Two murders in Madrid acted as a catalyst for the Spanish Civil War: the assassinations within hours of each other of a policeman by political activists, and of a political activist by policemen.
On the night of 12 July 1936, a young police officer, Lieutenant José Castillo, left his new bride to walk to work from their home on Augusto Figueroa Street, in the old working-class district in the centre of the capital. Castillo was part of a special force of shock troops known as the Assault Guards, a body set up five years previously to defend Spain’s nascent and fragile republic. An active left-winger, Castillo had been involved in the killing of a leading member of Spain’s fascist party, the Falange, during a riot in April earlier that year. They were violent times: political murders were taking place almost every day, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were on strike, churches were being burned down. There were whisperings of a military coup against the newly elected government – a left-wing coalition – now in charge in Madrid. Falangists had sworn revenge against Castillo for the death of their colleague, the Marquis of Heredia, and had sent the policeman’s wife, Consuelo, a note the day before her wedding advising her not to marry a man ‘soon to be a corpse’.
It was normally only a ten-minute walk to work, but that night Castillo didn’t make it. On Fuencarral Street four gunmen were waiting for him; they shot him down and disappeared. A passing journalist tried to help the wounded man, but arrived only to hear his last words: ‘Take me to my wife.’ He was dead by the time they got him to a nearby medical centre.
News of the killing quickly reached the police station. Castillo was the second officer in the local force to be killed that year – Captain Carlos Faraudo had been gunned down in the centre of Madrid as he was taking a walk with his wife. Angry and determined to exact revenge, the officers drew up a list of suspects and then, as night fell, began leaving the police station in small groups to make arrests. Suspicion fell on right-wingers, particularly the fascists of the Falange party and their associates. It was late by the time the last group of policemen headed out into the streets, taking a police lorry, number seventeen, out into the wealthy Salamanca district of Madrid. They were led by Captain Fernando Condés of the Civil Guard, Castillo’s best friend. Not all in the vehicle were police officers, however: two were members of the communist-socialist youth movement; another was a young Galician socialist called Luis Cuenca.
Police lorry number seventeen headed first to the home of a leading politician named José María Gil Robles. A heavy-jowled, trilby-wearing man, Gil Robles was a prominent figure on the Right, leader of the Catholic CEDA coalition party, who had tried but failed to win power and establish an authoritarian Catholic regime through the ballot box earlier that year. Fortunately for him, that night he wasn’t at home, having left to spend the weekend in Biarritz with his family. The policemen would have to look elsewhere.
One of the men in the lorry mentioned that another leading right-winger lived close by. José Calvo Sotelo, an economist, had been a finance minister before the establishment of the Republic, and was a brilliant orator who was quickly eclipsing Gil Robles as the leading light on the opposition benches. With his clean good looks and more radical policies, he was gaining many followers, moving ever closer to the Falange against the backdrop of a country rapidly falling apart.
By now it was around three o’clock in the morning on 13 July. Calvo Sotelo was at his home on Velázquez Street that night, having spent weeks moving from place to place for fear of assassination. The policemen drove to his house, roused him and ordered him to get dressed and accompany them to the police station. As a member of parliament, Calvo Sotelo was granted freedom from arrest. Still, he decided to go along with them, promising his family he would call them as soon as he arrived at the station. ‘Unless,’ he added as he was being led through the door, ‘these gentlemen are going to blow my brains out.’
With the politician inside, the police lorry set off at top speed through the streets of Madrid, Calvo Sotelo wedged in the front between a couple of policemen. After several minutes, Luis Cuenca, sitting in the back, fired two bullets into his head. The body stayed upright until they reached the East Cemetery, where they left it with the night guard.
‘As they were in uniform, I didn’t object,’ the guard later told an inquest.
The body wasn’t identified until the following morning.
Condés later said he had only meant to arrest Calvo Sotelo, and that Cuenca had shot him without his orders.
A day later, on 14 July, two funerals were held. At one the coffin of Lieutenant Castillo was draped in a red flag, socialists, Republicans and communists raising clenched fists in revolutionary salute. Several hours later Calvo Sotelo’s body was buried at the same cemetery, his coffin marked with a cross, mourners stretching their right arms out in the fascist salute.
