In March 1934, he attended the meeting in Valladolid at which José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Falange Española and the JONS were unified. The latter, he believed, was more revolutionary, the Falange ‘less dictatorial, more philosophical’.7 Not for nothing did the JONS call itself syndicalist; ‘on occasions we were capable of using the same tactics as the anarcho-syndicalists’. The meeting ended with shooting in the streets of Valladolid.
Back in his own village, where he was the only falangist, and virtually unable to leave his house at night, he attempted to blow up the local socialist casa del pueblo with a stick of dynamite; the labourers’ threats were becoming intolerable to him.8 If anything, the women were the worst. On one occasion, they broke up a religious procession by dancing and shouting around it in the streets. One man publicly urinated against the church door. Justice saw to it that he died a year later of cancer of the anus. The stick of dynamite exploded; but lacking experience in these matters, he failed to place it correctly to cause serious damage.
His novia sometimes had to carry his pistol in her bosom when they went out into the village because the guardia civil were always searching for arms. Not that he had much free time for going out; with the eight-hour day that the republic had introduced for agricultural labourers, farming was becoming impossible. He had to sleep in the stables to get the five pairs of mules fed and ready to be out in the fields by 8 a.m., and bring them back in the evening, to make the most of the labourers’ work day, which had been previously from sunrise to sunset.
If things had been bad before, after the Popular Front victory at the polls they got even worse. One of the labourers pulled a pistol on his uncle in the fields. ‘¡Me cago en la leche! We’re going to finish off all these carcas,’ the man cried. His fat and cowardly uncle, who hadn’t dared get off his horse in the fields since the republic was proclaimed, rode home in a sorry state.
—My blood boiled. I remember I was sewing headgear for the mules. When the workers came in from the fields, I disarmed the man and handed his pistol over to the justice of the peace. The next morning, when my uncle opened the door to let the labourers in, one of them again threatened to kill him …
Pistol in pocket, he set out to accompany his uncle to the townhall. The village square was packed – the labourers had gone on strike. ‘Don’t run,’ he warned his uncle. He took cover behind a pillar; at that moment the people started to surge towards them. Frightened, his uncle ran, pursued by a labourer in whose hand PASTOR saw a gleaming knife. His uncle tripped and fell.
—I pulled out my pistol. ‘Let’s see if they can kill me,’ I thought. I started to fire. The people fled. My uncle was scared out of his wits but unhurt. I walked into the townhall where the socialist council was meeting. ‘Hands up!’ At gun point I made them get out. ‘Give me that pistol,’ the justice of the peace said.
‘Grab hold of it by the barrel, then,’ I replied. I wasn’t handing it over with a hundred men outside in the square waiting to kill me …
Looking round the council room, he discovered the labourer’s pistol he had handed in the evening before. He was going to need two to get out of there alive. In the square he could see men armed with wooden pitchforks and shotguns ready to come for him. Meanwhile, searching through some papers, he found ‘the black lists of all of us who were to be assassinated’. It wasn’t just his uncle they were out to kill. He looked out of the window again and saw that the guardia civil had arrived from Medina de Rioseco. There would be no more shooting. Before leaving the townhall, he sent out for the best cigar to be found in the village tobacconist shop.
—I came out and raised the cigar in my manacled hands above my head and shouted ‘¡Arriba España!’ There was a tremendous uproar. They’d have lynched me if I hadn’t been protected by the guardia. There wasn’t a single landowning farmer to be seen; all of them, though they thought like us, had shut themselves up in their homes …
His counsel wanted to turn the trial into a non-political case. Opposed to this defence, PASTOR arrived in court wearing his blue falangist shirt and red and black tie, and gave the fascist salute. ‘¡Arriba España!’ he cried. Sentenced to several months’ imprisonment, he soon found himself in gaol with the bulk of the local falangist leadership who were under preventive detention.
* * *
After an assassination attempt on a leading socialist professor and deputy in Madrid, the Falange leadership in the capital had been arrested and its headquarters closed. José Antonio Primo de Rivera continued to direct the movement from prison. In Segovia, the local Falange chief, Dionisio RIDRUEJO, a student, remained at liberty. Convinced that the February general elections had been the last, he was equally sure that if the Popular Front established itself in power, there was going to be revolution: the socialists would take power.
—That was certainly what the bourgeoisie felt, rightly, I thought. The socialists kept continuous pressure on the government from the streets. The masses were taking the initiative, even if they weren’t intentionally heading for revolution. The bourgeoisie was frightened. Never having made its own revolution, it was much more frightened of revolution than its French counterpart. A revolution was the end of the world as far as it was concerned. The Spanish bourgeoisie never had any confidence in itself, and throughout its history relied on armed force to sustain it …
After the elections, street fights, assassination attempts, funerals which turned into riots and generated new clashes, new funerals, were frequent. Whereas before the elections, he observed, the left had usually provoked such fights, falangists now instinctively understood that they needed to draw out the struggle to achieve their aims. If the military suddenly rose they were unlikely to hand power over to the Falange.
