Violencia

by Jason Webster

  The rebels didn’t have a monopoly on the use of brutal violence against the enemy, nor in sophisticated weaponry. But what they did have, crucially, was an acceptance of the concept of a single command. Rebel – ‘Nationalist’ – Spain was as divided as the Republic, with factions ranging from fascists to right-wing republicans to monarchists (who themselves were divided between the supporters of Alfonso XIII and the Carlist pretender, still flying the flag for his cause over a hundred years since the First Carlist War . . .). What all these different groups could agree on, however, was the need for a single leader at the head of them all. At least while the war was being waged. And the man who stepped into this role as though it had been specifically made for him was Franco.

  The rebels are often referred to as Francoists, yet it should be remembered that Franco wasn’t behind the coup and nor was he the leader of the rebels for the first three months of the conflict. It was only as the Army of Africa, under his command, was closing in on Madrid in the autumn of 1936 that he managed to secure for himself the position of Generalísimo, overall commander of the rebel forces and, thanks to some sleight of hand, head of the Nationalist state. Not everyone was happy with this, and in time some of the other rebel generals realised that they had been duped. But rather than fighting among themselves – as the Republicans did – they grumbled in private while accepting Franco’s fait accompli. They were, after all, right-wingers, and the idea of a strong leader historically appeals more to the Right than to the Left.

  Franco was brutal, ruthless, and an average military commander. But he was lucky, and with his ability to play opponents off against one another, turned into a canny politician. Few others, perhaps, could have balanced the different factions as well as he did, eventually uniting them in a single party with a ridiculously long name which was commonly known simply as el Movimiento, ‘the Movement’.

  Rebel ‘unity’ was fictional yet effective, and manifested in the image of Franco himself, who drew inspiration from the great unifiers of Spanish history: Ferdinand and Isabella, and Philip II, symbols of the more glorious eras from the country’s past.

  Consciously or not, Franco was following a pattern from Spanish history, the predominant way in which the country has been brought together and then held united: through the efforts of Santiago the Slayer, a single, violent authority, brutally defeating anyone who would break the country apart.

  For him, as for the others in the past, it worked, winning him the Civil War in 1939, and maintaining him in power until his death thirty-six years later.

  1 Durruti himself was killed in a controversial incident near the front lines.

  AFTER

  POST-WAR

  Franco won the war, but peace was bloody and painful. Defeating his enemy in the field wasn’t enough for the ‘Caudillo’, as Franco termed himself in the style of an old medieval warlord. His intention from the beginning had been to wipe out the ‘anti-Spain’, the other Spain. The Slayer would try to eradicate his reflection – and eternal rival – as he always does.

  For decades after final victory in April 1939, Spanish executioners were kept busy cleansing the country of unwanted elements in an echo of the ‘purity of blood’ paranoia which had scarred the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and furnished the Inquisition with so many of its victims. Tens of thousands of Republican prisoners were held in makeshift concentration camps dotted around the country (there were almost three hundred according to latest estimates, yet barely a trace of them remains today). ‘Trials’ were sometimes held, in which many were, paradoxically, accused of ‘military rebellion’, but these were a formality with the inevitable outcome: death, either by firing squad or garrotte. Franco insisted on personally verifying all death sentences, and the names of the soon-to-be-deceased would be read to him while he dealt with other matters of state, or even while drinking his morning cup of hot chocolate. Occasionally he might interrupt the functionary’s flow, asking for details of the condemned person’s political affiliation, at which point he might specify which execution method he preferred in that particular case. Garrotting, in which the prisoner is choked while a bolt is pushed into the back of the neck to break the spinal cord, was considered the harsher.

  As many as twenty thousand people were killed in the post-war years, while the same number died as a result of the appalling conditions within the prisons and camps. Added to the two hundred thousand Republicans who had fallen during the actual war, and the half a million who had fled into exile following defeat, the political cleansing was extensive. All the ills of Spain as identified by the Francoists – namely, democracy, liberalism, freemasonry, Judaism and Marxism – could finally be removed and the Slayer could emerge victorious at last. The further paradox that he had used his original Other – the Moor – as his front-line assault troops in this curious engagement was forgotten. Or if questioned, dealt with by declaring the Muslim soldiers of the Regulares ‘honorary Catholics’. (Albeit, questioning of the new authoritarian regime in any way at all could land you in serious trouble.)

