by Paul Preston
Outside Barcelona, uncontrolled terror was the norm for a brief period. The columns of anarchists who flooded from the city in requisitioned vehicles left a trail of slaughter in their wake. As they passed through towns and villages en route to Aragon, they executed anyone considered to be a fascist, which meant clergy and practising Catholics, landowners and merchants. In the province of Lleida, army officers, the Civil Guard and local right-wing groups had initially controlled the city. However, under pressure from a general strike and demoralized by news of the defeat of the rising in Barcelona, the rebels surrendered on 20 July.
The POUM was the dominant force in the province of Lleida and co-operated with the CNT and UGT in creating a Committee of Public Safety, but it did little to prevent either the destruction by fire of the majority of the city’s churches or a wave of assassinations. On the night of 25 July, twenty-six army and Civil Guard officers were pulled from the local prison and shot and the Cathedral was set on fire. A Claretian priest, fourteen seminarists of the same order and a dozen civilians were also murdered. It has been suggested that this atrocity was triggered by the arrival that day of the column led by Durruti. As the dominant force in the city, the POUM appointed a shoemaker, Josep Rodés Bley, as Commissar of Public Order. When Aurelio Fernández sent an emissary to organize Patrulles de Control, the two combined to impose a wave of criminality on the city. On 5 August, twenty-one detainees, including the Bishop of Lleida, Dr Salvi Huix Miralpeix, were loaded on to a truck to be transferred to Barcelona. The truck was ambushed and they were shot in the cemetery. It has been suggested that the ambush was mounted by another column from Barcelona, ‘Los Aguiluchos de la FAI’ (the Young Eagles of the FAI) led by Juan García Oliver and, if anything, more violent than Durruti’s men.
On the night of 20 August, seventy-three priests and religious and several civilians were shot in the cemetery. By the end of October, more than 250 people had been murdered. This was over half of all of the deaths in Lleida during the entire war. The high incidence of terror was closely related to the fact that Lleida saw considerable traffic of anarchist columns en route to the Aragon front. Several of the civilian victims had been prominent in the repression after the events of October 1934.59 Elsewhere in the province, the POUM take-over saw harvests left to rot and factories abandoned. Those who pointed out that the economy had to be organized were denounced as reactionaries. This was particularly the case in Balaguer, to the north-east of the provincial capital, where, after murdering thirty-five people, seventeen of them on 5 August, the POUM committee seemed most concerned with leading the good life in the requisitioned homes of the wealthy.60
As early as 25 July, a joint declaration of the Catalan regional committee and the Barcelona Federation of the CNT had issued a statement declaring that ‘It is ignoble, unworthy and detrimental to the interests of the labouring class to besmirch the triumph with looting and pillage, the arbitrary ransacking of homes and other irresponsible acts.’ With either innocence or hypocrisy, it was claimed that the CNT and the FAI would impose severe measures against those caught by the Patrulles de Control committing such acts. Since such activities continued, some days later, an even more unbelievable declaration was issued to the effect that house searches, arbitrary arrests and executions had nothing to do with the CNT–FAI and were the work of those in the pay of fascists.61
Nevertheless, even those who were neither hypocrites nor innocents denounced the violence and the destruction unconditionally. The influential anarchist thinker Joan Peiró made a distinction between legitimate revolutionary violence and what he called ‘inopportune bloodshed’. He wrote in late August 1936: ‘If the cruelly exploitative bourgeoisie fall exterminated by the holy anger of the people, the neutral spectator will find therein an explanation for the killing. And the same is true if those exterminated are caciques, clerics devoted to extremist political activities or reactionaries. The revolution is the revolution, and it is only logical that the revolution should involve bloodshed.’ Then, having justified the ‘holy anger of the people’, he went on to denounce those who wasted time and petrol by burning down and looting churches and the summer homes of the rich while ‘the fat cats who deserve to be strung up from the lamp-posts of the riverside’ get away.62
