by Paul Preston
The repression in the wider province was equally brutal. In the small town of Lucena, 118 men and five women were shot.113 One of the most significant rebel atrocities took place in Baena, a hilltop town to the south-east of Córdoba on the road to Granada. During the spring of 1936, and indeed before, the town had seen considerable social hatred between its landless labourers and its landowners. The local bosses had systematically flouted the Republic’s labour legislation, bringing in cheap labour from outside and paying starvation wages. The commander of the town’s Civil Guard detachment, Lieutenant Pascual Sánchez Ramírez, an ex-Legionario, had built up a considerable arsenal of weapons and had been arming the local landowners and giving local Falangists official status as ‘special sworn-in guards’ (guardias jurados). On the night of 18 July, he seized control of the Casa del Pueblo. The next morning, he issued an edict of martial law and, with the sworn-in Falangists, occupied the town hall, the telephone exchange and other key buildings, into which they took hostages.
The rural labourers of the local CNT advanced on the town armed only with axes, sickles, sticks and a few shotguns. After a clash on the outskirts of the town, in which one Civil Guard and eleven workers died, they were driven off by a force of Civil Guards and right-wing civilians. The next day, 20 July, the workers returned to find the centre of the town defended by well over two hundred Civil Guards, Falangists and landowners distributed among several strategically chosen buildings that dominated the town. They threatened to kill a number of hostages they were holding in the town hall, including a woman at an advanced stage of pregnancy. The workers cut off their water, electricity and food supplies. Effectively controlling the town, the anarchists declared libertarian communism, abolished money and requisitioned food and jewellery as a first step towards common ownership of property. Coupons were issued for food. The revolutionary committee detained prominent members of the middle class in a nearby old people’s residence and ordered that none be harmed. A church and a convent where the rebels had established themselves were seriously damaged in the fighting and the parish priest killed. Moreover, in acts of revenge for personal grudges, eleven right-wingers were murdered before the town was captured by the military rebels. Sánchez Ramírez rejected proposals for a truce, fearing that surrender would lead to his death and that of his men.114
On 28 July, just as the besieged Civil Guards were about to give up, a large rebel relief column left Córdoba under the orders of Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga. It consisted of Civil Guards, Legionarios and Moorish Regulares, equipped with artillery and machine-guns. The workers, with virtually no firearms, were unable to put up much resistance and the column suffered only four wounded in taking Baena street by street. The Regulares led the assault, killing indiscriminately and looting. Survivors found in the street or in houses along the way were rounded up and taken to the town-hall square. The official Civil Guard account of the events in Baena admitted that ‘the slightest denunciation would see the accused shot’. Sáenz de Buruaga took refreshment in a café with one of his men, Félix Moreno de la Cova, the son of a rich landowner from Palma del Río. Meanwhile, Sánchez Ramírez, blind with rage, organized a massacre that echoed his experience in Morocco. First he killed the five male hostages detained in the town hall. Then he had lines of prisoners – many of whom had nothing to do with the CNT union or the events of the previous week – lie face down in the square. Completely beside himself, he insisted on shooting most of them himself. The occupying forces aided by local rightists continued to bring in more prisoners to replace those being shot.
ABC referred to these extra-judicial killings as the application of ‘exemplary punishment’ to ‘all leading elements’ and of ‘the rigour of the law’ to anyone found with arms. The paper’s final comment was ‘it is certain that the town of Baena will never forget the scenes of horror created by so many murders committed there and the activities of the liberating forces’. Nevertheless, despite ABC’s comments, Sáenz de Buruaga’s forces captured neither union leaders nor individuals with arms. Nearly all of these had withdrawn to the old people’s residence where the right-wing prisoners were being kept. The ‘so many murders’ were largely the consequence of Sáenz de Buruaga’s irresponsibility in going for a drink while Sánchez Ramírez conducted the massacre.