The murders had split the country in two. Three days later the Spanish Civil War began.
The murders of Castillo and Calvo Sotelo were the spark that set the Civil War in motion, but came after a long period in which Spain had become increasingly polarized and fractured, hatred and violence taking root as the country was torn apart by extremist forces. By the time the policeman and the politician were killed, there was no way of avoiding war, so intense was the loathing between conservatives and progressives, right-wingers and the Left, and so fragile was the state meant to hold them together.
Spain in 1936 was a republic, officially the country’s second after an unsuccessful and short-lived experiment with republicanism in 1873. The second fall of the monarchy had come in 1931, when King Alfonso XIII abdicated after elections for town halls across the country showed a collapse in his popularity. Preferring self-imposed exile to a possible civil war, he departed for France, and in a bloodless transition to a republican regime, power fell into the hands of liberals and left-wingers who had been pushing for years for modernization and an end to the monarchy. The new prime minister was the Andalusian barrister Niceto Alcalá Zamora, who formed a government made up of socialists and Republicans. The industrial revolutions that had taken place elsewhere in Europe were still in their infancy in Spain in the 1930s – new industries were concentrated principally in the northern areas of Catalonia and the Basque Country – and the main foreign export earner was still agriculture. Illiteracy rates were as high as 50 per cent, while millions lived in semi-slavery on vast feudal estates in the south – latifundios – where hunger was the norm and work scarce. Life there was primitive. Landowners were often absent, preferring the life of the city, while a surplus of labourers paid a daily rate meant farm managers had complete control over the lives of the workers, employing them or sending them away each morning as they saw fit. Much of the soil was poor and the climate was dry, and many landlords left swathes of their farms uncultivated, preferring the land to stay as an arid wasteland under their own control than be farmed by hungry peasants. And so the aristocrats and gentry and their moneyed offspring – señoritos – would spend their time in luxury in the capital and other big cities, while country folk starved – some even having to eat grass to survive – stuck in a pit of poverty and ignorance. What had been the point of abolishing black slavery, the socialist politician Indalecio Prieto asked, if white slavery still existed in Spain?
The country, then with a population of around twenty-four million people, was sharply divided in two, and there was immense pressure on the new Republic to produce much-needed reform, with hopes that after centuries of stagnation Spain would finally catch up with its neighbours. But while liberals and left-wingers dreamed of a better future, there was also fierce resistance to any change, principally from three powerful groups with a strong interest in maintaining things as they were: the old ruling class, the Church and the army.
The early thirties was a bad time to be building a new state. The world economy was still suffering from the crash of 1929, while political extremism was on the rise from the Soviet Union to Italy and Germany. But external pressures on the young Republic were almost nothing to the problems at home. The liberal intellectuals leading the new Spain made great moves to create the country they had always dreamed of, setting up almost ten thousand new schools in their first year, freeing the press and passing reformist agrarian laws. They also tried to modernize the country’s top-heavy army, where there were some seventeen thousand officers for a force of around a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers: a ratio of one to nine. Attempts to improve this, and obliging officers to swear allegiance to the new Republic, won the liberals many enemies in the armed forces.
But while conservatives dug in their heels over any change, the Republic’s own supporters complained things weren’t moving fast enough. And one of the biggest groups on the Left, the anarchists, whose support for the liberal government would ebb and flow over the coming years, was against the idea of a state altogether. More and more, the men in the centre felt attacked from all sides.
What made matters worse was the impression the liberal rulers gave of being unable to maintain law and order. Less than a month after the Republic came into being, six churches were burned down in Madrid after disturbances between supporters of the Republic and monarchists. The police did nothing to stop the attacks, the then war minister Manuel Azaña exclaiming that he would prefer all the churches of Spain to burn than that harm should come to a single Republican.
