by Paul Preston
When Castejón’s column arrived, it was fiercely resisted. Castejón’s revenge was fierce. Corpses that littered the streets were left to be eaten by pigs. Shops and houses were looted and women violated. In a radio broadcast, Queipo de Llano crowed with delight:
An example has been made of Morón that I imagine will serve as a lesson to those towns who still foolishly maintain their faith in Marxism and the hope of being able to resist us. Just as in Arahal, in Morón there was a group of heedless men who had committed unequalled acts of savagery, attacking right-wing individuals who had not provoked them. And I have heard that in various towns the Marxists have right-wing prisoners against whom they plan to commit similar barbarities. I remind them all that, for every honorable person that dies, I will shoot at least ten; and there are already towns where we have gone beyond that figure. And the leaders should not hold out hope of saving themselves by flight, since I will drag them from out of the ground, if necessary, to implement the law.94
Castejón himself explained how he took these towns: ‘I employed an encircling movement which enabled me to punish the reds harshly.’95 The rural proletariat was no match for the military experience of the battle-hardened Legionarios. However, as Castejón revealed, it was a question not simply of seizing control but of imposing a savage repression. In the case of the next town conquered, La Puebla de Cazalla east of Morón, refugees from there and Arahal had given bloodcurdling accounts of what had happened when Castejón’s column had arrived. Moreover, on 30 July, a rebel aircraft dropped leaflets threatening that the town would be bombed if it did not surrender immediately. Accordingly, no resistance was offered. Nevertheless, the repression that followed was unremitting. The crimes of the left had consisted of sacking the parish church and the headquarters of Acción Popular, requisitioning and distributing food and arresting forty-six local rebel sympathizers. No deaths occurred while the town was in the hands of the Popular Front Committee. Indeed, anarchists from Málaga had been prevented from killing the prisoners. Now, the occupying troops looted houses. Before cursory military trials started, over one hundred people were murdered. More than one thousand men, from a town of nine thousand inhabitants, were forcibly mobilized into the rebel army. To replace them, women and older men were used as slave labour.96
Similarly, as Queipo had threatened, when Castejón’s column reached the prosperous railway junction and market town of Puente Genil in south-western Córdoba, the repression was indiscriminately ferocious. For once, the events that had followed the initial coup in the town provided some kind of excuse. The numerous forces from the town’s three Civil Guards barracks, supported by local Falangists, members of Acción Popular and landowners, had declared for the rebellion on 19 July, seizing the Casa del Pueblo and taking many prisoners. They were opposed by a combination of the local leftists and loyal security forces from Málaga. In fierce fighting over the next four days, around 250 left-wing workers and twenty-one Civil Guards were killed and fifteen wounded. A further fifty left-wing hostages were executed by the Civil Guards on 22 July.
Although the rebellion was defeated by 23 July, sporadic sniper fire saw further left-wing deaths. This intensified the hatred behind the brutal reprisals that were now taken by the left. While a revolutionary committee set about distributing food, the surviving Civil Guards were executed along with many of those who had supported the military coup – landowners, money-lenders, right-wingers and, inevitably, the clergy. Among the atrocities committed, a seventy-year-old man and his wife were burned alive. Although a rich landowner, Manuel Gómez Perales, paid a ransom of 100,000 pesetas for his liberty, he and his four sons were murdered. In justification of the even greater scale of subsequent revenge, the rebel newspaper La Unión stated that there had been seven hundred victims, although official Francoist sources eventually claimed 154. Exhaustive modern research has identified only 115. There were instances of victims being tortured and mutilated and of women dancing with corpses. Many houses were looted and forty-five burned down. Seven churches were destroyed. Ten clergymen were murdered, although three others, who had shown sympathy with the plight of the local working class, were saved. Two teams arrayed in ecclesiastical robes played football with the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary.97
One week later, on 1 August, a substantial column of around 1,200 Legionarios, regular troops, Requetés and Falangists reached Puente Genil from Seville under the command of Castejón and Major Haro Lumbreras. Ramón de Carranza also arrived with his column. Enjoying artillery and air support, they quickly overcame the town’s fierce resistance. Messages had been sent to Puente Genil threatening that one hundred lives would be taken in reprisal for every right-wing victim of the ‘red domination’. When the scale of the attack was realized, many tried to flee towards Málaga. Troops were deployed, according to Castejón himself, ‘to prevent the flight of refugees and to increase the scale of the killing’. Regarding his own forces, he said: ‘Once inside the town, the repression started in earnest.’ The killing was indiscriminate and many of the victims were not at all political, merely people who had fled in terror.