—But, by and large, the bourgeoisie didn’t show much enthusiasm for the falangist riposte. They were waiting for the military to rise; they didn’t want the struggle, the disorder, to continue: they wanted it ended. ‘Things can’t be allowed to continue like this,’ was a phrase interminably repeated. Officers were publicly insulted, called cowards for not rising. The mounting lack of law and order was the apparent cause. (In truth, the disorder was about what one might expect in a democratic country during a critical moment of strikes and student agitation.) The real cause was the fear that the working-class organizations were going to make their revolution. The proof is that the military plot did not really begin to take firm shape until after the elections. They had tried before – ever since the republic was proclaimed – but without success. Now it became a bet to see who would rise first …
Various generals planned risings in April and again in May; the Falange was to take part in one of the latter. Carlists, who had uprisings ‘in their guts’ and had been training their requetés for the past two years, also planned to rise on their own – in Andalusia. Unluckily for the republic, all these attempts were called off at the last moment, their success being dubious.
* * *
Let us not deceive ourselves! A country can live under a monarchy or a republic, with a parliamentary or a presidential system, under communism or fascism. But it cannot live in anarchy. Now, alas, Spain is in anarchy. And we are today present at the funeral service of democracy.
Gil Robles, CEDA leader (Parliamentary speech, 16 June 1936)
* * *
There are strikes in Spain. That is natural, logical … We know that the proletariat’s spirit of innovation cannot be reconciled with the interests of a republic which aims to preserve itself and the institutions which shape it.
Solidaridad Obrera, CNT (Barcelona, 2 June 1936)
* * *
What no country can endure is constant bloodletting and public disorder without an immediate revolutionary end … I tell you, this is not revolution … it is the climate which fascism requires …
Indalecio Prieto, socialist leader (May Day speech, Cuenca, 1936)
* * *
No more strikes, no more lock-outs, no more usurious interest, no more of capita
lism’s abusive financial formulae, no more starvation wages, no more political salaries gained by happy accident, no more anarchic liberty, no more criminal loss of production, for national production is above all classes, all parties, and all interests.
Many call that the fascist state. If it is, then I who share that idea of the (integrative) state and believe in it, declare myself fascist.
Calvo Sotelo, monarchist leader (Parliamentary speech, 16 June 1936)
* * *
The proletariat must not limit itself to defending bourgeois democracy, but must ensure by every means the conquest of political power in order to make the social revolution. The form of government in the period of transition between capitalist and socialist society will be the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Resolution of the Madrid socialist party group, Caballero-wing (21 May 1936)
* * *
In the barely industrialized capital of Madrid and southwards into the latifundist region of New Castile, Estremadura and Andalusia, with its high concentration of landless labourers, the level of agitation and violence began to rise. To the urban street violence between the Falange, reinforced by the influx of JAP members, and the socialist youth, now fused with the young communists in the unified socialist youth (JSU), was added renewed rural agitation. The left republicans in power were (as they had been throughout the republic) dependent on working-class support and this was being largely denied them; the revolutionary proletariat was not to be contained within the moderate Popular Front programme. From right to left, the bourgeois republican parties saw the danger and momentarily attempted to overcome their previous antagonism and close ranks;9 it was too late.
Though scores of small towns and villages were trouble-free, in others the accumulated hostility of years erupted as soon as the election results were known. Such was the case in Fuensalida, a small village not far from Toledo. Looking out of the window of his house, the local vet’s son, Pedro GARCIA, saw a man, shotgun in hand, holding off a crowd surging towards him in the little square, hurling stones. The man was a rich, right-wing landlord, the only one who had dared show his face. It was like something out of the wild west, he thought. Tension in the village had been rising for years. The labourers, who formed the bulk of the village, had become more and more violent, and the landlords responded in kind. In 1932, the guardia civil fired into a peasant demonstration, killing a father and his infant, and wounding several others.10 He could remember how the labourers had traced a large cross in the earth of the main square.
—The tension affected even us children. The Pioneers, the socialist youth organization, terrorized us at school. They called us the sons of parasites – the word fascist wasn’t yet fashionable – the señoritos who ate chops. There was an unbridgeable gulf between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between those who ate, and those who couldn’t afford to eat, chops …
The Popular Front victory galvanized the peasantry in the latifundist regions. Barely a month after the election, 60,000 peasants in Badajoz, organized by the socialist-led Landworkers’ Federation, took over 3,000 previously selected farms and began to plough them. In a single stroke, the peasantry occupied more land than the agrarian reform of the previous three and a half years had granted them.
José VERGARA, a liberal republican agronomist, who had served as the Agrarian Reform Institute’s delegate in Toledo province, believed that the situation had dramatically changed in the two years since he had left there.