  Franco, however, was wily and never let ‘facts’, ‘details’ or even loyalties get in his way. Galicians are known in Spain as being hard to read. When you meet one on the stairs, the joke goes, you can never tell if they’re going up or going down. ‘Do as I do,’ Franco, the dictator of all Spain, later told a journalist, ‘and don’t get involved in politics.’ This craftiness and seeming capacity to ride currents of history which swept others away can be seen in the dictator’s complex relationship with Hitler. The Führer’s military support had helped Franco enormously in his rise to power, a fact which the Spaniard acknowledged in his declaration of Nazi Germany as ‘the highest achievement in human civilisation’, and his granting of precious iron ore to help arm the Third Reich. Five months after the Civil War ended, the Second World War began. Spain declared itself neutral at first, waiting to see how the wind blew. Then, after the fall of France and with Britain left on its own, in June 1940 Franco declared his country non-belligerent, a step just short of declaring war on the UK, whose navy could have crushed Spain easily at the time by blocking imports of desperately needed oil and wheat. When Hitler and Franco finally had their first and only face-to-face meeting, in October 1940 at a train station on the Spanish-French border, the Führer insisted that his ally take a full and active part in the war. Franco was keen to agree, but his price was high: he wanted guarantees of supplies which would inevitably be cut off by the Royal Navy, as well as control of Morocco, Algeria and huge swathes of north-west Africa in what would become a new Spanish Empire. Hitler refused, and over the coming months tensions between the two leaders intensified. Hitler even drew up plans to ignore Franco and send two German divisions through the country to conquer Gibraltar, so crucial to Britain’s links with India and the rest of the British Empire.

  What saved both Britain and Spain was Hitler’s turn to the east and the launch of his main plan, the conquest of the Soviet Union, in June 1941. At once Spain became a sideshow. But to demonstrate his continued goodwill, Franco created the Blue Division, made up of Spanish volunteers to go and fight on the Russian front in aid of their anti-Marxist German friends. Over forty thousand Spanish soldiers passed through the division, seeing heavy fighting and casualties – as high as 50 per cent. And while most were driven by political conviction, others, such as the future film director Luis Berlanga, joined up to help members of their families jailed and awaiting death sentences for Republicanism back at home. In a kind of logic worthy of the Inquisition, youngsters fighting for Christian civilisation against the atheist hordes in the east were considered to have cleansed their blood relatives, at least in part, of their crimes.

  Spain and Germany were, to all intents and purposes, close friends and allies, and the pressure for Spain to declare war on Britain remained, an outcome favoured by many within the regime, not least the Falangists, ardent supporters and admirers of the Nazis and Fascists. But behind the scenes, British intelligence offici
als in Madrid were busy bribing Franco’s generals to stay out of the war, paying them millions of pesetas to lobby against involvement. The plan worked long enough for the Germans to be hit with their first serious defeat at Stalingrad. At which point Franco, ever the operator, saw that the wind was beginning to blow in a new direction, and gradually pulled back his support for Hitler. Falangists were removed from government and the Blue Division was disbanded.1

  And new stories were created to explain what had happened. According to the later version, Franco’s interview with Hitler wasn’t, in fact, the humiliation that it really had been, but evidence of the Caudillo’s cunning, cleverly keeping the impoverished and war-torn Spain out of a conflict which would have brought nothing but calamity. As further ‘proof’ of how he had played such a blinder, the arrival of Franco’s train eight minutes late for the interview (because of the poor state of the Spanish railways) became, in the new account, a subtle and intelligent way of showing the Führer that Spain could keep Germany waiting and was not going to be pushed around. Con un par de cojones, as the Spanish phrase goes. ‘With a big pair of balls.’ This retelling of the event is still popular today.