The views of Peiró about gratuitous violence were echoed in Tarragona, if not in Lleida. Elements of Tarragona’s anti-fascist committee successfully opposed the summary execution of those considered to be fascists. Nevertheless, the fact that the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard had been posted to the battle front rendered it difficult at first to control the more bloodthirsty militiamen. Moreover, news of atrocities in the rebel zone would provoke reprisals. Nevertheless, local Esquerra Republicana, UGT and POUM leaders denounced terrorism and criminality. The atrocities committed in the town were the work of three gangs consisting of members of the Libertarian Youth and the FAI. Those of them not criminals released from jail on 22 July were unskilled, and often unemployed, manual labourers, on the margins of society. Provided with weapons, they committed acts of theft, extortion and murder in the name of revolution.63
The moment of what Peiró had called ‘the holy anger of the people’ passed and the wider needs of the war effort ensured that, by the end of August, Solidaridad Obrera could be found calling for an end to spontaneous violence against the perceived enemies of the people.64 Yet that same Solidaridad Obrera published an article calling for the elimination of Manuel Carrasco i Formiguera, a prominent member of the Catalanist Christian Democrat party Unió Democràtica de Catalunya. He worked in the early months of the war as a legal adviser to the Finance Ministry of the Generalitat – work which would subsequently be used by the Francoists to justify his execution. In that post, he had opposed various attempts by anarchists and others to get access to the frozen bank accounts of people who had been assassinated or had gone into exile. These included the fortune of Miquel Mateu i Pla, whom the Generalitat had helped escape. In other cases, there were attempts to cash cheques that had been extorted from wealthy individuals arrested by the patrols or efforts by the committees that had confiscated businesses to get access to the funds of their owners. One such refusal, to the committee running the newspaper Diari de Barcelona, saw Carrasco denounced in its pages on 15 December as a fascist assassin. Two days later, an article in Solidaridad Obrera by Jaume Balius, a member of the FAI who was also a wealthy, and fanatical, Catalan separatist, denounced Carrasco for his Catholic faith. In fact, Carrasco was a conservative of common sense and humanity as well as a deeply pious Catholic. Balius’s denunciation was effectively an invitation for him to be assassinated. On the evening following its appearance, a FAI patrol came looking for him at his home.65 Since the authorities could not guarantee his safety, Carrasco was forced to flee his beloved Catalonia to work on behalf of the Generalitat in the Basque Country. Captured by the Francoists, Carrasco was tried and executed by firing squad on Easter Saturday, 9 April 1938.66
By November 1936, Peiró had hardened his line and could be found courageously denouncing the terrorism and theft which had plunged Catalonia into bestiality and brought the revolution into disrepute:
Here, for too long, there has been no law but that of the strongest. Men have killed for the sake of killing, because it was possible to kill with impunity. And men have been murdered not because they were fascists, nor enemies of the people, nor enemies of our revolution, nor anything remotely similar. They have been killed on a whim, and many have died as a result of the resentment or grudges of their killers. When the popular violence erupted, the killers and thieves took advantage and they continue stealing and killing and bring shame on those who risk their lives at the front.