—A revolution was brewing in the countryside, the bourgeoisie was frightened. There was no way the republic could solve the problem. The agrarian reform law as such was unworkable.11 In its absence, the peasants were taking over the land themselves …
The communist party, the most determined of the working-class parties in its support of the Popular Front, participated actively in the land take-overs. According to the party, it was the Popular Front’s task to carry the bourgeois-democratic revolution – ‘Which had never been made in Spain’ – to its conclusion.12 The expropriation of large estates fell within the confines of this revolution, whose historic task was to abolish ‘semi-feudal’ vestiges in the countryside.
Trinidad GARCIA, a day-labourer’s son and member of the communist party’s Toledo provincial committee, had been telling the peasantry during the election campaign that if ‘those in charge’ didn’t make the agrarian reform, ‘we’ll make it ourselves’. The land was the key problem. In some villages, the peasants went out even before the elections and took over big landowners’ farms and formed cooperatives or collectives on their own account. In others, like La Villa de don Fadrique, a communist stronghold, it took the elections to set the takeover process in motion. The communist mayor called an assembly of the township’s 10,000 inhabitants and explained party policy: wherever possible, the poor peasantry and landless labourers should carry out the agrarian reform without waiting for the Agrarian Reform Institute.
—Then he went on to propose that all the local large estates should be taken over and worked collectively by the labourers; smallholders should get extra land from the estates, so that their holdings became viable family-operated units. But he urged the smallholders to work all their land collectively, stressing the social and economic advantages of this, recalled Julián VAZQUEZ, a communist garment worker who had been sent by a party weekly from Madrid to cover the event. The proposal was overwhelmingly approved. The three largest owners were brothers, each of whom, I remember, belonged to a different republican party; the political cleverness of the rich! It did them no good, they were all expropriated, including the one who had joined the left republicans! …
‘Semi-feudal’ vestiges in the countryside were being liquidated not only at the aristocracy’s but also at the bourgeoisie’s expense. This was inevitable, for the nobility owned little more than 10 per cent of the arable land – a fact that was little remarked at the time, but which was to have its repercussions on the rural bourgeoisie.
Month after month agricultural strikes increased; in the two and a half months leading up to the war, there were almost as many as in the most conflictive year of 1933. Harvest wages doubled, real labour costs on the land probably tripled.13
Things had got bad enough for José AVILA, a labrador in Espejo, an agro-township in Córdoba province, not to know whether it was worth sowing the land because he couldn’t be sure whether the harvest would be brought in. Most of the labradores were in his position. He had given up planting crops which could not be left standing in the fields when ripe. Wages were the apparent cause of the strife, but when it came to claims they had always reached agreement in the end. What was it these labourers really wanted? What was it that caused these frequent lightning strikes?
—Politics, that was where the trouble lay. Everyone read a lot, everyone had his own point of view, everyone went his own way. If there had been just two sorts of politics, left and right, things would have been better. But there were so many ideologies, especially on the left: republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists. I don’t know what the labourers really wanted. I don’t think they knew themselves. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good for us farmers.
At work they began to make remarks to our faces. ‘Not a single fascist must be allowed to live.’ It became risky for us to live on the cortijos. The labourers talked of the reparto but was that what they really wanted? When the republic took over the duke of Medinaceli’s three estates near here,14 the people didn’t seem satisfied with the land they got. They wanted something else.
If only there had been a strong political organization, left or right, republican or non-republican, things wouldn’t have reached the stage they did. Guarantees, rights – fine! But law and order as well. That was what was missing …
* * *
Militancies 3
JUAN MORENO
CNT day-labourer
—What did we want? Not the sort of agrarian reform the republic was trying to make. The state and capitalism are the worker’s two worst e
nemies. What we wanted was the land – for the workers to take it over and work it collectively without the state intervening …
Forty-three years old, MORENO had been a syndicalist militant in his native township of Castro del Río for the past twenty years or more, including the ‘Three Bolshevik Years’ of 1918–20 when, in the space of eighteen months, he and his companions had declared six general strikes. They had won some notable gains, even if they had overthrown neither the state nor capitalism. Castro, with a population of over 10,000, had become one of the leading anarcho-syndicalist centres of western Andalusia.
Unlike the neighbouring township of Espejo, where the workers participated in the Agrarian Reform Institute’s take-over of the duke of Medinaceli’s estates, the anarcho-syndicalists of Castro refused to have anything to do with agrarian reform. The attitude of the Castro militants had been determined many years before during the ‘Bolshevik Years’ when a syndicalist congress had decided ‘not to beg land from the ruling classes, since we are irreconcilable enemies of authority and property; if we want land we should follow the Bolsheviks’ example’.15
More recently, at its first National Congress under the republic, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT had declared its hostility to agrarian reform: the rural unions’ task was not to obtain land by cooperating with the government’s agrarian reform, but to work for the ‘revolutionary preparation of the rural masses’ and the day when, in collaboration with the proletariat, they would overthrow capitalism and take the land. The Congress had gone on to declare that the CNT remained in ‘open war’ with the state, and that the republican regime, then two months old, was to all intents and purposes as ‘oppressive’ a power as any other.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 11