Numerous women were raped before being shot. Men were taken off the street or pulled from their houses to be tortured and shot. Five hundred and one people were killed on that first day. Castejón returned to Seville on the same evening and the ‘clean-up operation’ continued for months afterwards. It took the lives of many who were anything but leftists, including several lawyers and doctors. The president of the Red Cross was shot ‘for having given medicines to the reds’. In his broadcast that evening, Queipo de Llano praised Castejón, saying that ‘the repression has been harsh but not nearly as harsh as it should have been and indeed will be’. At least another thousand people were executed over the following months, many as acts of petty vengeance against workers who had stood up to the owners in the previous years.98
On 3 August, Castejón was ordered by Franco to join the march on Madrid. His advance would see the ‘cleansing’ of numerous pueblos along the way. The purging elsewhere in the province of Seville continued at the hands of Ramón Carranza, whose column was now incorporated into a larger force under Major Francisco Buiza Fernández-Palacios. On Friday 7 August, this column set off from the provincial capital in a north-easterly direction. Fully equipped with artillery, it numbered 1,200. Its first target was Lora del Río, a relatively tranquil town where the bulk of the working class was Socialist and the Mayor a moderate Republican. There, the Captain of the Civil Guard and his men, together with the parish priest and about eighty local right-wingers, had greeted the news of the military uprising enthusiastically. They gathered arms and set up headquarters in the Civil Guard barracks on 19 July.
Meanwhile, the left had formed a liaison committee consisting of Socialist and Republican members who began to requisition and distribute food. Meat was plentiful since the committee permitted the slaughtering of the fighting bulls being bred on local farms. On each of the next three days, the Civil Guard Captain led a parade of the rightists around the town reading out an edict in favour of the military uprising. To avoid bloodshed, the Mayor ordered them to desist. They ignored him and finally, on the evening of 22 July, when they paraded again, they were confronted by the liaison committee. Four of the rightists were wounded and all the marchers barricaded themselves in the Civil Guard barracks. After a short siege, they surrendered, against the loud protests of the Captain, who was shot. The following day, house searches began and the majority of the town’s right-wingers were imprisoned. The funds of local banks and valuables from the church were put into safe-keeping but there were also cases of blatant robbery. On 1 August, anarchists arrived from Constantina to the north and, overcoming the protests of the committee, began to shoot the prisoners. Over the next four days, they executed ninety, including the parish priest and his assistant, five Falangists and twenty Civil Guards. Many of those murdered were active supporters of the military rising, but others were simply known rightists who had provoked
the enmity of local workers.99
Artillery and air bombardment of the town began on the evening of 7 August. Virtually no resistance was offered when Lora del Río was occupied the next day by Buiza’s column. Large numbers of citizens fled. In the words of ABC, ‘the town’s military saviours imposed exemplary justice’. A cavalry captain, the Carlist Carlos Mencos López, was left in charge of the ‘pacification’. Houses were systematically looted – the prelude to methodical confiscation of the goods and property of the town’s Republicans. In revenge for the crimes of the anarchists from Constantina, people were shot that day on the basis of simple denunciations. That night, there was a great orgy with drink provided by grateful wine-producers. An eyewitness reported that many recently widowed women were used to meet ‘the sexual excesses of that collectivity without women [the Legionarios] in an orgy begun by the conservative señoritos’. Then ‘trials’ were mounted in which the witnesses were relatives of the victims. On 10 August, Ramón Carranza arrived with his column. A further three hundred labourers, including some women, were ‘tried’ without defence. They were accused of ‘crimes’ ranging from having a Republican flag to having expressed admiration for President Roosevelt. Domestic servants were accused of criticizing their employers. All were found guilty. Over the next days, they were loaded on to the town’s only truck and taken to the cemetery on the outskirts where all, including two pregnant girls, were shot.100