Likewise, conservatives, who were slowly organizing themselves into political parties and formations, felt increasingly alarmed at the growth in regionalism in the country. The idea of ‘Spain’ had always been a problematic concept, the country being more a collection of nations than a single entity. What were now called regions had almost all been, at some time in the distant past, independent kingdoms, principalities or counties, tiny fiefdoms which had been born at the time of the Reconquest and which had grown as Christian territory expanded southwards at the expense of the Moors during the Middle Ages. Through a succession of wars, treaties and marriages these had eventually been united under a single crown some five hundred years earlier. Now that the king had gone, however, Catalonia in particular started to test its strength, drafting a ‘statute of autonomy’ in 1932 which gave the region its own government – the Generalitat – with powers over local administration, civil law and health. For the army, ever the defender of the patria, the fatherland, nothing was more sacred than the unity of the country. The Catalan move was seen as a dangerous threat and prompted the first attempt to bring the young Republic down, a rebellion that became known as the Sanjurjada.
General Sanjurjo was a hero of Spain’s wars against the Riff tribesmen in northern Morocco. On 10 August 1932 he took part in a pronunciamiento – a coup typical of the nineteenth century, whereby a military officer would make a proclamation against the government, either rousing enough support to take over the country or getting shot down in glory. Although momentarily successful in Seville, where he launched a manifesto, Sanjurjo’s co-conspirators failed in their uprisings in Madrid and other major cities across the country after their plot was betrayed by a prostitute. Sanjurjo was arrested while trying to flee to Portugal and was imprisoned.
The time was not yet right to bring down the Republic, but conservatives were shortly to gain the upper hand. Frustrated by the slow pace of reform, anarchists were encouraging peasants to occupy villages and plots of land spontaneously and start farming them for themselves. One of the most famous cases occurred in January 1933 in the Andalusian village of Casas Viejas. Unlike earlier disturbances, which had involved church burning, this time the authorities used extreme measures to restore control. Police reinforcements stormed the village and violently imposed order. As they were carrying out house-to-house searches, one of the villagers, known as Seisdedos, locked himself in with a handful of other anarchists and refused to come out. In the gun battle that followed, two policemen were shot. Eventually the police burned the house down, killing all inside, although Seisdedos’s daughter, Libertaria, had managed to escape. Later the police shot dead fourteen anarchists who had surrendered earlier in the operation. The massacre caused an outcry and the socialists decided to withdraw their support for the liberal government. In the following elections in November 1933, conservative parties were duly elected to power.
There followed two years of rule by right-wing coalitions. Agrarian reform was not just halted but reversed, many peasants ending up worse off than they had been before. The period became, for the Left, the bienio negro, the ‘black biennium’, with its lowest point in October 1934. The Left became alarmed at the entry into government at this time of the Catholic authoritarian CEDA coalition. The group was led by José María Gil Robles, an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini who had been present at one of the Nuremberg rallies. He allowed himself to be addressed as Jefe, or ‘Chief’, in imitation of Führer or Duce, and was keen to introduce Nazi propaganda techniques to Spain.
Convinced that Gil Robles’s party’s inclusion in the cabinet marked the first step in the creation of a fascist state, left-wing groups organized a general strike and staged a series of revolts across the country, all doomed to failure. Only in the northern mining region of Asturias did the rebellion hold out, thanks to a rare alliance between socialists, anarchists and communists. There, local troops weren’t able to quell the movement, and so the government in Madrid called in the toughest forces that Spain then had – the Army of Africa, based in the Spanish territories in northern Morocco. Led by General Francisco Franco, colonial troops and soldiers from the Spanish Foreign Legion suppressed the left-wing miners using merciless and blood-thirsty methods they had developed in the Riff mountains. In an operation which lasted a fortnight, two thousand people were killed and a number of towns and villages destroyed. General Franco became a pin-up for the Right and a hate figure for the Left. Few then realized it, but a precedent had been set for the coming Civil War.
The repression and defeats of two years of right-wing governments served to reunite left-wing parties, so that by the time elections came round once again in February 1936 they were able to stand on a united ticket – the Popular Front, a name thought up by the communists. This time the anarchists decided to vote, if only to secure the release of their imprisoned comrades. On the Right, the CEDA leader Gil Robles presented himself as the last hope against the threat of Marxist revolution, leading a coalition of parties known as the National Front. Both sides were already referring to themselves in the language of confrontation. The Popular Front, again promising sweeping social reforms, won the vote by a whisker.
