Читать книгу The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain - Paul Preston - Страница 19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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