of the rising in Morocco. They detained those prominent rightists thought to support the rebels. Since the Civil Guard local commander pretended that he and his men were loyal to the Republic, they were allowed to go about their business. A tense peace was broken when a group of armed anarchists, unconnected with the Committee, attempted to take a judge to join the other prisoners. He had a pistol and shot one of the anarchists who, before dying, shot the judge. The Civil Guard intervened, shooting one anarchist and wounding another. Hoping for the arrival of help from Seville, the lieutenant took the right-wing prisoners and their families into the barracks, which was then besieged by the local left. The commander announced that he would surrender and that his men would lay down their arms. It was a lie. They came out using the rightist civilians as a shield and then broke through the besiegers, aiming to capture the town hall. In the subsequent fight, several Civil Guards and rightists lost their lives. When the Civil Guard barracks were searched, two guards were found dead, handcuffed together, which suggested that they had been killed for opposing the actions of the Lieutenant.⁹³

When Castejón’s column arrived, it was fiercely resisted. Castejón’s revenge was fierce. Corpses that littered the streets were left to be eaten by pigs. Shops and houses were looted and women violated. In a radio broadcast, Queipo de Llano crowed with delight:

An example has been made of Morón that I imagine will serve as a lesson to those towns who still foolishly maintain their faith in Marxism and the hope of being able to resist us. Just as in Arahal, in Morón there was a group of heedless men who had committed unequalled acts of savagery, attacking right-wing individuals who had not provoked them. And I have heard that in various towns the Marxists have right-wing prisoners against whom they plan to commit similar barbarities. I remind them all that, for every honorable person that dies, I will shoot at least ten; and there are already towns where we have gone beyond that figure. And the leaders should not hold out hope of saving themselves by flight, since I will drag them from out of the ground, if necessary, to implement the law.⁹⁴

Castejón himself explained how he took these towns: ‘I employed an encircling movement which enabled me to punish the reds harshly.’⁹⁵ The rural proletariat was no match for the military experience of the battle-hardened Legionarios. However, as Castejón revealed, it was a question not simply of seizing control but of imposing a savage repression. In the case of the next town conquered, La Puebla de Cazalla east of Morón, refugees from there and Arahal had given bloodcurdling accounts of what had happened when Castejón’s column had arrived. Moreover, on 30 July, a rebel aircraft dropped leaflets threatening that the town would be bombed if it did not surrender immediately. Accordingly, no resistance was offered. Nevertheless, the repression that followed was unremitting. The crimes of the left had consisted of sacking the parish church and the headquarters of Acción Popular, requisitioning and distributing food and arresting forty-six local rebel sympathizers. No deaths occurred while the town was in the hands of the Popular Front Committee. Indeed, anarchists from Málaga had been prevented from killing the prisoners. Now, the occupying troops looted houses. Before cursory military trials started, over one hundred people were murdered. More than one thousand men, from a town of nine thousand inhabitants, were forcibly mobilized into the rebel army. To replace them, women and older men were used as slave labour.⁹⁶

Similarly, as Queipo had threatened, when Castejón’s column reached the prosperous railway junction and market town of Puente Genil in south-western Córdoba, the repression was indiscriminately ferocious. For once, the events that had followed the initial coup in the town provided some kind of excuse. The numerous forces from the town’s three Civil Guards barracks, supported by local Falangists, members of Acción Popular and landowners, had declared for the rebellion on 19 July, seizing the Casa del Pueblo and taking many prisoners. They were opposed by a combination of the local leftists and loyal security forces from Málaga. In fierce fighting over the next four days, around 250 left-wing workers and twenty-one Civil Guards were killed and fifteen wounded. A further fifty left-wing hostages were executed by the Civil Guards on 22 July.

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