Gil Robles’s plan had been to gain power through the ballot box, much as Hitler had concentrated his efforts after the failure of the Munich Putsch. After the CEDA’s electoral defeat in Spain, this strategy lay in ruins. Fifteen thousand members of the youth movement of Gil Robles’s party switched en masse to the radical Falange party, the Spanish fascists.
The Falange had been set up in 1933 by the young aristocrat José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It was a radical, extremist group that called for social reform and authoritarian nationalistic rule, while engaging in a violent conflict with left-wing groups. Inspired by Italian fascism, it had been named after an ancient Macedonian battle formation. Until the elections of February 1936, when the Popular Front came to power, the Falange had been a small fringe organization, but now, with a new influx of members, it became a more important player on the stage. After acts of increasing violence, including murders and bombings, in March its offices were closed down and its dapper young leader was imprisoned. José-Antonio would never know freedom again, although he was later destined to become a mythical figure in Spanish politics.
For the extreme Left, the victory of the Popular Front at the elections in itself was not enough, and it urged that the pace of social reforms be increased. The leader of the radical wing of the socialist party, a semi-literate former stucco worker called Francisco Largo Caballero, was travelling around the country making increasingly inflammatory remarks about revolution, and was flatteringly dubbed ‘the Spanish Lenin’ by the Soviet press. Meanwhile, on a single day in March that year, over sixty thousand peasants in the western region of Extremadura spontaneously took over almost three thousand farms. Having feared for their property, landowners were now beginning to fear for their lives. Both sides seemed to be hell-bent on confrontation, with frequent gun battles in the streets between left-wingers and Falangists and other far-right groups. And the violence continued. On 16 June 1936 the CEDA leader Gil Robles claimed in parliament that in the four months since the Popular Front had won the general election 160 churches had been destroyed, 269 people assassinated, 10 newspaper offices sacked, 113 general strikes called and 146 bombs set off. Anarchy ruled; the government had lost control.
At the centre, the liberal intellectuals in the Popular Front, once again in charge, proved incapable of holding these forces of mutual destruction in check. Warnings came that right-wing army officers were planning another coup, but almost no counter measures were taken, ministers refusing to arm the people whose votes had given them power, but whose radicalism they feared. As a precaution they removed from Madrid those generals most suspected of plotting against the government and sent them to the outer regions. Franco, famous for his repression of the left-wing rebellion in Asturias eighteen months earlier, was packed off to the Canaries, General Manuel Goded went to the Balearic Islands, while General Emilio Mola was sent to Pamplona in the north. Sanjurjo, now out of prison, was in exile in Portugal.
Mola’s forced move to Pamplona was a godsend for the plotters. This tall, bespectacled general now became the mastermind of the coming coup from the centre of a highly Catholic, conservative part of the country, and was nicknamed el Director. Secret plans were drawn up for the army to rise simultaneously across Spain and Spanish Morocco, thus delivering a knockout blow against the government and preventing what was seen as an otherwise inevitable Bolshevik revolution. The key was to be the use of extreme violence. ‘We must sow terror,’ Mola insisted to his co-conspirators. ‘We must give the sense of domination by eliminating all those who do not think like us, without scruples or hesitation.’1
On 7 July the annual San Fermín bull-running fiesta took place in Pamplona. Mola used the holiday to organize a clandestine meeting with the other plotters. They had to move fast or the government would eventually smoke them out. But there were problems: the local conservatives of Pamplona, the Requetés, were demanding more concessions for their pet causes; others were urging caution. Franco sent a telegram from the Canary Islands saying the time still wasn’t right. Mola was furious. Franco was an important figure, a well-respected soldier, and would be a key factor in the success of the coup. Mola decided to carry on regardless.
Two things would work in his favour. In Madrid, Prime Minister Casares Quiroga studiously ignored the barrage of warnings about the coming disaster, like a Cassandra figure in reverse. And then, on 13 July, José Calvo Sotelo was shot dead in a police lorry.
At once all the doubts and calls for caution were silenced. Policemen had murdered a leading politician on the Right. No further justification was needed for a coup. Franco telegrammed again from the Canaries. This time, he was on board.
The rebellion was set for 18 July at five o’clock in the afternoon, just after siesta time. The starting point was to be the home of the Army of Africa – the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco.