by Paul Preston
In the meantime, in the villages between Villamartín and Ubrique, such as Benamahoma, the Mora-Figueroa column arrested the mayors and imposed new town councils. Using Olvera as their base, they advanced over the provincial border into Seville and conquered the town of Pruna on 18 August, and the villages of Villanueva de San Juan and Algámitas four days later. The local landowners and right-wingers who had been placed in protective custody by the Popular Front authorities claimed that the column had arrived just in time to save them from horrendous atrocities. It was not explained why the left had waited so long before contemplating such atrocities.30
The repression in Benamahoma was undertaken by a notorious gang known as the ‘Lions of Rota’, consisting of self-declared Falangists led by Fernando Zamacola, a man from Galicia with a record of assault and armed robbery. At a post-war investigation into Zamacola’s crimes, it was revealed that more than fifty people had been executed including several women. The town postman was shot along with his fifteen-year-old son. Members of the Lions testified that Juan Vadillo, the local commander of the Civil Guard, had ordered the shootings to cover up the appalling beatings inflicted on those arrested. As well as murders, there was also considerable theft of the property of those detained and sexual abuse of the wives of men who had fled or been shot. These women were forced to clean the Civil Guard barracks and the offices of the Falange and made to dance at parties organized by Zamacola’s men. As well as cases of head-shaving and the use of castor oil, several were raped by both Vadillo and Zamacola.31 Zamacola was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando.32
Meanwhile, Mora-Figueroa’s column made daily expeditions to mop up after the troops who conquered the smaller towns to the north of the province, Ubrique, Alcalá del Valle and Setenil. Many local Republicans and trade unionists had fled to the sierra around Ubrique, fearing reprisals. However, when on 24 July a light aeroplane dropped leaflets announcing that anyone without blood on their hands had nothing to fear, many of them returned. Most of these trusting souls, including the Mayor, were shot in the course of the following weeks. A member of Izquierda Republicana, the Mayor owned a prosperous bakery and olive press. By providing cheap bread for the poor, he had earned the enmity of the local oligarchy. He was tortured and forced to hand over substantial sums of money before being shot. At least 149 people were executed in Ubrique.33
In nearby Alcalá del Valle, the local Civil Guard had handed over its guns to a rapidly created Comité de Defensa. Weapons held by local rightists were confiscated and several of the men were imprisoned but none was physically harmed. The parish church was requisitioned as the Comité’s headquarters, its altar, statues and religious images destroyed. The town was briefly occupied on 25 August by a force of twenty Civil Guards and Manuel Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. After it had been driven off, a group of anarchist militia arrived from Ronda in the neighbouring province of Málaga and began to loot the houses of local right-wingers until they were stopped by the Comité de Defensa. On 18 September, the town was finally reoccupied by rebel units including Mora-Figueroa’s column. The repression in Alcalá del Valle was sweeping, aiming to eradicate left-wing individuals, organizations and ideas. Knowing what the columns had done in nearby towns, many inhabitants of Alcalá del Valle had already fled. These included those who had held posts in Republican parties, trade unions or institutions. The victims were thus those who had stayed confident that, being guilty of no crimes, they had nothing to fear. There was no pretence of trials. Twenty-six men and four women were picked up off the street or from their houses, tortured and then shot.34
While the various paramilitary forces purged the province of Cádiz, a similar process was taking place in Seville. There the right-wing victory was attributed by Gonzalo Queipo de Llano to his personal daring and brilliance. Within a year of the events, he claimed that he had captured the city against overwhelming odds with the help of only 130 soldiers and fifteen civilians. In a radio broadcast on 1 February 1938, he made an even wilder exaggeration, declaring that he had taken the city with fourteen or fifteen men.35 He claimed that he been opposed by a force of over 100,000 well-armed ‘communists’. In fact, the defeated workers had had between them only eighty rifles and little ammunition and were armed, if at all, with hunting shotguns, ancient pistols and knives.36