Juan Manuel Lozano Nieto was the son of a man murdered by the rebels despite having taken no part in the left-wing atrocities. Seventy years after the events in Lora, Lozano Nieto, by now a Catholic priest, wrote a measured account of them. In his book, he explained why even those who were not seeking revenge for an executed relative took part in the murders of the left. Some were simply trying to save themselves. Others, of lower-middle-class origin, were desperate to differentiate themselves from the landless labourers. Others were interested in enriching themselves with the property of those they killed. There were cases of the simple theft of the shops or cattle of the wealthier executed Republicans and the clothes and household goods of the more humble. Then there were simple degenerates, who killed for money or for alcohol, while others were involved for sexual gratification.101 According to his dispassionate account, between six hundred and one thousand men young and old, women and children were slaughtered in the repression in Lora. Entire families were eliminated or left without means of support. Children were left without parents. Women were abused and humiliated, subjected to the standard rebel practice of their heads being shaved except for a tuft of hair to which was tied a ribbon with monarchist colours.102
Between 5 and 12 August, the forces of Carranza and Buiza had taken the village of El Pedroso, and the towns of Constantina and Cazalla de la Sierra. In Constantina, the atrocities of the local anarchists were avenged threefold. Three hundred inhabitants were executed and a further three thousand fled.103 In Cazalla de la Sierra, under the anarchist-dominated revolutionary committee, the parish church was sacked and set alight, the Civil Guard detained, food requisitioned and distributed and numerous right-wingers detained. Forty-one civilians and twenty-three Civil Guards were shot during the night of 5–6 August in retaliation for Buiza’s first attack on the town.104 When he took the town at his second attempt a week later, a tribunal consisting of officers from his force and local rightists was set up to try those considered responsible for the crimes committed. Seventy-six, including several women, were shot over the following weeks.105
The near racist contempt of the southern landowners for their peasants had found an echo in the Africanistas. Their belief in their right of arbitrary power over the tribes of Morocco was comparable to the sense of near-feudal entitlement of the señoritos. An easy identification of interest saw both regard the proletariat as a subject colonial race. Before 1936, explicit parallels had been drawn between the workers of southern Spain and the Rif tribesmen. Now, the ‘crimes’ of the reds in resisting the military uprising were seen as equivalent to the ‘crimes’ of the tribesmen who massacred Spanish troops at the battle of Annual in 1921 and nearly captured Melilla. The role of the African columns in 1936 was likened to that of the Legionarios who relieved Melilla.106
The relationship between the landowners and their military saviours was illustrated when Queipo de Llano asked Ramón de Carranza’s friend Rafael de Medina to raise money for the rebel cause. After years of anguished complaints that agriculture was in ruins as a result of Republican reforms, it might have been expected that Medina’s fund-raising efforts would meet with difficulty. On his first day, three olive exporters in Alcalá de Guadaira gave 1 million pesetas between them. Later the same day, in Dos Hermanas, one landowner asked what the money was for. When told that it was hoped to buy aircraft, he asked how much an aeroplane cost. When Medina replied, ‘About one million pesetas,’ without hesitating the latifundista wrote him a cheque for the full amount.107 Landowners often formed and financed their own units, such as those led by Carranza or the Mora-Figueroa brothers.
