by Paul Preston
The defeat of Sanjurjo did nothing to calm social hatred in the south and the behaviour of the Civil Guard did much to exacerbate it. In late 1932, near Fuente de Cantos in the south of Badajoz, a left-wing meeting in the nearby fields was broken up by the Civil Guard and a local union leader, Julián Alarcón, detained. To teach him a lesson, they buried him up to his neck and left him until his comrades could return and dig him out.75
In mid-December 1932, in Castellar de Santiago in the province of Ciudad Real, the Civil Guard stood immobile while local landowners and their retainers ran riot. The principal source of local employment was the olive harvest. There were few large estates and the smaller farmers who grew olives had trouble paying their workers a decent wage and preferred to employ workers from outside the province or women, who were traditionally paid less. After protests from the local Socialist workers’ society, the Casa del Pueblo, an agreement had been negotiated with the landowners not to use women and outside workers while local men remained idle. However, encouraged by the Agrupación Nacional de Propietarios de Fincas Rústicas (the Association of Rural Estate-Owners), an aristocratic pressure group, local farmers united to confront what was perceived as the temerity of the workers and ignored the agreement. The Mayor, under pressure from the landowners, did nothing to implement the agreements and simply tried to absent himself from the conflict by going to the town of Valdepeñas.
On 12 December, his car was stopped by a group of unemployed day-labourers who tried to make him return and do his job. Someone in his car fired a shot, hitting Aurelio Franco, the clerk of the Casa del Pueblo, and a fight started. Stones were thrown and the Mayor was hurt. The landowners and their armed guards then rampaged through workers’ houses, smashing furniture and threatening their wives and children. Aurelio Franco and two other union officials were pulled out of their houses and shot in front of their families. The Civil Guard witnessed the incidents but did not intervene. The FNTT newspaper, El Obrero de la Tierra, commented that what had happened in Castellar de Santiago ‘represents in its extreme form the barbarity of a moneyed class that believes that it owns people’s lives and livelihoods. Utterly out of control, the local bosses revealed the real nature of the class that they represent because they turned that place into a corner of Africa.’ A general strike was called in the province. Nevertheless, the local landowners continued to ignore working agreements and no one from the Castellar post of the Civil Guard was punished for dereliction of duty.76
Demonstrating the Civil Guard’s support for employers determined to block Republican social legislation, the events at Castellar de Santiago were surpassed less than one month later. Now dominated by the extremist FAI, the anarchist movement launched an ill-prepared insurrection on 8 January 1933. It was suppressed easily in most of Spain, but in the small village of Casas Viejas (Cádiz) a savage repression ensued. With the best land around the village used for breeding fighting bulls, the inhabitants faced year-round unemployment, near-starvation and endemic tuberculosis. The writer Ramón Sender wrote of the poor being maddened with hunger like stray dogs. When the FAI declaration of libertarian communism reached the local workers’ centre, the villagers hesitantly obeyed. Assuming that all of Cádiz had followed the revolutionary call, they did not expect bloodshed and naively invited the local landowners and the Civil Guard to join the new collective enterprise. To their bewilderment, the Civil Guard replied to the offer with gunfire. Many fled the village, but some took refuge in the hut of the septuagenarian Curro Cruz, known as Seisdedos. Inside with Seisdedos were his two sons, his cousin, his daughter and son-in-law, his daughter-in-law and his two grandchildren. They and a few other villagers were armed only with shotguns loaded with pellets. A company of Assault Guards arrived under the command of Captain Manuel Rojas Feijespan. During a night-long siege, several were killed as machine-gun bullets penetrated the mud walls of the hovel. Rojas ordered the Guards to set fire to the hut. Those who tried to escape were shot down. Another twelve villagers were executed in cold blood.77
The immediate reaction of the rightist press was favourable, echoing its customary applause for the Civil Guard’s repression of the rural proletariat.78 However, when they realized that political capital could be made, rightist groups cried crocodile tears and echoed anarchist indignation. Before the full details of the massacre were known, all three Socialist ministers, especially the moderate Indalecio Prieto, had given Azaña their support for the anarchist rising to be suppressed.79 However, despite their hostility to the anarchists, the Socialists could not approve of the gratuitous brutality displayed by the forces of order. To make matters worse, the officers responsible claimed falsely that they had been acting under orders. They were backed up to devastating effect by the future leader of the Unión Militar Española. Captain Barba Hernández was on duty the night of 8 January 1933. When the scandal broke out, he defended his friend Captain Rojas Feijespan by claiming that Azaña had personally given the order ‘shoot them in the belly’. Seized upon by the right-wing press, the fabrication did immense damage to the Republican–Socialist coalition.80 Casas Viejas and its repercussions brought home to the Socialist leadership the cost of participation in the government. They saw that the defence of the bourgeois Republic against the anarchists was sacrificing their credibility with the Socialist masses.
