by Paul Preston
José Prat García, PSOE deputy for Albacete, in a reasoned speech to the Cortes, pointed out the anti-constitutional nature of Salazar Alonso’s measures. He reiterated that the FNTT had followed due legal process in declaring its strike. The application of existing legislation would have been sufficient to solve the conflict, claimed Prat, but Salazar Alfonso had rejected a peaceful solution and resorted to repression. The Minister replied aggressively that, because the FNTT’s objective was to force the government to take action, the strike was subversive. When he stated, falsely, that the government was taking steps against owners who imposed hunger wages, José Prat replied that, on the contrary, he had frustrated all attempts at conciliation, by overruling the negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Labour and Agriculture. Prat concluded by stating that the strike aimed only to protect the rural labourers and to end situations such as that in Guadix (Granada) that had reduced workers to eating grass. José Antonio Trabal Sanz, of the Catalan Republican Left, declared that Salazar Alonso seemed to regard the wishes of the plutocracy and the national interest as synonymous. Cayetano Bolivar, Communist deputy for Málaga, claimed that the government’s provocation was closing the doors of legality and pushing the workers to revolution. When Bolivar mentioned the workers’ hunger, a right-wing deputy shouted that he and the rest of the majority were also hungry and the debate ended.55
As his early preparations made with Bedia and Valdivia revealed, conciliation had not been uppermost in Salazar Alonso’s mind. His measures were now swift and ruthless to weaken the left in advance of the conflict. Workers’ leaders were rounded up before the strike had started. Other liberal and left-wing individuals in the country districts were arrested wholesale. On 31 May, José González Barrero, the recently removed Mayor of Zafra, was arrested on trumped-up charges. The Mayors of Olivenza and Llerena, also in Badajoz, were likewise arrested, as were numerous union officials, schoolteachers and lawyers, some of whom were beaten or tortured. Salazar Alonso had effectively militarized the landworkers when he had declared the harvest a national public service. Strikers were thus mutineers and were arrested in their thousands. Even four Socialist deputies, including Cayetano Bolívar, visiting prisoners in Jaén, were detained – in violation of the Constitution.56
In the prison of Badajoz, with a normal capacity of eighty prisoners, six hundred were held in appalling conditions. There was similar overcrowding in the prisons of Almendralejo, Don Benito and other towns in the province. In addition to those arrested, several thousand peasants were simply loaded at gunpoint on to cattle trucks and deported hundreds of miles away from their homes and then left to make their own way back penniless and on foot. On 4 July, two hundred starving peasants from Badajoz who had been imprisoned in Burgos reached Madrid and congregated in the Puerta del Sol where they were violently dispersed by the police. The FNTT paid for them to return home, where many were rearrested.57
Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils, especially in Badajoz and Cáceres, were removed, and the Mayor and councillors replaced by government nominees. The strike seems to have been almost complete in Jaén, Granada, Ciudad Real, Badajoz and Cáceres, and substantial elsewhere in the south. In Jaén and Badajoz, there were violent clashes in many villages between strikers and the permanent workers, the armed guards of the large estates and the Civil Guard. However, neither there nor in other less conflictive provinces could the strikers stop the owners drafting in outside labour, with Civil Guard protection, from Portugal, Galicia and elsewhere. The army was brought in to use threshing machines and the harvest was collected without serious interruption. The CNT did not join in the strike, which limited its impact in Seville and Córdoba although that did not protect anarchist workers from the subsequent repression. Although most of the labourers arrested on charges of sedition were released by the end of August, emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders, including González Barrero, to four or more years of imprisonment.58
The Casas del Pueblo were not reopened and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936. In an uneven battle, the FNTT had suffered a terrible defeat. In several provinces, the remaining Socialist town councils were overturned and replaced by the caciques’ nominees. In Granada, the Civil Governor was removed at the behest of local landowners because he had made an effort to ensure that the remaining labour legislation was implemented after the strike.59 In the Spanish countryside, the clock had effectively been put back to the 1920s by Salazar Alonso. There were no longer any rural unions, social legislation or municipal authorities to challenge the dominance of the caciques. The CEDA was delighted.60
By choosing to regard a strike of limited material objectives as revolutionary, Salazar Alonso was able to justify his attack on Socialist councils. As has already been noted, he claimed that, by the end of the conflict, he had removed only 193 of them. However, the real figures were much higher. In Granada alone, during the period that the Radicals were in power, 127 were removed. In Badajoz, the figure was nearer 150.61 By his aggressively brutal action during the peasant strike, the Minister of the Interior had inflicted a terrible blow on the largest union within the UGT and left a festering legacy of hatred in the south. Local landowners were quick to reimpose more or less feudal conditions on workers whom they regarded as serfs. Wages were slashed and work given only to non-union workers regarded as ‘loyal’.
Shortly after entering the Ministry of the Interior, Salazar Alonso had crushed strikes in the metal, building and newspaper industries on the grounds that they were political. He had done so despite pleas from labour leaders that all these disputes had social and economic origins and were not meant to be revolutionary.62 In the summer of 1934, he had managed to escalate the harvest strike and smash the FNTT. Despite his success, Salazar Alonso was still some way from his long-term goal of destroying any and all elements that he considered to be a challenge to the government.
This was clear from a letter that he wrote to his lover Amparo at the end of July:
You can imagine what I’m going through. It could be said that this is the beginning of a revolutionary movement much more serious than the more frivolous might think. Conscious of the enormous responsibilities I bear, I am totally dedicated to the task of crushing it. It’s true that the campaign against me is building up. There are wall slogans saying ‘Salazar Alonso just like Dollfuss’ [the Austrian Chancellor who had repressed a revolutionary strike in Vienna in February]. The extremist press attacks and insults me, calls for me to be assassinated. I’m calmer than ever. I work ceaselessly. I’m organizing things. Today I had meetings with the Chief of Police, the Director General of Security, the head of the Assault Guard, and the Inspector General of the Civil Guard. I’m preparing everything carefully, technically just like the officer in charge of a General Staff. Needless to say, I don’t sleep. Even in bed I continue to plan my anti-revolutionary organization. Public opinion is turning in my favour. People believe in me, they turn to my puny figure and they see the man of providence who can save them.63
Salazar Alonso referred to Amparo as his muse and to himself as the chieftain, using the word later adopted by Franco, ‘Caudillo’. He painted for her the self-portrait of a brilliant general about to go into battle against a powerful enemy. However, the nearest that Largo Caballero’s PSOE–UGT–FJS liaison committee had come to creating militias was to make a file-card index of the names of men who might be prepared to ‘take to the streets’. The lack of central co-ordination was demonstrated by Largo Caballero’s acquiescence in the erosion of the trade union movement’s strength in one disastrous strike after another. Young Socialists took part in Sunday excursions to practise military manoeuvres in the park outside Madrid, the Casa del Campo, armed with more enthusiasm than weapons, activities easily controlled by the police. Desultory forays into the arms market had seen the Socialists lose their scarce funds to unscrupulous arms-dealers and had produced only a few guns. The police were fully informed about the purchases, eith
er by spies or by the arms-dealers themselves, and often arrived at Casas del Pueblo and Socialists’ homes with precise information about weapons hidden behind false walls, under floorboards or in wells. The one attempt at a major arms purchase, carried out by Indalecio Prieto, was a farcical failure. Only in the northern mining region of Asturias, where small arms were pilfered from local factories and dynamite from the mines, did the working class have significant weaponry.64
On 10 June, while the peasants’ strike was taking place in the south, Ansaldo’s Falangist terror squads were involved in violent incidents in Madrid. They attacked a Sunday excursion of the Socialist Youth in El Pardo outside the capital. In the subsequent fight, a young Falangist was killed. Without waiting for authorization from José Antonio, Ansaldo requisitioned the car of Alfonso Merry del Val and set off to retaliate. Opening fire on other young Socialists returning to Madrid, they killed Juanita Rico and seriously wounded two others.65 Margarita Nelken accused Salazar Alonso of covering up the Juanita Rico murder, and that of another Socialist, in the knowledge that they were carried out by Falangist terror squads.66 Throughout the summer, Ansaldo was planning to blow up the Socialist headquarters in Madrid. Fifty kilos of dynamite was stolen and a tunnel dug from the sewers into the basement of the Casa del Pueblo. Ansaldo’s men murdered one of their squad suspected of being a police informer. Before the explosive device was ready, on 10 July, the police discovered large quantities of guns, ammunition, dynamite and bombs at the Falange headquarters. Eighty militants, mainly Jonsistas and Ansaldo’s men, were detained, but only for three weeks.67 Although José Antonio formally expelled Ansaldo in July, the hit squads continued to carry out reprisals against the left with equal frequency and efficiency. In fact, Ansaldo went on working with them.
For Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso, the adventurism of the Falange was an irrelevance. The Socialists’ empty revolutionary threat had played neatly into their hands. Their readiness to take advantage of that rhetoric to alter the balance of power in favour of the right had been illustrated brutally during the printers’ and landworkers’ strikes. Gil Robles knew that the leadership of the Socialist movement, dominated by followers of Largo Caballero, had linked its threats of revolution specifically to the entry of the CEDA into the cabinet. He also knew that, thanks to Salazar Alonso, the left was in no position to succeed in a revolutionary attempt. Constant police activity throughout the summer dismantled most of the uncoordinated preparations made by the revolutionary committee and seized most of the weapons that the left had managed to acquire. Gil Robles admitted later that he was keen to enter the government because of, rather than in spite of, the reaction that could be expected from the Socialists: ‘Sooner or later, we would have to face a revolutionary coup. It would always be preferable to face it from a position of power before the enemy were better prepared.’68
A linked element of Gil Robles’s strategy in the late summer of 1934 was the expansion of the militia of the Juventud de Acción Popular under the banner of ‘civilian mobilization’. Essentially, with the forthcoming revolutionary showdown in mind, its purpose was strike-breaking and the guaranteeing of essential public services.69 The man he chose to organize the ‘civilian mobilization’ and to train the paramilitary units was Lisardo Doval, the Civil Guard officer expelled from the service for his part in the Sanjurjo coup attempt of August 1932.70
During the summer of 1934, political tension was heightened by a conflict over Catalonia which was skilfully manipulated by Gil Robles in such a way as to provoke the left. The right deeply resented the Republic’s granting of regional autonomy to Catalonia in 1932. This was reflected in the decision of the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees on 8 June to overrule a measure by the Catalan parliament to lengthen leases for smallholders. This delighted big landowners in Catalonia and elsewhere. Presenting the law unchanged to the parliament on 12 June, the President of the Generalitat (the Catalan regional government), Lluís Companys, described the Tribunal’s decision as yet another centralist attempt to reduce the region’s autonomy by ‘the lackeys of the Monarchy and of the monarchist-fascist hordes’.71
Salazar Alonso opposed those in the cabinet who favoured a compromise solution. Both the Left Republicans and many Socialists regarded Catalonia as the last remaining outpost of the ‘authentic’ Republic. The anti-Catalan statements being uttered by the CEDA left little doubt that Catalan autonomy would be under threat if the CEDA joined the government. Gil Robles spoke provocatively at an assembly organized by the Catalan landowners’ federation in Madrid on 8 September. The assembly, like others held by the CEDA’s agrarian financiers, argued for a restriction of union rights, the strengthening of the forces of authority and, more specifically, the crushing of the Generalitat’s ‘rebellion’.72
On the following day, the Juventud de Acción Popular held a fascist-style rally at Covadonga in Asturias, the site of the battle in 722 considered to be the starting point for the long campaign to reconquer Spain from the Moors. The choice of venue symbolically associated the right-wing cause with the values of traditional Spain and identified the working class with the Moorish invaders. Local Socialists declared a general strike and tried to block the roads to Covadonga, but the Civil Guard ensured that the rally went ahead as planned. The leader of the Asturian branch of Acción Popular, the retired army officer José María Fernández Ladreda, cited the reconquest of Spain as he introduced Gil Robles, who spoke belligerently of the need to crush the ‘separatist rebellion’ of the Catalans and the Basque nationalists.73 The wily Gil Robles knew only too well that such language, threatening key achievements of the Republican–Socialist coalition of 1931–3, would confirm the left in its determination to prevent the CEDA coming to power.
Salazar Alonso knew, as did Gil Robles, that the entry of the CEDA into the government was the detonator that would set off the Socialists’ revolutionary action and justify a definitive blow against them. On 11 September, at a deeply conflictive cabinet meeting, Salazar Alonso proposed a declaration of martial law precisely in order to provoke a premature outbreak of a revolutionary strike. Both the Prime Minister, Ricardo Samper, and the Minister of Agriculture, Cirilo del Río Rodríguez, protested at such irresponsible cynicism. The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, called for Salazar Alonso’s resignation.
Later that evening, Salazar Alonso wrote once more to his lover Amparo recounting what had happened earlier in the day. He made it clear that he thought the CEDA should join the government and that his objective was to provoke a reaction by the left precisely in order to smash it.
I explained the revolutionaries’ plan. I examined the Catalan question, pointing out objectively and honestly all the circumstances, the possibilities and the consequences of our decisions … The situation is serious. I couldn’t permit any action that was thoughtless or not properly prepared. I had to consider what was necessary to justify declaring martial law … The Government, opposed by the revolutionary left, lacks the backing of the parliamentary group [the CEDA] on whose votes it relies … Was this the Government with the authority to provoke the definitive revolutionary movement?74
In his published account of his role, Salazar Alonso wrote: ‘The problem was no less than that of starting the counter-revolutionary offensive to proceed with a work of decisive government to put an end to the evil.’ He aimed not just to smash the immediate revolutionary bid but to ensure that the left did not rise again.75
Not long afterwards, Gil Robles admitted that he was aware of and indeed shared Salazar Alonso’s provocative intentions. He knew that the Socialists were committed to reacting violently to what they believed would be an attempt to establish a Dollfuss-type regime. He too was fully aware that the chances of revolutionary success were remote. Speaking in the Acción Popular offices in December, he recalled complacently:
I was sure that our arrival in the government would immediately provoke a revolutionary movement … and when I considered that blood which was going to be shed, I asked myself
this question: ‘I can give Spain three months of apparent tranquillity if I do not enter the government. If we enter, will the revolution break out? Better let that happen before it is well prepared, before it can defeat us.’ This is what Acción Popular did: precipitated the movement, confronted it and implacably smashed the revolution within the power of the government.76
The Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo, eventually came around to the point of view of Gil Robles and Salazar Alonso. At the end of September, he organized large-scale army manoeuvres in León, in an area contiguous, and of similar terrain, to Asturias, where he suspected the revolutionary bid would take place.77 When the cabinet discussed cancelling the manoeuvres, Hidalgo argued that they were necessary precisely because of the imminent revolutionary threat. Certainly, once the revolutionary strike did break out in Asturias in early October, the astonishing speed with which the Spanish Foreign Legion was transported from Africa to Asturias suggests some prior consideration of the problem. As Hidalgo later admitted in the Cortes, three days before the manoeuvres started, he had ordered the Regiment No. 3 from Oviedo not to take part and to remain in the Asturian capital because he expected a revolutionary outbreak.78 In any case, Gil Robles had secured confidential assurances from senior military figures that the army could crush any leftist uprising provoked by CEDA entry into the cabinet.79