After four months in Paris he decided to leave for the nationalist zone. He wrote to Franco and to Queipo de Llano, a good friend of his. He belonged to no political party. Although a friend of President Azaña in the past, he had broken off relations with him when the latter became actively involved in politics. In a judicial career, he believed, one should not be politically involved. He came to his decision to return from a sense of patriotism and the conviction that ‘a fire cannot be put out by running away from it’.
—It was up to Spaniards to solve the problems of Spain. My wife advised me not to return. ‘The nationalists are just as brutal as the reds,’ she maintained; but she came with me when, on New Year’s day 1937, we left Marseilles by ship for Gibraltar …
The morning after their arrival in La Linea, across the border from Gibraltar, his wife wanted to return briefly to the latter to buy some silk stockings. He went to the security forces’ commandant to get a pass; after the latter had read a sheet of paper lying on his desk, he looked up and said: ‘¡Ay señor! this is very disagreeable. This piece of paper informs me that I must arrest you.’ …
—‘In that case you had better carry out your duty,’ I replied. I was taken to a military barracks where a captain called Manuel Jiménez said to me: ‘Prepare yourself, for tonight you are going to be executed.’ He spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, sitting in his office: there was no question of a trial. I didn’t lose my composure. ‘Why are you going to shoot me?’ ‘You know the reason as well as I.’ ‘I don’t know at all, but I do know one thing: if you shoot me tonight you’ll regret it tomorrow. Don’t you know where I’ve come from? If I had anything to hide I wouldn’t have come.’ …
Unfortunately for him, he did not have on him the letters from Franco and Queipo de Llano. The captain refused to allow him to use the telephone to ring Seville. But his wife, on her own initiative, had done so and spoken to Queipo de Llano, who was about to leave for the Marbella front where the offensive along the coast towards Málaga was under way. Before leaving, he was able to send orders that PARTALOA was to be transferred to Seville prison until he returned. It was a stroke of luck.
Only later did PARTALOA discover that the cause of his arrest was the allegation that he had stood as a communist candidate in parliamentary elections. The denuncia had been made by a man from Almería, now in Algeciras in the nationalist zone, whom PARTALOA had helped on several occasions in the past and who had heard of his arrival …
Transferred to Seville, PARTALOA reached the prison at 2 a.m. Queipo’s wife had telephoned to say he was coming and was to be treated with every courtesy. He was told he could spend the night in a room where a fire was burning. He pulled up a chair, but soon some Moorish troops came in. He had never liked Moors and he asked to be taken to a cell. As the warder opened the cell door he saw that there were some twenty men crammed into a tiny space trying to sleep on the floor. The prisoners began to protest.
—I said I understood but that I didn’t want to spend the night in the same room with Moors. As soon as they heard the word Moors they leapt up, exclaiming. They were right. Ten minutes later the cell door opened again.
‘All those whose names I call get up and step forward. It’s no good trying to hide.’ The warder called three names. The prisoners stepped forward. I’ll never forget the last one, he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, and he was rolling a cigarette. He went on rolling it until it was finished, got up and turned to us: ‘I wish you all better luck,’ he said, and went out. That scene is engraved on my memory. The men were taken out, their jackets removed, their hands bound behind their backs with rope or wire, and they were led away to be shot.
They hadn’t been tried; by Spanish law, no one under eighteen could be sentenced to death. It was enough, as I was soon to see in Córdoba, for the head of public order simply to put a cross beside a name on a list …
Released from Seville prison, where he personally had been treated well, he went to see Queipo; it had been his intention to take over the running of social affairs in the general’s zone – an intention which included taking over all the large estates and dividing them up amongst the peasantry. Queipo, he was sure, would have agreed; but after his reception in the nationalist zone he felt unable to take on the task.