The many leftists who fled and packed into the residence used the hostages as shields in the hope that this would restrain Sáenz de Buruaga’s pursuing forces. It did not and many were found dead by the windows, shot with munitions possessed only by the attackers. Most of the anarchists who had taken refuge there fled, but a few stayed until the last moment, murdering many of the remaining hostages in reprisal for the executions in the square. In total, eighty-one hostages were killed. Many local people were convinced that, but for the massacre organized by Sánchez Ramírez, the hostages would have survived. Nevertheless, the discovery of their corpses led to a further massacre in an orgy of revenge so indiscriminate that several right-wingers were also victims. Masses of left-wing prisoners were shot, including an eight-year-old boy.115 On 5 August, with Sáenz de Buruaga’s column having gone to Córdoba, Baena was attacked unsuccessfully by anarchist militia. This in turn intensified the rhythm of executions within the town.116
On the night of 31 July, Queipo de Llano felt the need to justify, in his nightly broadcast, the repression in Baena, by referring to ‘real horrors, monstrous crimes that cannot be mentioned lest they bring shame on our people, and that produced after the fall of Baena, the punishment that is natural when troops are possessed by the indignation provoked by such crimes’.117 Two months later, the middle classes of Baena hosted a ceremony at which Sáenz de Buruaga presented Sánchez Ramírez with the military medal in the still bloodstained square. Nearly seven hundred people were killed by, or on the orders of, Sánchez Ramírez, Sáenz de Buruaga and, over the next five months, the man named as military judge. This was the leading local landowner, Manuel Cubillo Jiménez, whose wife and three young sons were among those killed in the residence by gunfire from the forces of Sáenz de Buruaga. He was implacable in his desire for revenge. Many townspeople fled eastwards to the Republican-held province of Jaén. The women who remained were subjected to various forms of sexual abuse and humiliation, from rape to head-shaving and being forced to drink castor oil. Over six hundred children were left orphaned, including cases of toddlers left to fend for themselves.118
The events in Baena fitted well into the overall thinking behind the military uprising. The point was made expressively by José María Pemán, who declared that ‘this magnificent conflict which is bleeding Spain is taking place on a plane that is both supernatural and wondrous. The flames of Irún, Guernica, Lequeitio, Málaga or Baena burn the stubble to leave the land fertilized for the new harvest. We are going to have, my fellow Spaniards, land clean and levelled on which to lay imperial stones.’119
Initially, the rebel columns of each Andalusian province had concentrated on occupying nearby towns and villages, the choice of which depended less on military criteria than on the desire of landowners to liberate their estates from left-wing occupations. At the beginning of August, in order to impose a strategic vision of operations, a more central control was imposed on the columns. With numerous towns and villages of Córdoba still in Republican hands, General Varela was sent to undertake their conquest. Although no column would henceforth be permitted to act on its own initiative, their activities continued to reflect the prejudices and objectives of the landowners. One of the first objectives for Varela was the relief of Granada, which remained isolated and besieged by government forces. This was achieved on 18 August. A second objective was the complete occupation of Seville and Cádiz prior to an attack on Málaga. Thus the beautiful hilltop town of Ronda became an intermediate target of the highest importance.120
Significantly, among Varela’s staff could be found the Falangist bullfighter and landowner Pepe el Algabeño, the great latifundista Eduardo Sotomayor and Antonio Cañero, a famous
rejoneador (horse-back bullfighter). The estate-owners who bred fighting bulls loathed the day-labourers who wanted to plough the pastures for crops. Among them, there were several retired bullfighters who, after their successes in the ring, had bought land and become bull-breeders.121 Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the latifundistas for the brutal repression of landless labourers would eventually take its toll on the productive capacity of the great estates. The military authorities were sufficiently concerned to take up the question and call for there to be left sufficient workers to ensure agricultural production.122
