Читать книгу The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain - Paul Preston - Страница 16

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