  Spain managed to scrape through the Second World War without becoming overly involved, but this didn’t mean it found new friends in return. In October 1944 Spanish Communists, thinking that the moment to overthrow Franco had come, staged an invasion of the Valley of Aran, a tiny area of the Spanish Pyrenees, hoping to drag the Allies into the fight and provoke a full-scale invasion against the dictator in Madrid. By that point, however, Britain and the US were already thinking ahead to a post-war scenario, and helping Reds in their back yard was always going to be complicated. The Communists were left to their own devices and eventually crushed by the Francoists.

  But a hand of friendship towards Madrid was not forthcoming either. Spain was isolated, memories of her former ties with Hitler and Mussolini still fresh. And the people who suffered most were ordinary Spaniards, reduced to hunger and intense poverty as international political games were played around them. Many were reduced to scouring the countryside for scrap metal, selling bullet casings or pieces of shrapnel to earn enough to feed themselves and their families day by day. Even now la posguerra – the post-war period of the 1940s and ’50s – holds a place in collective memory as a time of great suffering, a painful and drawn-out hangover after the intense agonies of the Civil War.

  Thankfully, however, it was not to last. Reading the winds once more, Franco saw his opportunity in his staunch, and genuine, anti-Marxism. By the late 1940s the Cold War had begun in earnest. The US needed new allies in its struggle against the Soviet Union. And into the fight stepped Spain, with Franco as the ‘Sentinel of the West’ and defender of Christendom.

  1 Although a hard-core group of Spanish anti-Communists chose to remain in what was called the Blue Brigade; some of their number resisted to the very end, fighting around Hitler’s bunker as the Red Army conquered Berlin.

  RECOVERY AND DECLINE

  What exactly was Francoism, however, and what did Franco believe? What kind of country did he create with his dictatorial powers?

  Part of the problem lies in the word ‘Francoism’ itself, which suggests the existence of some kind of ideology. But Franco was never a great political thinker, despite being an astute political operator. He was ambitious and had a solid belief in himself as a saviour of Spain, a man of destiny who would rescue the country at a time of great peril. In his own mind he was another Rodrigo Díaz – El Cid – a warrior knight acting on behalf of a king and yet at the same time independent, a ruler unto himself, loyal to his master’s cause but also detached. A man who would carve out his own kingdom without ever becoming king.

  Which is what he did. Alfonso XIII had been ‘godfather’ to Franco’s wedding; the Caudillo had close ties to the royal family and courted their cause during the Civil War. Alfonso’s third son and heir to the throne, Juan, was engaged on the Nationalist side during the conflict. Monarchists died for the sake of their king, believing that their sacrifice would help put him back on the throne. But with Franco in charge, neither Alfonso nor Juan would ever reign. The country was his and he was determined to hold on to power to the very end.

  ‘If you give him Spain,’ one rebel general commented to another back in 1936, ‘he’ll believe it’s his and won’t let anyone relieve him of his position either during the war or until after he’s dead.’

  Cabanellas’s words were prophetic: he knew the younger general better than the others, who simply handed Franco all power. They would later regret it.

  In essence, Franco was an opportunist, but it would be wrong to assume that he would have clung to the coat-tails of any ideology simply to get to the top. He was conservative, a nationalist, a devout churchgoer (he carried a relic – the withered arm of St Theresa of Avila – wherever he went), ardently anti-Marxist, and had a curious hatred towards the Freemasons.1

  Beyond that, he rarely committed himself to any political belief system, playing the various factions around him off against one another. At the start of his rule the Falange were in the ascendant because they were closest politically to Nazism and Fascism. When the course of the Second World War changed and Spain became a pariah, ‘autarchy’ and isolation were touted as the new ideals, Spain proud and on her own in the face of a multitude of enemies.