Virtually every town and village of Cádiz had been conquered by 18 September. Despite exhaustive efforts to inflate the figures, the Francoist authorities could claim that, in the areas in Republican hands since the military coup of 18 July, only ninety-eight people had been killed, the majority in response to news of the rightist violence in other pueblos.123 This contrasts with the 3,071 people executed by the rebels within the province. There were executions in every pueblo of Cádiz, whether or not there had been any deaths at the hands of Republicans. The principal victims were those who had played any role in Republican institutions, political parties or trade unions. Anyone known to have taken part in any strike action over the previous ten years or known to sympathize with Republican ideas such as schoolteachers or Freemasons was a likely target.124
With Cádiz entirely in Francoist hands, Manuel Mora-Figueroa’s forces were joined by those of his brother José, and the augmented column began to make incursions into the province of Málaga. They conquered numerous villages as they moved uphill to the sierra dominated by the historic town of Ronda, perched alongside the tajo or gorge in which the River Gaudalevin runs more than three hundred feet below. Famous for its Roman and Arab bridges and its exquisite eighteenth-century bullring, Ronda had suffered a pitiless repression at the hands of anarchists led by a character known as ‘El Gitano’. Initially, the CNT committee had maintained a degree of order although churches were sacked and images destroyed, but soon there were murders being carried out by anarchists from Málaga and also by locals. However, there is no substance to the claim, first made by Queipo in a broadcast on 18 August and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, that large numbers of prisoners were killed by being thrown into the tajo. The many rightist victims were shot in the cemetery. Francoist sources claim that victims of the red terror from Ronda and the nearby pueblos of Gaucín and Arriate numbered over six hundred. On 16 September, when Varela took the town, the defenders fled and his forces suffered only three casualties in the assault. His men stopped and interrogated anyone found in streets and shot many of them. Over half of the population fled towards Málaga.125 Under the new authorities, those of the town’s defenders who had not fled were subjected to a bloody repression and the theft of their property.126
Mora-Figueroa set up headquarters in Ronda. There his forces were joined by a group of young socialites from Sanlúcar under the leadership of another scion of a sherry-producing family, Pedro Barbadillo Rodríguez. After the capture of each pueblo, large numbers of prisoners were taken back to Ronda for execution.127 In response to the intensity of the repression in Western Andalusia, many men, fearing for their lives, fled to the hills and lived by stealing cattle and crops. Mounted patrols of Civil Guards and Falangists of the Mora-Figueroa column devoted considerable time to hunting them down and killing them, particularly after the fall of Málaga in February 1937.128
Queipo de Llano placed the ‘legal’ supervision of the repression throughout all of Andalusia and Extremadura in the hands of the military judge, Francisco Bohórquez Vecina. The utterly arbitrary nature of Bohórquez’s proceedings was starkly revealed on 28 May 1937, in a set of complaints sent to General Varela by Felipe Rodríguez Franco, a prosecutor of the Cádiz provincial court. He had been removed from his post for ignoring the illegal instructions issued to members of the summary courts martial by Bohórquez. Rodríguez Franco alleged that these instructions were that ‘all the agents and scrutineers of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections should be tried, with decisions as to their guilt to be made on the basis of the impression that their faces made on the judges during their interrogation. All red militiamen, as a general rule, should be tried and shot.’ Bohórquez laid down the percentage of sentences of different kinds that should be passed and even made an a priori rule about proof, saying that one witness for the prosecution was enough for a guilty verdict. Varela acknowledged receipt but nothing was done.129
Events in Granada were significantly different from those in Cádiz, Córdoba and Seville. The military commander, General Miguel Campins, had arrived in Granada only on 11 July and was not party to the conspiracy. Loyal to the Republic, he refused to obey Queipo’s order to declare martial law. However, Campins did send a telegram putting himself under the orders of his friend General Franco, whose deputy he had been at the Zaragoza Military Academy. Campins was arrested by rebel officers and it was alleged that his hesitation had led to the coup failing in Jaén, Málaga and Almería. Queipo declared on the radio that, if he had been less of a coward, he would have committed suicide.130 Campíns was tried in Seville for ‘rebellion’ on 14 August and shot two days later. Franco sent letters asking that mercy be shown to Campins, but Queipo tore them up.131