—‘Look, don Gonzalo,’ I said to Queipo, ‘a dog is the only animal you can beat and which will come and give you its paw. I haven’t had a happy reception here; I’m sorry, but you can’t count on my help.’ ‘What you have said is well said, and your decision is very just,’ he replied. And so I went to Córdoba where, in the past, I had served as a public prosecutor …
Not, however, to practise. For his dismissal from his post by the republican authorities for being a ‘fascist’ was now followed by his dismissal by the nationalists for not having supported the military uprising. The two dismissals were published officially in both zones within a few days of each other. They satisfied him equally, for they showed that he supported neither ‘fascism’ nor ‘communism’, both of which he hated as totalitarian.
—But let me say this quite clearly. I had occasion to witness the repression that was being carried on in both zones. In the nationalist zone it was planned, methodical, cold. The authorities didn’t trust the people and imposed their will through terror. To do so they committed atrocities. In the Popular Front zone atrocities were also committed. That was the similarity between the two; but the difference was that in the republican zone the crimes were committed by an impassioned people, not by the authorities. The latter always tried to prevent crimes; my own case of being helped to escape is only one of many. It wasn’t so in the nationalist zone. There more people were shot, it was scientifically organized …
Day after day he attended courts martial in Córdoba, observing nationalist justice at work. The courts martial were no more than a ‘mask of legality’, in his view, trying and sentencing, in a single day’s mass session, thirty or forty people without for a moment attempting to ascertain whether the accusations against them were true. ‘Death sentence, death sentence, death sentence.’
—The officers on the courts were honourable men, but they knew very little about law and saw sedition in everything. They often asked my advice. I’m happy to recall that I managed to save eighteen people from execution. It meant sitting in silence day after day, witnessing the atrocities that were being committed – I couldn’t intervene unless asked, my reputation as a ‘red’ would have meant that I would have lost what little moral authority I had over them if I had tried – in order, occasionally, to be able to do something …
But when Major Ibañez – don Bruno – the civil guard officer who had been appointed head of public order in Córdoba,2 sat proudly informing him of the purge he was carrying out, PARTALOA felt too frightened to tell him straight to his face what he thought. ‘It was the most humiliating experience of my life.’ Don Bruno justified the repression by maintaining that Spain had to be ‘rid of these bad people’. Bad people?
—He got hold of the list of the workers’ representatives on the joint employers–workers’ committee in Córdoba under the dictatorship before the republic and had every single one of them shot. I know that for a fact, because I was the president in 1930 of seven such committees, and I was able to do something that I believe was unique in labour relations there: to get all seven to agree unanimously to new wage rates. The workers’ representatives, some 100 in all, were fine men; in those committees they overcame the class struggle to reach agreement with the employers. And he shot them all!
Tremendous atrocities. One other example, no more. A certain count, a good friend of don Bruno’s, told me this himself. One day the count discovered that a friend of his was to be shot that very night. He jumped into a car and caught up with the lorry taking the men to their execution. As his friendship with don Bruno was well known, he was able to stop the lorry, and he ordered his friend to be taken off. The head of the squad refused, maintaining that he was under
orders to deliver eighteen corpses – corpses, not prisoners – to the cemetery. The count then grabbed a passer-by, ordered him on to the lorry, and took his friend off. The hapless man was executed with the rest …
SEVILLE
General Queipo de Llano ran the nationalist zone of Andalusia and Estremadura like a viceroyalty. With the working class – such as remained – cowed, with trade unions abolished and wages restored to their pre-Popular Front levels, he set out to introduce a regime which assured the ‘harmonious co-existence of capital and labour’.
‘I ask you, workers, does disorder, anarchy and gangsterism suit you better than a government which imposes freedom from above? The real freedom, which ends where that of your neighbour begins?’ he asked in a speech at the opening of a building site for cheap workers’ housing. Capital and labour were dependent one on the other; but while there was an apparent equality between them, no such equality existed among men, for such was not ‘natural’. However, he promised that no great fortunes would be made in future while people were dying of hunger. As a gesture of intent, he forbade employers to sack workers without ‘prior authorization from the regional labour office’; and abolished employers’ associations, for ‘it is not fair that workers’ organizations should disappear while employers have associations to defend their interests, interests which must be abolished’.
Convinced that the major part of the ills which afflicted Spain originated in its ‘abandoned state of agriculture’, he set in motion a number of projects. One of these was to drain and put into cultivation 100,000 hectares of the marshlands along the Guadalquivir from Seville to the sea to provide work and homes for several thousand families. As the state could not spend large sums of money, he told the landowners involved, at a meeting, they would have to contribute in proportion to the size of their holdings. When asked for their opinion, none answered. The engineer in charge of the project informed the owners that the scheme’s cost of 4 million pesetas could be reduced to only one third of that total by ‘the use of personnel whom the general will put at the scheme’s disposal’.3 Thus reassured, they gave their consent.
—With the result that an area where hardly any rice was grown before has become the most important rice-growing area of Spain, exceeding even that of Valencia, explained Prudencio PUMAR, a lawyer, who was to become involved in an even more ambitious project under the general’s auspices.
One day in October 1936, he and some friends agreed, in casual conversation, that Seville – ‘birthplace and heart of the nationalist movement’ – needed industry. One of the men commented that cotton was grown successfully in Andalusia but that there was no processing industry. They formed a committee and took their idea to Queipo. He backed it wholeheartedly.
—Any worthwhile initiative suggested in good faith always found his support. We got in touch with the technical junta of the newly formed Burgos administration, and met considerable resistance: the Catalans on the junta didn’t want to see a textile plant in Seville. At that time, apart from a very old cloth factory, the only industry in the city was engaged in the transformation of agricultural products, mainly olives …
Less than a year later HYTASA was launched with a capitalization of 100 million pesetas. Difficulties in getting foreign exchange out of the Burgos administration to buy machinery in Switzerland – ‘we wanted only the best’ – were overcome with Queipo’s help. For an initial outlay of 700,000 pesetas the company was able to buy machinery worth 10 millions. At the beginning the company’s originators had difficulties in subscribing shares. ‘The people of Seville weren’t used to the idea of industrial ventures; it took quite an effort to sell small numbers of 1,000-peseta shares at par to raise the capital; but we managed that, too.’
HYTASA was the only integrated textile factory in Andalusia.4 Raw cotton prices were fixed for the farmer – calculated on equivalent guaranteed prices for maize and chick-peas – and the prices of finished textile products were also regulated. Given the shortage of textiles in the nationalist zone – the bulk of the industry being in Catalonia – HYTASA’S initial success was virtually guaranteed; production in the first years averaged some 50 million to 60 million pesetas annually. But, in PUMAR’S view, the reasons for success were more profound; the secret of the nationalist economy resided in the fact that there was law and order in the zone.
—Security, safety and confidence. I wasn’t a political person; yet I supported the uprising because life had become impossible. You couldn’t walk the streets in safety. One of Queipo’s major successes was to rid this zone of strikes. People knew that authority existed and that something unpleasant might happen if they tried to strike; Queipo wouldn’t have tolerated any such thing for a moment …
With this tranquillity, he felt, it was only natural that business confidence existed and that the new authorities were able to secure help from abroad, especially from Germany, Italy and Portugal. ‘Help that was given to those who respected law and order, who inspired confidence, to an army that was always advancing.’
The confidence inspired by the nationalist zone was by no means limited to the European fascist regimes: convinced of where its real interests lay, international capital subscribed to the nationalist war effort in no uncertain manner.
