The Spanish Holocaust (26 page)

Throughout June and July, Gil Robles instructed provincial CEDA leaders that, on the outbreak of the rising, all party members were to join the military immediately, party organizations were to offer full collaboration, youth sections were to join the army and not form separate militias, party members were not to take part in reprisals against the left, power struggles with other rightist groups were to be avoided, and the maximum financial aid was to be given to the authorities. Only the instruction about reprisals was ignored, and CEDA members were prominent in the repression, especially in Granada and the cities of Old Castile. The first section of the CEDA to join the rising was the Derecha Regional Valenciana. Its moderate Christian Democrat leader Luis Lucia had been marginalized by the secretary general, José María Costa Serrano. When General Mola was finalizing civilian participation in June, Costa Serrano offered 1,250 men for the early moments of the rising and promised 10,000 after five hours and 50,000 after five days. Alongside local sections of the Falange, Renovación Española and the Carlists, the radical wing of the DRV was placed by Costa Serrano under the orders of the military junta. At the beginning of the war, Lucia issued a statement condemning the coup. As a right-wing politician, he went into hiding from the anarchists only to be caught and imprisoned in Barcelona. Nevertheless, in 1939 he was tried and sentenced to death by the Francoists for the alleged offence of military rebellion. His sentence was later commuted to thirty years in prison.
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Military intervention came to seem an ever more urgent necessity in the eyes of landowners as a result of the Socialist campaign for the
recovery of common lands which enjoyed the support of the Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes.
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The rhetoric of the landowners, and that of their press, generated an apocalyptic sense of utter catastrophe. On 10 July,
ABC
lamented that 80 per cent of the land would be in the hands of municipalities and that there would be towns where private property would disappear.
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The younger members of landowning families joined the Falange. Anticipating the coup, many owners moved into their homes in the larger towns of the province, or to Madrid or Seville, or, in the case of the very rich, even to Biarritz or Paris, where they contributed finance and expectantly awaited news of the military plot. Behind them they left gangs of Falangists who attacked local Socialists with the protection of the Civil Guard. In Don Benito, the Civil Guard helped local Falangists when they firebombed the Casa del Pueblo.
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The FNTT frequently complained that the victims of the Civil Guard were always workers and denounced the stockpiling of arms by the landowners. It was claimed that, in Puebla de Almoradiel in the south of Toledo, the local right had two hundred shotguns, three hundred pistols and more than fifty rifles.
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When workers tried to collect unpaid wages from the landowners, they were often confronted by the Civil Guard. Those who had made such demands were invariably among the victims of the right-wing columns that captured their towns in the early months of the Civil War.
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The hatred between the landless peasants and the owners and their administrators was part of daily life in the south. One major landowner from Seville, Rafael de Medina, wrote of ‘the incomprehension of the haves and the envy of the have-nots’, of those who walked in rope sandals (
alpargatas
) and those who travelled by car. As he and his father drove past labourers walking along a country road, they noted their ‘grimfaced look, of such profound contempt and such outright bitterness, that it had the force of a thunderbolt’. Medina always carried a pistol at meetings to discuss working conditions with union leaders.
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The hatred was explained by the Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Many of the really big owners, dukes, counts and even very rich non-aristocratic owners, lived in Paris or Biarritz or Madrid. They visited their lands occasionally to hunt and to show them off to their friends. While there, their contempt for the labourers was manifest. They, like the less grand landowners who lived on their estates, would often laughingly take advantage of the wives, sisters and daughters of their labourers. Their administrators ran the estates, hiring and firing arbitrarily, ignoring the law. After the abuses of 1933–5, the return of
left-wing town councils after the February 1936 elections saw a reversal of fortunes. The prevailing spirit was one not of conciliation but of outright hatred. As Varela Rendueles put it, the landless labourers wanted to follow the example of their ‘betters’: ‘all they wanted to do was to repeat the barbaric lessons that they had been taught’.
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A key element of the hatred between the rural poor and the rich, Varela Rendueles noted, was the way in which proletarian women were used and abused. Baldomero Díaz de Entresotos expressed the patronizing and exploitative attitude of the rural middle classes when he wrote indignantly of those who tried to break free of the prostitution into which they had been forced:

You lived off the romantic adventures of the
señorito
… Those
señoritos
, once your friends, used to live for you just as you lived for them. You think they stole municipal funds? I don’t think so but if they did the people’s money returned to the people as represented by pretty proletarian women. The
señoritos
were unable to stay away. At siesta time, they came to your whorehouses, sat in their shirtsleeves in the shade of trailing vines and left you banknotes on the beer crates. They livened up the tedium of your nights with wine and music. They were real democrats. Is there any greater democracy than to sleep in the arms of the daughters of the people? Generous, truly Andalusian,
señoritos
.
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The perception and empathy with which Varela Rendueles interpreted rural tensions was rare. In notes for his unfinished autobiography, General Sanjurjo made the revealing comment: ‘In reality, the agrarian problem in the name of which so many mistakes are made to the detriment of landowners and against the overall economy of Spain, exists only in Madrid on the lips of demagogues who use it as a way of exciting and manipulating the rural population. The agrarian problem was an invention of people like Margarita Nelken.’
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Mola had complained on 1 July that the planned spiral of provocation and reprisal had not persuaded public opinion to consider a military uprising legitimate. Less than two weeks later that goal was reached. On the evening of 12 July, Falangist gunmen murdered a lieutenant of the Assault Guards, José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada.
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This crime derived much of its catastrophic impact from the fact that, two months earlier, on 7 May, Castillo’s friend Captain Carlos Faraudo de Miches had been shot dead by a Falangist squad. On that same day, the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, showed his adjutant,
Major Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros of the air force, a right-wing blacklist of fourteen members of the Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista, which had been created in late 1935 to combat the activities of the UME. Faraudo was number one, Castillo number two and Hidalgo de Cisneros fourth.
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After Faraudo’s murder, calls for reprisals had been silenced. However, when Castillo was also assassinated, fellow Assault Guards from the Pontejos barracks just behind the Dirección General de Seguridad in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were determined on revenge. In the early hours of the following day, they set out to take revenge on a prominent right-wing politician. Failing to find Gil Robles who was holidaying in Biarritz, they kidnapped Calvo Sotelo and, shortly after he got into the truck, one of them shot him. His body was then taken to the municipal cemetery where it was discovered the next morning.
¹²⁹
Republican and Socialist leaders were appalled and the authorities immediately began a thorough investigation. For the right, it was the opportunity to launch the coup for which the lengthy preparations were on the point of fruition.

At Calvo Sotelo’s burial, Antonio Goicoechea swore to ‘imitate your example, avenge your death and save Spain’. Even more bellicose was the speech made to the standing committee of the Cortes on 15 July by the Conde de Vallellano, on behalf of the Carlists and Renovación Española. Vallellano, referring rather inaccurately to ‘this unprecedented crime in our political history’, claimed that Calvo Sotelo had opposed all violence. Accusing the Popular Front deputies collectively of responsibility, he announced the monarchist abandonment of parliament. In what was to be his last parliamentary intervention, Gil Robles expressed his agreement with Vallellano and blamed both the violence of recent months and the assassination on the government. Knowing full well the objectives of the imminent military uprising, he declared that the parties of the Popular Front would be the first victims of the coming backlash.
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PART TWO

Institutionalized Violence in the Rebel Zone

5

Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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