In the meantime, the main centre of resistance, the working-class district of the Albaicín, was forced to surrender after artillery and bombing attacks. Varela reached Loja west of the city on 18 August, and opened a line of contact with Seville. Granada was still threatened by loyalist forces.132 The consequent sense of insecurity, along with feeble Republican bombing raids, intensified the brutality of the repression carried out by the newly appointed Civil Governor. The forty-five-year-old Comandante José Valdés Guzmán was a deeply reactionary Africanista as well as an early member of the Falange. The painful legacy of a serious wound suffered in Morocco together with lifelong intestinal problems had left him with an ulcerous disposition. He had been posted to Granada in 1931 as head of the military administration. He harboured a deep loathing of the local left after the events of 9–10 March when Falangist gunmen had fired on a group of workers and their families and thus provoked a joint general strike of all of the unions of the city. The right now took full-scale revenge for the consequent violence, when the offices of both the Falange and Acción Popular had been set on fire.133
Numerous doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, schoolteachers and, above all, workers were murdered. Much of the dirty work was carried out by the large numbers of newly recruited Falangists who played a key role in locating and denouncing suspects.134 When control of the city centre was assured, Valdés allowed the Falangist ‘Black Squad’ to sow panic among the population. The group was led by prominent local rightists and was made up of a mixture of convinced fanatics, paid thugs and men anxious to hide a left-wing past. Leftists were forcibly seized from their homes at night and shot in the cemetery. One of their leaders, Juan Luis Trescastro Medina, declared that, on expeditions to surrounding villages, he was prepared to slit the throats of any reds including breast-feeding babies.135 After the fall of Loja, Queipo sent a contingent of Regulares which took part in atrocities in the pueblos. In the course of the war, more than five thousand civilians were shot in Granada, many at the cemetery. The cemetery’s caretaker went mad and, on 4 August, was committed to an asylum. Three weeks later, his replacement and his family moved from the lodge at the cemetery gates because the shots and the cries and screams of the dying had made it unbearable for them. Large numbers of people from all over the Alpujárras were buried in a common grave in a canyon near Órgiva.136
One of the most celebrated victims, not just in Granada but in all of Spain, was the poet Federico García Lorca. Years later, the Francoists were to claim that Lorca had died because of an apolitical private feud related to his homosexuality. In fact, Lorca was anything but apolitical. In ultra-reactionary Granada, his sexuality had given him a sense of apartness which had
grown into deep empathy for those on the margins of respectable society. In 1934, he had declared: ‘I will always be on the side of those who have nothing.’ His itinerant theatre La Barraca was inspired by a sense of social missionary zeal. Lorca regularly signed anti-fascist manifestos and was connected with organizations such as International Red Aid. Since he was an immensely famous and popular poet and playwright, his politics and his sexuality provoked the loathing of the Falange and the rest of the right.
In Granada itself, he was closely connected with the moderate left. His views were well known and it had not escaped the notice of the town’s oligarchs that he thought that the Catholic conquest of Moorish Granada in 1492 had been a disaster. Flouting a central tenet of Spanish right-wing thinking, Lorca believed that the conquest had destroyed a unique civilization and created ‘a wasteland populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain today’. Recent research has also added another element which was resentment of the success of Lorca’s father, Federico García Rodríguez. He had become rich, buying and selling land in Asquerosa to the north-west of Granada (now renamed Valderrubio). To the annoyance of other landowners, he paid his employees well, lent his neighbours money when they were in danger of foreclosure and even built homes for his workers. His friendship with the Socialist Minister, Fernando de los Ríos, was another reason for resentment. Among his political and economic rivals were the lawyer and businessman Juan Luis Trescastro Medina and Horacio Roldán Quesada of Acción Popular. Roldán Quesada had hoped to marry the poet’s sister Concha, but she had married Manuel Fernández Montesinos, who became Mayor of the city.137