The insurrection having succeeded only in agricultural provinces which, in 1935, contributed less than one third of the state’s taxes, the nationalists started the war at a considerable economic disadvantage. Measures such as postponing payments on the national debt and on 60 per cent of all war supplies, as well as new taxes, still left more than two thirds of the necessary finance unprovided. Without Italian and German aid, estimated in total at over £116 million ($570 million), they could not have carried on the war. On top of this they were able to buy £15 million ($76 million) of war-related supplies from the dollar and sterling countries.5 The Texas Oil Company delivered nearly 2 million tons of oil on long-term credit and without guarantees between 1936 and 1939; British mining companies lodged no protest when the Burgos regime exported half their ore to Nazi Germany at an artificially low peseta exchange rate. Exports flourished – sherry sales, mainly to Britain, reached nearly £2 million in 1937, their highest level for many years, and the US contracted to buy $4 million worth of the 1938 olive crop.6 Surplus wheat from the two previous years’ crops which was still in storage was shipped to Germany. In 1937, the nationalists were able to export to the sterling area products worth £12 million and to Germany approximately half that amount again; the total exports of undivided Spain two years earlier had been only 20 per cent higher.7
Queipo concerned himself not only with his area’s economy but with welfare problems. He was determined to provide Seville’s needy inhabitants with cheap housing. There could be little doubt of the necessity of such a project: of the city’s 267,000 inhabitants, 90,000 were estimated to be living in rooming houses, packed on average five to a room, while another 20,000 lived in shanty towns around the city.8 ‘The home is the seat of the family, and the Christian family is the fundamental base of a vigorous and strong nation,’ declared the preamble to Queipo’s housing decree of December 1936. Fourteen months later, 360 houses were said to have been built or to be under construction, a figure which was given as 1,000 by December 1938.
The land, however, was Queipo’s chief concern. Within six weeks of the rising, he had set up a marketing board to fix minimum prices for wheat, flour and bread; in the autumn he decreed that no farmer could sow less wheat than his previous five-year average and took measures to make seed available; in March 1937, he founded a provincial savings bank to ‘redeem the small farmer from usury, making possible loans at a modest interest of 5 per cent p.a. in place of the 5 per cent per month which some people demand’. The matter of quashing the agrarian reform settlements he did not have to handle; the national defence junta in Burgos took care of that.9
Near the hamlet of Santa Cruz, some 25 km from Córdoba, José AVILA’s family became tenant farmers on one of th
e duke of Medinaceli’s estates which had been expropriated and distributed to peasant settlers under the agrarian reform law.10 The settlers had fled, the wheat was still standing; the uprising had started as the crop was ready to harvest, and livestock had been let in to graze it. AVILA’s family was offered the tenancy because the original tenant had been assassinated in neighbouring Espejo – one of some sixty people to suffer that fate in the township. ‘Tenant farmers for the most part – our sort was the backbone of a place like that.’ AVILA and his family fled the township and got to Córdoba, to return when Espejo was captured. His oldest brother ran the estate, their father having died, while he and two younger brothers acted as foremen. None of them received a wage; on Sundays, their mother, who was the legal tenant, gave them a tip. ‘That was how we lived then. I was twenty-nine at the time.’
But in other respects, he found, there had been a dramatic change. There were no labour disputes, no trouble of any sort, everything went smoothly, tranquilly.
—What a contrast to pre-war! Strikes disappeared, it wasn’t even necessary to outlaw them. For who was going to organize a strike now that there were no political parties? This fact convinced me that previously the strikes had been politically motivated, that the labourers struck on orders from others without really knowing why. It was a labyrinth from which we had at last managed to escape …
It was a large estate for the times. To farm its 1,000 fanegas (650 hectares) without mechanization was the equivalent of farming 2,000 hectares with tractors and combine harvesters, he estimated. At harvest time, the estate required up to 120 men, at other times between forty and fifty, with twenty-four yokes of mules. Even so, it was extensive farming, in space and time: each year in rotation one third of the estate was left for grazing, one third grew a fallow crop of legumes or maize and the remaining third grew wheat. To bring in the harvest took two months, compared to two weeks with mechanization, and the same was true of ploughing.
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