Peiró’s indignation about the abuses of the revolutionary context intensified throughout the autumn of 1936. He commented that ‘in certain areas around the province of Barcelona, and especially in Lleida, the scale of bloodshed has been terrifying. And how many committees around Catalonia have had to order the execution
of “revolutionaries” who took advantage of the situation sometimes to steal and other times to murder in order to prevent the discovery of their theft?’ Peiró believed that it was in the interests of the anarchist movement to make public denunciations of these abuses. In one of his articles he wrote of a leader of the anti-fascist committee of a village near Mataró. The individual in question had furnished his house with the proceeds of his robberies. ‘This “revolutionary”, who boasts of having liquidated God and the Virgin Mary, has made “his own revolution”, to acquire not only furnishings worthy of a prince, but also clothes, carpets, works of art and jewellery.’ For Peiró, the reason why so many were fighting and dying at the front was to eliminate theft and violence, not to encourage it. Obviously, the thieves and murderers were hardly those who could be trusted to build a new world.67
Nor, however, could such trust be placed in many members of the CNT–FAI. A notorious occasion when anarchist intruders from outside were resisted took place on 23 January 1937 with a bloody clash in La Fatarella, a hilltop village in the Terra Alta region of Tarragona. A long-running conflict between poor smallholders and hungry landless labourers who favoured collectivization was ignited by the arrival of elements of the FAI from Barcelona. They tried forcibly to collectivize the smallholdings of the local peasantry but were expelled by them. Claiming that the rebel fifth column had risen in La Fatarella, these anarchists called for reinforcements from Barcelona and Tarragona. Large numbers of anarchist patrols were sent from elsewhere in Tarragona and also from Barcelona – among them the group of Joaquim Aubí ‘El Gordo’ who ran the ghost cars of Badalona. A villager managed to telephone the Generalitat, but the various delegates sent either arrived too late or did nothing. One of them was Aurelio Fernández, and in his presence the FAI militia killed thirty of the smallholders who were opposing their policy of collectivization and sacked La Fatarella. In CNT sources, the smallholders were referred to as ‘rebels’ and it was falsely alleged that a monarchist uprising was being planned in the village.68 The extremist Jaume Balius wrote: ‘the revolution must purge the rearguard. We suffer from too much legalism. He who is not with the workers is a fascist and should be treated as such. Let us not forget the case of La Fatarella.’69
Anarchist violence was as likely to be directed against the Communists as against the clergy, the middle classes or the smallholding peasantry. The relatively ineffective efforts of the Generalitat to control the excesses of the CNT–FAI were reflected in the timidity shown by Josep Tarradellas, the first minister since the end of September. In mid-September, President Companys told Ilya Erhenburg that he was outraged by the terror inflicted by the anarchists on the Communists and expressed surprise that the PSUC did not respond in kind.70 However, Companys was significantly reinforced by the arrival, on 1 October, of the Russian Consul Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. His first report to Moscow gave the measure of the problem. He complained that the CNT was recruiting so indiscriminately that it contained ever more right-wing provocateurs and criminal elements from the lumpenproletariat. He reported that, in late July, the CNT had taken advantage of the outbreak of the war to kill over eighty workers on the pretext that they were scabs. Certainly, among them was Ramón Sales, the head of the scab union, the Sindicatos Libres.
Anarchist victims also included the president of the UGT in the port of Barcelona, Desiderio Trillas Mainé, who was shot dead on 31 July along with two others, all three members of the PSUC. The excuse used was that, being able to choose who got work on the docks, he had favoured UGT members. In fact, the motive was more to do with his opposition to a CNT port strike in January 1934.71 Subsequently, in a village near Barbastro in Huesca, twenty-five members of the UGT were murdered by anarchists in a surprise attack. In Molins de Rei near Barcelona, workers in a textile factory went on strike in protest against arbitrary dismissals by the FAI committee. A delegation trying to take the workers’ complaints to Barcelona was forced off the train. Those who did manage to get through were too frightened to return.72