Far from being an act of spontaneous heroism, the coup had been meticulously planned by a major of the General Staff stationed in Seville, José Cuesta Monereo, and was carried out by a force of four thousand men. The commander of the Seville Military Region, General José de Fernández Villa-Abrille, and his senior staff were aware of what was being hatched. They did nothing to impede the plot, despite the pleas of the Civil Governor, José María Varela Rendueles.37 Nevertheless, Queipo had them arrested and tried for military rebellion. The majority of the Seville garrison were involved in the coup, including units of artillery, cavalry, communications, transport and the Civil Guard. This is clear even from the lists included in the hymn of praise to Queipo composed by the journalist Enrique Vila.38 After artillery bombardment, this large force seized the telephone exchange, the town hall and the Civil Governor’s headquarters, blocked the main access routes into the centre and then applied indiscriminate terror.39
The subsequent crushing of working-class resistance was undertaken by Major Antonio Castejón Espinosa. According to Castejón himself, with fifty Legionarios, fifty Carlist Requetés, fifty Falangists and another fifty Civil Guards, they immediately began the bloody suppression of the workers’ districts of Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos. Castejón’s artillery was organized by Captain Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, the CEDA deputy and landowner from Carmona, who had immediately placed himself under the orders of Queipo.40 The Falangists came mainly from the Círculo de Labradores, the rich landowners’ club. Civilian participation in the rising was organized by prominent members of the Círculo like Ramón de Carranza, Pedro Parias González and the bullfighter Pepe el Algabeño (José García Carranza). Queipo de Llano rewarded them by making Carranza Mayor and Parias Civil Governor of Seville. Pepe el Algabeño, who had been the target of an assassination attempt by anarchists in Málaga in March 1934, headed a group of bullfighters who placed themselves at the disposal of Queipo de Llano.41 On the morning of 19 July, armed gangs led by Carranza imposed what he called ‘brutal punishment’ on working-class districts around the city.42
Despite artillery bombardment, the working-class districts resisted doggedly. Finally, Queipo’s forces, using women and children as human shields, were able to enter and begin the repression in earnest. Women and children, as well as their menfolk, were were put to the sword. After the subjugation of Triana, the new Mayor Carranza strode through the streets with a megaphone ordering that all pro-Republican and anti-fascist graffiti be cleaned from the walls. He set a ten-minute deadline, after which the residents of any house whose walls carried slogans would be shot. With fathers, husbands, brothers and sons dead or dying in the streets around them, the surviving men, women and children began frantically scrubbing at the walls while the victorious rebels gloated.43 For his final attack on La Macarena, on 22 July, Queipo used aircraft to bomb and strafe the district. He published a warning in the press demanding that weapons be thrown into the street and windows and doors be covered in white sheets to ‘avoid the damage that could be caused by air attacks and the forces of the Army’.44
On 16 August, the bodies of two Falangists were found in Triana. In reprisal, seventy men from the surrounding streets were arrested at random. They were shot in the cemetery without any form of trial two days later.45 When the actor Edmundo Barbero reached Seville in August, he would find the city (and many of its inhabitants) entirely plastered in Falangist symbols. Triana, La Macarena, San Julián and San Marcos were full of the rubble of houses destroyed by the artillery barrages. Barbero was appalled by the terror-stricken faces and the fact that all the women wore black, despite Queipo’s prohibitio
n of public mourning, incessantly and threateningly repeated in the press and on the radio. Elsewhere, in the pueblos, Falangist patrols ensured that no houses carried emblems of mourning and that laments of grief could not be heard.46
After the initial slaughter, a more systematic repression began. On 23 July, Queipo de Llano issued another edict which stated that any strike leaders caught would be shot along with an equal number of strikers chosen at the discretion of the military authorities. Anyone who disobeyed his edicts was to be shot without trial. The following day, Queipo issued his sixth edict, which stated that ‘on discovering acts of cruelty against individuals in any town or village, the leaders of the Marxist or Communist organizations that exist there will be shot. In the event of them not being found, an equal number of their members, arbitrarily selected, will be shot without this prejudicing the sentences that will be passed against the guilty ones.’47 This edict was used to justify the execution of large numbers of men, women and children who were innocent of any ‘acts of cruelty’.