Thereafter, several of the various volunteer forces were formalized as a kind of landowners’ cavalry usually known as the Volunteer Mounted Police. These units included both landowners and those of their employees specialized in horse-breeding and training. Polo ponies were used as well as working horses. As if taking part in a sport or hunting expeditions, they carried out a continuous campaign against the left in the south. Such groups were to be found throughout most of Andalusia and Extremadura. In Lucena in Córdoba, the local landowners funded a squad of expert horsemen to ‘defend property’ and pursue leftists who had fled into the countryside. The group was notorious for its cruelty, its pillaging and its many sexual crimes and was known locally as ‘the death squad’. In September 1936, for example, they crossed the iron bridge over the River Genil and entered Cuevas de San Marcos in Málaga. Many of the inhabitants who fled into the surrounding countryside, for no reason other than fear, were rounded up and shot. After such expeditions, the death squad would return to Lucena with lorries loaded with furniture, bedding, sewing machines, books, clocks and other household items.108
The caciques and the army could call upon support for their repressive activities from a substantial social group. Those at the top provided money and weapons but there was no shortage of willing volunteers to do their dirty work. Those who went out searching for leftists, murdering and raping, torturing and interrogating, and those who denounced their neighbours were a heterogeneous group. Some were landowners or local businessmen, some were their sons. Others of whatever social class were hoping to save themselves from a dubious past by manifesting enthusiasm for the killing. Others enjoyed the opportunity to kill and rape without hindrance. Others again welcomed the chance to steal or buy cheaply the coveted property of their neighbours. There were also the silent accomplices who looked on, perhaps appalled, perhaps delighted. As the suffocating atmosphere of fear intensified, despite the legitimizing sermons of the clerics, the terror was based on an all-pervading moral corruption.
Sometimes, however, the intensity of the repression was not sufficient for Queipo de Llano. Córdoba had fallen within a matter of hours to the city’s military commander, the Artillery Colonel Ciriaco Cascajo Ruiz, with help from the Civil Guard.109 With the city of Córdoba isolated within a province that remained loyal to the Republic, a group of Falangists went to Seville to get arms. Their leader was asked by Queipo how many they had shot in Córdoba. When he replied, ‘None,’ Queipo was outraged and thundered: ‘Well, until you shoot a couple of hundred there’ll be no more arms for you!’ Queipo was dissatisfied because Cascajo was ordering ‘only’ five executions per day. The municipal authorities and leading Republicans who had taken refuge in the building of the Civil Governor were murdered. Among other victims were four parliamentary deputies for Andalusia and Manuel Azaña’s nephew, Gregorio Azaña Cuevas, a state lawyer, who had gone to attend a meeting about the proposed autonomy statute for Andalusia along with another of thos
e arrested, Joaquín García Hidalgo Villanueva, a Freemason and journalist who had been Socialist deputy for the city between 1931 and 1933. García Hidalgo, a diabetic, was taken to prison. There he was tortured and force-fed sugar. He died in a diabetic coma on 28 July.
After an inspection by Queipo on 5 August, the rate of executions speeded up. Bruno Ibáñez, a brutal major of the Civil Guard, was put in charge of the terror. In the first week, he arrested 109 people from lists given him by landowners and priests. They were shot out on the roads and in the olive groves. The Socialist Mayor Manuel Sánchez Badajoz, a number of town councillors and a much loved parliamentary deputy, Dr Vicente Martín Romera, were taken to the cemetery at dawn on 7 August and, by the light of car headlights, shot with seven others. Within a few days, with the midsummer heat at its height, the numbers of shootings and the corpses left in the streets caused a minor typhoid epidemic. It has been calculated that more than 11,500 people were killed in the province of Córdoba between 1936 and 1945.110
A young Falangist lawyer recalled: ‘The basement of Falange headquarters in which people were held was like a balloon which was blown up in the afternoon and was empty the following morning. Each day there were executions in the cemetery and along the roads leading out of the city.’ He saw Bruno Ibáñez one day at a bullfight: ‘As he came out of the ring people cringed. To get out of his way, people would have incrusted themselves in the walls if they could. Everyone was electrified with terror and fear. Don Bruno could have shot all Córdoba, he was sent there with carte blanche. It was said that his whole family had been wiped out by the reds in some town in La Mancha. Whether it was true or not, he was a prejudiced, embittered man.’ He organized book burnings and imposed a programme of religious films and Nazi documentaries in local cinemas.111 A note issued by Bruno Ibáñez on 1 October 1936 stated that ‘Those who flee are effectively confessing their guilt.’112