An even more extreme example of FAI activity was the extortion of the Marist Order carried out by Aurelio Fernández. Having already suffered the deaths of fourteen of their number, senior elements of the order met with Aurelio Fernández and Eroles on 23 September 1936 to propose a ransom for the surviving members. It was agreed that, for 200,000 francs, to be paid in two instalments, their safe passage into France would be guaranteed. When the first half of the money was paid to Fernández, 117 novices were allowed to cross the frontier at Puigcerdà on 4 October, but all those over the age of twenty-one were detained. Thirty were taken to Barcelona, allegedly to join another seventy-seven monks of the order who were awaiting passage by sea to Marseilles. In fact, all 107 were held in the prison of Sant Elíes. Meanwhile, the treasurer of the order returned to Barcelona with the second instalment of the ransom. He was imprisoned and the money handed over to Aurelio Fernández. On the same evening, forty-four of the monks in Sant Elíes were shot. A brother of one of those imprisoned persuaded Aurelio Fernández to release him and then informed the Generalitat of the situation. It took an intervention by President Companys to save the lives of the remaining sixty-two. Anarchist sources have claimed that the entire operation was carried out with the complicity of Tarradellas.73
The bitter hostility between the CNT and the Communists fed off the fact that the anarchists hoarded substantial quantities of weaponry including machine-guns. In a report to the Comintern on 19 September, the secretary general of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, claimed that, in Barcelona, ‘the anarchists have seized virtually all the weapons in Catalonia and they keep them, not just for their columns, but for use against other working-class groups. Since the military insurrection, they have assassinated several Communist militants and trade unionists and committed atrocities in the name of what they call libertarian communism.’ Similarly, André Marty, the Comintern overseer of the volunteers of the International Brigades, commented that the anarchists’ superiority in weapons meant that, in the short term, compromise was necessary but ‘we will get even with them’.74
Some of the most violent clashes between Communists and anarchists took place in the Valencian region. This was in part a reflection of the repressive violence that had already occurred both in the city and in many towns and villages of its three provinces. Self-styled patrols and committees had eliminated those they considered to be fascists. Many Popular Front Committees would sanction land seizures, attacks on churches or the burning of the property registries but they could not always control individuals who, as happened in Catalonia, murdered priests, landowners and municipal and judicial functionaries. Not untypical was the case of Llíria, to the north-west of Valencia, where a moderate committee found itself under threat from FAI patrols from the capital. Others in danger included smallholders who did not want their farms collectivized. Again, as in Catalonia, the killing was often done by groups from elsewhere on a reciprocal basis by those ashamed to murder people from their own town. In Castellón, the killing was shared between ‘La Desesperada’, a group from Izquierda Republicana, and ‘Los Inseparables’ of the CNT–FAI.75
In the fertile Valencian countryside, there had been few problems when CNT and UGT members occupied land belonging to rebel supporters, many of whom had been assassinated in the first wave of disorder. However, when the anarchists tried to impose collectivization forcibly, they were resisted by smallholders old and new. The anarchists would arrive at a village, whether in Catalonia, Aragon or Valencia, and oblige the town crier to declare ‘libertarian communism’ and the abolition of money and property. Thus considerable violence was provoked by CNT columns trying to impose the collectivization of land wherever they passed. Many of the members of the columns were urban workers who propounded purist anarchist aspirations without any understanding of the specific conditions of each place.
This explains the extraordinary case of the province of Zaragoza, where only forty-four of its towns and villages were i
n Republican territory. With 742 victims, this small area of Zaragoza, approximately one-third of the province, had the highest number of victims per capita in the Republican zone – 8.7 per cent of the population. Eight of the forty-four towns had no victims at all and a further eight between one and two. The towns with the greatest number of victims, such as Caspe, had not experienced significant social disorder before 18 July 1936 but were all ones occupied by the anarchist columns from Barcelona and Valencia. It was the militiamen of these columns who detonated the process whereby churches were set alight, clergy and right-wingers murdered and land forcibly collectivized. Most of these things, however, could not have happened without assistance from local anarchists. Victims were more likely where right-wingers had collaborated with the military coup, as was the case in Caspe, or where there had been social conflict before 18 July, as in Fabara. Where neither condition pertained, the local committee was able to ensure that there were no deaths. This was the case in Bujaraloz, Lécera, Mequinenza and Sástago, as well as many small villages. One hundred and fifty-two people of the province’s 742 victims were murdered by the anarchists elsewhere, and taken to Teruel, Huesca, Lleida or Barcelona to be killed.76