To take charge of the process, Queipo de Llano chose an Africanista, the infantry Captain Manuel Díaz Criado. He had served with the Foreign Legion in the 1920s and organized the Guardiá Cívica that murdered four workers in the Parque de María Luisa in Seville in 1931; he had also been involved in Carlavilla’s attempt to murder Azaña in May 1936. On 25 July, Queipo gave Díaz Criado the title of Military Delegate for Andalusia and Extremadura with the power of life and death over the people of the region. He chose as his right-hand man an equally brutal Civil Guard, Sergeant Major José Rebollo Montiel. Rebollo supervised the torture and interrogation of prisoners. Díaz Criado was described by Edmundo Barbero as ‘a cruel and sadistic drunk’.48 On his orders, the working-class districts of Triana and La Macarena were stripped of their male populations. Among hundreds of prisoners taken and herded into the provincial prison were children and old men. Most were quickly taken out and shot without any pretence of judicial procedure. Others were taken to rot in the fetid prison ship Cabo Carvoeiro.49
When working-class leaders could not be found, members of their families were taken as hostages. The Communist leader of the Seville dockworkers, Saturnino Barneto Atienza, went into hiding and eventually reached the Republican zone. His sister, his wife, his infant daughter and his mother-in-law were detained in inhuman conditions for the duration of the war. His seventy-two-year-old mother, Isabel Atienza, a devout Catholic, was arrested and interrogated. On 8 October, she was forced to witness a shooting in the cemetery and then, seriously disturbed, was taken to a square near her home and shot. Her body was left in the street for a day.50 On the night of 10 August, a number of murders were committed to commemorate the anniversary of General Sanjurjo’s failed military coup in 1932. Among the victims were the Andalusian intellectual Blas Infante and the Republican Mayor José González Fernández de Labandera, who had helped foil the Sanjurjada.
Queipo de Llano gave Díaz Criado unlimited powers and would hear no complaints against him. Díaz Criado himself refused to be bothered by details concerning the innocence or previous good deeds of his victims. On 12 August, the local press was issued a note prohibiting intercessions in favour of those arrested. It stated that ‘not only those who oppose our cause, but also those who support them or speak up for them will be regarded as enemies’.51 Díaz Criado was widely regarded as a degenerate who used his position to satisfy his bloodlust, to get rich and for sexual gratification. The head of Queipo’s propaganda apparatus, Antonio Bahamonde, whose disgust at what he witnessed eventually led to his defection, was appalled by Díaz Criado. He wrote:
Criado usually arrived around six in the evening. In an hour or less, he would go through the files, signing death sentences (about sixty per day) usually without hearing the accused. To anaesthetize his conscience or for whatever reason, he was always drunk. As dawn broke every day, he was to be seen, surrounded by his courtiers in the restaurant of the Pasaje del Duque, where he dined every night. He was an habitual client of the night clubs where he could be seen with admiring friends, flamenco singers and dancers, sad women trying to appear gay. He used to say that, once started, it was all the same to him to sign one hundred or three hundred death sentences and the important thing was to ‘cleanse Spain of Marxists’. I have heard him say: ‘Here, for decades to come, no one will dare move.’ He did not receive visits; only young women were allowed into his office. I know cases of women who saved their loved ones by submitting to his demands.52
Francisco Gonzálbez Ruiz, one-time Civil Governor of Murcia, had similar recollections of Díaz Criado: ‘in the small hours, after an orgy, still accompanied by prostitutes, and with unimaginable sadism, he would haphazardly apply his fateful mark “X2” to the files of those who were thus condemned to immediate execution’.53 One of Díaz Criado’s closest friends was a prostitute known as Doña Mariquita who had hidden him when he was on the run after his attempt to kill Azaña. Knowing this, many people paid her to intercede for their loved ones. Edmundo Barbero was present at gatherings in the early hours of the morning at which Díaz Criado, Sergeant Rebollo and Doña Mariquita would discuss the sexual and financial offers made on behalf of prisoners. On one such occasion, a bored Díaz Criado decided to take those present to a dawn execution. To his irritation, they arrived just as the echoes of the shots were dying away. However, he was mollified when the commander of the firing squad offered the women of the party his gun for them to finish off the dying. A sergeant of the Regulares then proceeded to remove gold teeth from the dead by bashing their heads with a stone.54
Bahamonde saw Díaz Criado drunk in a bar, signing death sentences. One of the few who survived to tell the tale later was the last Republican Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Díaz Criado began his interrogation with the words: ‘I have to say that I regret that you have not yet been shot. I would like to see your family in mourning.’ He said the same to Varela Rendueles’s mother some days later. Díaz Criado falsely accused Varela Rendueles of distributing arms to the workers. The only ‘proof’ that he could produce was a pistol once known to have been in Varela Rendueles’s possession found on a worker shot resisting the coup. The pistol had been stolen when Varela Rendueles’s office was looted. However, only after his successor as Civil Governor, Pedro Parias, had corroborated this did Díaz Criado grudgingly withdraw the accusation.55 Díaz Criado’s slipshod manner inevitably led to problems.