There was further violence during the campaign for the re-run municipal elections on 23 April 1933. There were to be elections in twenty-one towns in the province of Badajoz, the most important being Hornachos. On that day, the Mayor of Zafra, José González Barrero, headed a demonstration in Hornachos of three hundred Socialists and Communists. Red flags were flown and revolutionary chants heard. Initially, on the orders of the Civil Governor, the Civil Guard stood back. However, local rightists, who were running in the elections as the Anti-Marxist Coalition, approached Rafael Salazar Alonso, one of the Radical deputies for the province, who was in Hornachos on that day. Since there was no telephone line to Hornachos, Salazar Alonso drove to the nearby town of Villafranca de los Barros where he telephoned the Minister of the Interior and called for the Civil Guard to be given the freedom to open fire. In his own account, he was still in Villafranca de los Barros when that happened. Other sources suggest that, in fact, he was present when, after stones were thrown and a shot fired, the Civil Guard in Hornachos began to shoot at the crowd. Four men and one woman were killed and fourteen people wounded. Forty workers were arrested, several of whom were badly beaten.81 It was widely believed that Salazar Alonso was responsible for the action of the Civil Guard in Hornachos on that day.82
The pugnacious and provocative Salazar Alonso was a man given to extreme enthusiasms who, prior to 1931, had been a fiery, anti-clerical Republican but had undergone a dramatic change after falling under the spell of the landed aristocracy of Badajoz. In consequence, he threw himself into the service of reactionary interests with the zeal of a convert and played an important role in the genesis of violence in southern Spain. According to Pedro Vallina, a celebrated doctor of anarchist beliefs, Salazar Alonso was ferociously ambitious and had adopted anti-clericalism as a way of rising to prominence within the Radical Party. He had been born and brought up in Madrid. In his father’s home town, Siruela in Badajoz, he had married the daughter of a wealthy landowner. He had made his early career manifesting radical views, but once he secured a seat in parliament he moved rapidly to the right. During his lightning visit to Villafranca de los Barros on 23 April 1933, he met Amparo, the wife of another even wealthier landowner, a man much older than herself. He abandoned his own wife and children and began an affair with Amparo, who began to visit him in Madrid. The austere and idealistic Dr Vallina was confirmed in his view that Salazar Alonso was ‘one of the most shameless and cynical men I have ever known’. Even the head of the Radical Party, the corrupt Alejandro Lerroux, commented wistfully that Salazar Alonso ‘frequented palaces where I had never been other than on official business’.83 Eventually, both because of and despite the a
dulterous nature of his relationship with Amparo, he would abandon Freemasonry and become a pious Catholic.84
Throughout the spring and summer of 1933, evidence mounted that the Republic’s social laws were simply being ignored. Official labour exchanges and the arbitration committees known as mixed juries were bypassed and work offered only to men who would tear up their union cards. Land was withdrawn from cultivation. There were ever more cases of landowners shooting at workers. A meeting of the national committee of the UGT was held in mid-June to consider the drift to anarchist and Communist organizations of members frustrated by Socialist efforts to maintain worker discipline in the face of provocation.85
Workers – especially in the countryside – were being forced into increasing militancy by the employers’ refusal to comply with social legislation. As long as the Socialists had a presence in the government and could offer the prospect of reform, the unions would still respond to calls for discipline and patience. However, for some time, Alcalá Zamora had been seeking an opportunity to get the Republican–Socialist coalition out of power. This was partly because of discomfort with the Socialists and personal incompatibility with Manuel Azaña. In early September, despite a parliamentary vote of confidence for Azaña, the President invited the corrupt leader of the Radical Party, Alejandro Lerroux, to form a government. Unable to face parliament without certain defeat, he governed with the Cortes closed. Landowners were quickly delighted by the forbearing stance of the new Ministers of Agriculture, Ramón Feced Gresa (a property registrar by profession) and of Labour, Ricardo Samper (a Radical from Valencia). The new Minister of the Interior, Manuel Rico Avello, named several reactionary civil governors who permitted most of the Republic’s social legislation to be more or less ignored. To the detriment of local workers, cheap labourers were brought into the southern provinces from Galicia. Infractions of the law were not punished.86 Inevitably, the dwindling Socialist faith in bourgeois democracy was further undermined.