  Salvation for a starving nation came with the Cold War, and the US – the country which had humiliated Spain in the ‘Disaster’ of 1898 – now became its friend, pouring in millions of dollars to help prop up its new anti-Soviet ally. From celebrating ‘autarchism’, Spain became capitalist. The apertura (‘opening up’) which followed brought in the first tourists, but these foreigners had different ideas as well as cash: the social liberalism which had been crushed during the Civil War was in danger of clambering in through the back door. The answer was to usher in Church hardliners, with ‘technocrats’ trained by the Opus Dei taking on cabinet positions. ‘Nos han hecho ministros,’ gloated the movement’s founder, Josemaría Escrivá, on hearing the news. ‘We’ve been made ministers.’

  It was 1956 and Franco was beginning to feel his age by this time. He effectively pulled away from the business of government and spent the rest of his active years hunting, fishing and watching films: like Hitler, he considered himself something of an artist, and even wrote a film script, La Raza, a clunking melodrama in which two brothers – one a fine upstanding Catholic and the other a Masonic reprobate – have a huge falling-out . . . You get the picture. The Caudillo’s simplistic metaphor for the causes of the Civil War got to be filmed twice, once in the ’40s and again in the ’50s. Both versions are as bad as each other, if interesting from a historical point of view.

  It is tempting to see the Franco years as a period in which Spain was, in effect, put on ice, when the turbulence of the preceding period was suppressed with an iron fist and progress halted; while the rest of the Western world was experiencing ‘the ’60s’, Spain was held back somewhere in the ’40s or even earlier. There is some truth to this view, but underneath the rigid dictatorial regime’s upper layer, the rest of the country was going through rapid and quite fundamental change, particularly from the late 1950s onwards. Tourism and the ‘opening up’ process saw millions of foreigners arrive,2 but also similar numbers of Spaniards left the country in search of work, often in Germany, then booming in its post-WWII rebuilding phase. As a result, Spanish per-capita income between 1960 and 1970 rose by over 80 per cent. The austere post-war years were coming to an end, and everyone wanted to enjoy the new fruits: over a million Spaniards left the countryside during the same decade, usually ending up in shanty towns on the edges of the main cities. Although much reduced these days, they still exist in places, while a walk in remote mountain areas of the country can sometimes reveal old farmhouses abandoned during this period, with scattered scraps of the last newspapers and magazines left by their owners before they headed for the bright lights, never to return.<
br />
  New levels of personal wealth and contact with liberal foreigners also brought challenges to the conservative forces trying to keep Spain at one remove from the rest of the world. While bullfighting and flamenco were requisitioned by the regime to sell Spanish ‘passion’ and ‘difference’ to bikini-clad hordes in search of holiday exoticism,3 at the same time the Church was becoming increasingly alarmed at the side effects this was having on Spanish youth, who were discovering that there was more to life than rosary beads.

  By the late 1960s, however, there were more things on the regime’s mind than the sexual morals of the people. Victory in the Civil War might have led some to think that the ancient threat to national unity, regionalism, had been vanquished once and for all. But just as in the past it had risen from near death, so it did again now, most visibly in the shape of ETA, which aped the government it was intent on removing from the Basque Country by using violence for political ends: the group claimed its first victim in 1968 and over the next fifty years went on to claim eight hundred and sixty-four lives. Only in the spring of 2018 did it give up the ghost and disband (interestingly, at exactly the moment when Catalan separatism took centre stage on the Spanish political scene).

  Things came to a head in the late ’60s when the more liberal elements within Franco’s government were removed, and a hard-line conservative–Catholic regime was installed which really did try to put the clock back. It was led by an ardent Franco supporter, Admiral Carrero Blanco, who became prime minister in 1973. Franco was ageing rapidly; Carrero Blanco was meant to ensure his legacy continued once the old dictator was gone. But ETA had other ideas. In December that same year they blew the prime minister’s car up with so many explosives that it flew into the air, over a church and into a courtyard. Even the armoured plating of a minister’s vehicle couldn’t save the new head of government, and Carrero Blanco died soon afterwards of his wounds. (At the time, Moscow accused the CIA of involvement, a theory which some still defend today.)