Paul Preston - The Spanish Civil War - Reaction, Revolution and Revenge

Thus, political tension grew throughout 1934. In March, the anarchists held a four-week strike in Zaragoza to protest against the maltreatment of prisoners taken after the December rising. Then the CEDA made a sinister gesture in the form of a large rally of its youth movement, the JAP. The choice of Philip II’s monastery of El Escorial as venue was an unmistakably anti-Republican gesture. In driving sleet, a crowd of twenty thousand met in a gathering which closely resembled a Nazi rally. They swore loyalty to Gil Robles, ‘our supreme chief’, and chanted ‘¡Jefe! ¡Jefe! ¡Jefe!’ . The JAP’s nineteen-point programme was recited, with emphasis on point two, ‘our leaders never make mistakes’, a direct borrowing from the Italian Fascists. One CEDA deputy declared that ‘Spain has to be defended against Jews, heretics, freemasons, liberals and Marxists’. Another, the deputy for Zaragoza, Ramón Serrano Suñer, brother-in-law of General Franco and later architect of the post-Civil War National-Syndicalist state, denounced ‘degenerate democracy’. The high point of the rally was a speech by Gil Robles. His aggressive harangue was greeted by delirious applause and prolonged chanting of ‘¡Jefe!’ . ‘We are an army of citizens ready to give our lives for God and for Spain,’ he cried. ‘Power will soon be ours … No one can stop us imposing our ideas on the government of Spain’.

The young revolutionaries of the FJS were convinced that Gil Robles was aiming to take over the government in order to bring the Republic to an end. Various Radical ministries were incapable of allaying the suspicion that they were merely Gil Robles’ Trojan Horse. By repeatedly threatening to withdraw his support, Gil Robles provoked a series of cabinet crises by complaining that the cabinet was too liberal. As a result, the Radical government was adopting an ever-more conservative veneer. On each occasion, Lerroux, who was desperate to stay in power, would force the more liberal elements of his party out of the cabinet. Accompanied by like-minded friends, they then quit the party, leaving the rump ever more dependent on CEDA whims. After the first of the reshuffles, in March 1934, Gil Robles found a Radical minister who enjoyed his unalloyed trust. This was Rafael Salazar Alonso, the Minister of the Interior and a representative of the aggressive landowners of Badajoz. One of his first acts as minister was to call in the Inspector General of the Civil Guard, Brigadier General Cecilio Bedia de la Cavallería, and make it clear that his forces should not be inhibited in their repression of social conflicts. Although Lerroux resisted the temptation to declare all strikes unlawful, he delighted the right by announcing that strikes with political implications would be ruthlessly suppressed. For both the CEDA and Salazar Alonso, all strikes were deemed to be political. He provoked a number of strikes throughout the spring and summer of 1934 which enabled him to pick off the most powerful unions one by one, beginning with the printers in March. The Radical–CEDA determination to undermine the Republic’s most loyal support became clear when the government clashed successively with the Catalans and the Basques.

The sympathy shown by the Constituent Cortes to autonomist aspirations was now dropped in favour of right-wing centralist bias. This was particularly the case with regard to Catalonia. Unlike the rest of Spain, Catalonia was governed by a truly Republican party, the Esquerra, under Lluis Companys. In April, Companys passed an agrarian reform, the Ley de contratos de cultivo , an enlightened measure to protect tenants from eviction by landowners and the right to buy land which they had worked for eighteen years. The law was opposed by the landowners and the Catalan conservative party, the Lliga, protested to the Madrid government with the backing of the CEDA. The right of the central government to intervene in Catalonia over this issue was not clear. Under pressure from the CEDA, the Radical cabinet handed the question to the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, whose membership was predominantly right wing. On 8 June, by a small majority, the Tribunal found against the Generalitat. Nevertheless, Companys went ahead and ratified the law. Meanwhile, the government began to infringe the Basques’ tax privileges and, in an attempt to silence protest, forbade their municipal elections. Such high-handed centralism could only confirm the left’s fears of the Republic’s rapid drift to the right.

Trouble increased during the summer. Rural labourers were suffering immense hardship through increased aggression from employers, which had been greatly facilitated by the repeal in May of the law of municipal boundaries. Coming just before the harvest, this permitted landlords to import cheap Portuguese and Galician migrant workers to undercut local wages. The defences of the rural proletariat were falling rapidly before the right-wing onslaught. The last vestige of protection that left-wing landless labourers had for their jobs and their wages was that provided by the Socialist majorities on many town and village councils. Socialist mayors were the only hope that rural workers had of the local landowners being obliged to observe social legislation or of municipal funds being used for public works that would provide some employment. The Radicals had been systematically removing them, Salazar Alonso using flimsy pretexts such as ‘administrative irregularities’. He ordered provincial civil governors to remove alcaldes who ‘did not inspire confidence in matters of public order’ – which usually meant Socialists.

After much agonized debate within the FNTT, Ricardo Zabalza began to advocate a general strike in order to put a stop to the patronal offensive. Older heads within the UGT were opposed to what they saw as a rash initiative which might squander worker militancy and thus undermine the possibility of a future defence against attempts to establish a reactionary corporative state. The harvest was ready at different times in each area, so the selection of a single date for the strike would lead to problems of coordination. Moreover, a general strike, as opposed to one limited to large estates, would cause hardship to leaseholders and sharecroppers who needed to hire one or two workers. There was also the danger that the provocative actions of the owners and the Civil Guard could push the peasants into violent confrontations which they could only lose. Nevertheless, under extreme pressure from a hungry rank and file pushed beyond endurance by the constant provocation of caciques and Civil Guard, the FNTT called for a series of strikes, to be carried through in strict accordance with the law.

While the strike action could hardly be considered revolutionary, Salazar Alonso was not prepared to lose this chance to strike a blow at the largest section of the UGT. His measures were swift and ruthless. Within weeks of taking over the Ministry of the Interior, in meetings with the head of the Civil Guard General Bedia de la Cavallería and the Director General de Seguridad José Valdivia, he had already made specific plans for the repression of such a strike. Accordingly, just as Zabalza’s hopes of compromise negotiations between the FNTT and the Ministers of Agriculture and Labour were about to be fulfilled, Salazar Alonso issued a decree criminalizing the actions of the FNTT by declaring the harvest a national public service and the strike a ‘revolutionary conflict’. Liberal and left-wing individuals in the country districts were arrested wholesale, including four Socialist deputies. This was a flagrant violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Constitution. Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint onto lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back. Workers’ centres were closed down and many town councils were removed, to be replaced by government nominees. Although most of the labourers arrested were soon released, emergency courts sentenced prominent workers’ leaders to four or more years in prison. The workers’ societies in each village, the Casas del Pueblo , were closed and the FNTT was effectively crippled until 1936. In an uneven battle, the FNTT had suffered a terrible defeat. Salazar Alonso had effectively put the clock back in the Spanish countryside to the 1920s.