The appalling conditions in the southern countryside were revealed by the famous Socialist writer and playwright María Lejárraga, on a visit to a village in La Mancha. On her arrival, she discovered that the local Socialists had been unable to find a hall for her meeting. After frantic negotiations, they persuaded a local farmer to let them use his barnyard. After the pigs and hens were shooed away, the meeting began, illuminated only by the light of a hissing acetylene lamp. In the front row sat a number of wretched women, each with one or more children on her lap:
their misshapen heads connected to their skeletal bodies by stick-like necks, their bellies swollen, their little legs twisted into incredible shapes like those of a rag doll, their mouths gulping in air for want of better nourishment. This is the Spain that we found when the Republic was born. Behind the thin and prematurely aged women – who can ever tell whether a woman in the Castilian or Andalusian countryside is twenty-five or two hundred and fifty years old? – stood the men, the oldest supporting their frailty by leaning on the wall at the back.87
During the first two years of the Republic, the left had been appalled by the vehemence of opposition to what they regarded as basic humanitarian legislation. After the elections of November 1933, however, the flimsy foundations of a socially progressive Republic laid down in that period were to be ruthlessly torn up as the right used its victory to re-establish the repressive social relations obtaining before 1931. That the right should have the opportunity to do so was a cause of great bitterness within the Socialist movement. In large part, it was their own fault for having made the elemental mistake of rejecting an electoral alliance with the Left Republican forces and thus failing to take advantage of the electoral system. They now believed that the elections had no real validity. The Socialists had won 1,627,472 votes, almost certainly more than any other party running alone could have obtained. With these votes, they had returned fifty-eight deputies, while the Radical Party, with only 806,340 votes, had obtained 104 seats. According to calculations made by the secretariat of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the united right had gained a total of 212 seats with 3,345,504 votes, while the disunited left had won ninety-nine seats with 3,375,432 votes.88 That the right gained a parliamentary seat for fewer than 16,000 votes while left-wing seats ‘cost’ more than 34,000 was certainly galling, although that did not alter the fact that the main factor in determining the results was the party’s own tactical error in failing to take advantage of a system which favoured coalitions.