According to the usually reliable Bahamonde, ‘A friend of General Mola was shot, despite the fact that Mola himself had taken a great interest in his case, even telephoning Díaz Criado personally. Since he usually just signed the death sentences after barely flicking through the files, Díaz Criado failed to notice that on the day in question he had signed the death sentence of Mola’s friend.’56 Even so, Queipo tolerated Díaz Criado’s excesses; but, in mid-November 1936, Franco himself insisted on his removal. The immediate trigger had been that he had accused the Portuguese Vice-Consul in Seville, Alberto Magno Rodrigues, of espionage. Given the scale of Portuguese help to the rebel cause, and the efforts of Salazar’s government to secure international recognition for Franco, the accusation was acutely embarrassing. Moreover, it was absurd since Rodrigues was actually compiling information about German and Italian arms deliveries at the request of Franco’s brother, Nicolás. An enraged Queipo de Llano was forced to apologize to Rodrigues in front of Nicolás Franco. Now known as the ‘Caudillo’, Franco personally signed Díaz Criado’s posting to the Legion on the Madrid front, where he employed his brutal temperament against the soldiers under his command.57
Díaz Criado’s replacement by the Civil Guard Major Santiago Garrigós Bernabéu brought little relief to the terrorized population. Indeed, it was fatal for those who had been saved by the bribery of Doña Mariquita or by sexual submission to Díaz Criado himself. Francisco Gonzálbez Ruiz commented on the situation: ‘since some fortunate ones were saved by the opportune intervention of a female friend or by dint of p
aying a goodly sum, of course, when Díaz Criado was sacked, his successor felt the need to review the cases. Because the procedure followed had been corrupt, those who had been freed were now shot. Needless to say, nothing could help the thousands of innocents already dead.’58
One reason for which people were executed was having opposed the military coup of 10 August 1932. Among those murdered on these grounds were the then Mayor, José González Fernández de Labandera, the first Republican Mayor of Seville in April 1931 and Socialist deputy at the time, Hermenegildo Casas Jiménez, the then Civil Governor, Ramón González Sicilia, and the President of the Provincial Assembly, José Manuel Puelles de los Santos. After Puelles, a liberal and much loved doctor, had been arrested, his clinic was ransacked and he was murdered on 5 August. A similar fate awaited numerous other municipal and provincial officials.59
As soon as the ‘pacification’ of Cádiz and Seville was under way, Queipo de Llano could turn his attention to the neighbouring province of Huelva. Initially, because of the firm stance of the Civil Governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, the Mayor, Salvador Moreno Márquez, and the local commanders of the Civil Guard, Lieutenant Colonel Julio Orts Flor, and of the Carabineros, Lieutenant Colonel Alfonso López Vicencio, the coup failed. Arms were distributed to working-class organizations but every effort was made to maintain order. Local rightists were detained for their safety and their weapons confiscated. Given the chaos and the hatred provoked by the uprising, it is a tribute to the success of the measures implemented by the Republican authorities that the number of right-wingers assassinated by uncontrolled elements in Huelva was limited to six.