However, the Socialists had other, more substantial reasons for rejecting the validity of the elections. They were convinced that in the south they had been swindled out of parliamentary seats by electoral malpractice. In villages where one or two men were the sole source of employment, it was relatively easy to get votes by the promise of a job or the threat of dismissal. For many workers on the verge of starvation, a vote could be bought for food or a blanket. In Almendralejo (Badajoz), a local aristocrat bought votes with bread, olive oil and chorizo. In many villages of Granada and Badajoz, those who attended left-wing meetings were beaten by the landowners’ estate guards while the Civil Guard stood by. The new Civil Governors named by the Radicals were permitting ‘public order’ to be controlled by armed thugs in the service of the landowners. Sometimes with the active assistance of the Civil Guard, at other times simply with its benevolent neutrality, they were able to intimidate the left. In the province of Granada, Fernando de los Ríos and other candidates faced violent disruption of their campaign. In Huéscar, De los Ríos was met with a volley of rifle-fire and, in Moclín, his car was stoned by rightists. At Jérez del Marquesado, the local caciques (bosses) hired thugs whom they armed and filled with drink. De los Ríos was forced to abandon his planned meeting when he was warned that they planned an attempt on his life. At the remote village of Castril, near Huéscar, a meeting being addressed by María Lejárraga and De los Ríos was disrupted by the simple device of driving into the crowd some donkeys laden with logs. In Guadix, their words were drowned out by the persistent ringing of the nearby church bells. In the province of Córdoba, in Bujalance, the Civil Guard tore down left-wing election propaganda. In Montemayor, Encinas Reales, Puente Genil and Villanueva del Rey, Socialist and Communist candidates were prevented by the Civil Guard from giving election speeches. On the eve of the elections, there was an attempt on the life of the moderate Socialist leader Manuel Cordero. In Quintanilla de Abajo (Valladolid), local workers demonstrated against a fascist meeting. The Civil Guard searched them and, when one said that his only weapons were his hands, they broke his arms with rifle butts.89
Given the scale of unemployment in the province of Badajoz, nearly 40 per cent, and the consequent near-starvation of many of its inhabitants, it was inevitable that the election campaign should be marked by considerable violence. In a relatively short time, the Socialist deputy Margarita Nelken had won genuine popularity by vehemently expressing her deep concern for the landworkers and their families. In consequence, she became a target for right-wing hatred. Her passionate speeches at meetings throughout the province drew loud applause. The meetings were often suspended by the local authorities or, if they went ahead, interrupted by hecklers. Her principal opponent, the Radical champion of the local landowners, Rafael Salazar Alonso, larded his attacks on her with sexual insults. A local thug known as Bocanegra was released from prison, allegedly at the behest of Salazar Alonso, in order that he might inflict beatings on her, on another Socialist candidate, Juan-Simeón Vidarte, and on Dr Pedro Vallina, the immensely popular anarchist physician. Vidarte was also the victim of two assassination attempts in the province. In Hornachuelos (Córdoba), the Civil Guard lined up the women of the village at gunpoint and warned them not to vote. In Zalamea de la Sierra (Badajoz), local rightists shouting ‘¡Viva el Fascio!’ opened fire on the Casa del Pueblo, killing a worker.90
On the day after the election, Margarita Nelken sent a telegram to the Ministry of Labour protesting that a group of thugs led by the Radical Mayor of Aljuc�
�n in Badajoz had opened fire on groups of workers, killing one, seriously wounding two and wounding several more.91 Margarita was herself manhandled at gunpoint after a speech in the Casa de Pueblo of Aljucén. At voting stations, Civil Guards obliged workers to exchange their voting slips for ones already marked in favour of right-wing candidates. There was significant falsification by the right – votes bought with food and/or blankets, intimidation of voters, repeat voting by truckloads of right-wing sympathizers and the ‘misplacing’ of boxes of votes from places with known left-wing majorities. The consequence was that the PSOE won only the three seats allotted to the minority block for the province – Margarita Nelken, along with fellow Socialists Pedro Rubio Heredia and Juan-Simeón Vidarte.92
Throughout the south, glass voting urns and the louring presence of the caciques’ thugs made the secret ballot irrelevant. In some provinces (particularly Badajoz, Málaga and Córdoba), the margin of rightist victory was sufficiently small for electoral malpractice to have affected the results. In Granada, there were nine towns where the rightist majority was an implausible 100 per cent, two where it was 99 per cent and a further twenty-one where it was between 84 and 97 per cent. After the elections, the Minister of Justice resigned, in protest at the level of electoral falsification.93 Across the south, the landowners returned to the semi-feudal relations of dependence that had been the norm before 1931.