by Paul Preston
The pattern of violence beginning when the anarchist columns arrived, sometimes with the collaboration of the local committees, was repeated in Huesca, the northernmost province of Aragon. The highest indices of anti-clerical violence were in the east. In the small town of Barbastro, the Bishop Florentino Asensio and 105 priests were murdered, 54 per cent of a total of 195. The provincial capital lost thirty-one of its 198 priests, 16 per cent of the total. In numerous villages, the parish priest was murdered after being forced to watch parodies of the Mass and offered life if he renounced God. As was not uncommon in Aragon, the bodies of murdered priests were frequently soaked in gasoline and burned.77 In most of the province, no nuns were killed. At worst, they were threatened and obliged to leave their convents. However, at Peralta de la Sal in the east of the province, which fell in the diocese of Lleida, on 1 October 1936 three nuns were raped and murdered. Numerous lay Catholics, including at least eight women, were assassinated by anarchists in Huesca.78
In the southernmost Aragonese province, Teruel, the repression was also set off by the arrival of anarchist columns. Having detained rightists and clergy identified by local militants, the leaders of the Ortiz Column would often organize a crude public trial. In communities like La Puebla de Híjar or Alcorisa, the population was obliged to assemble in the village square. Prisoners were brought out one by one on to the balcony of the town hall and the villagers asked to vote on whether they should live or die. The scale of the repression would depend on the will and determination of the local anti-fascist committee to prevent killings. In tiny villages like Azaila, Castel de Cabra and Vinaceite, the committee managed to ensure that there would be no executions. In other towns and villages such as Alcañiz, Calanda, Albalate del Arzobispo, Calaceite, Muniesa or Mora de Rubielos, the committee gave the names of those to be executed to the anarchist occupiers. In others, such as La Puebla de Valverde, the initiative came entirely from the anarchists of the notorious ‘Iron Column’ from Valencia (Columna de Hierro) who killed those who opposed their collectivization.79
Idealistically motivated collectivization was usually greeted enthusiastically by the landless labourers but met fierce resistance from smallholders. Some of the anarchist columns were accused of looting, abuse of women and large-scale theft of crops. In the villages of Valencia, growers were given worthless vouchers in exchange for requisitioned livestock. Their wheat and orange harvests were seized and taken to Valencia for export by the CNT. In late August, at Puebla de Valverde in Teruel, tens of thousands of cured hams were requisitioned ‘for the revolution’. The worst culprits in looting came from the self-styled Iron Column.80
The origins of the Column can be traced to an earlier episode at Puebla de Valverde in late July. What happened there underlined the contrast between the naive innocence of Republican militias and what they were up against. It also goes some way to explaining the reasons for the subsequent brutality of the anarchists involved. On 25 July, a Republican expedition was organized to recover Teruel, which had been taken by a small number of rebels. Surrounded by the loyal provinces of Tarragona, Castellón, Valencia, Cuenca and Guadalajara, it was assumed, reasonably, that Teruel would succumb easily. There were two columns, one from Valencia, consisting of Carabineros (frontier guards), Civil Guards and some anarchist militia, and another from Castellón, consisting of Civil Guards and a larger number of militiamen. Overall command was entrusted to a fifty-six-year-old colonel of the Carabineros, Hilario Fernández Bujanda, who led the column from Valencia, accompanied by Major Francisco Ríos Romero of the Civil Guard. The column from Castellón was led by Francisco Casas Sala, the Izquierda Republicana parliamentary deputy for the city and, at his prompting, his friend, a retired army engineer, Major Luis Sirera Tío. In trucks and buses, 180 militiamen left Castellón at 8.15 p.m., to be followed shortly afterwards by two companies of Civil Guards.
The two columns joined together at Sagunto. Anarchist attacks on the town’s churches and the properties of local right-wingers severely undermined the commitment of the Civil Guards in the columns. According to one of their officers, they were merely biding their time until they could rebel, aware that to do so in a town like Sagunto would be suicidal. They moved off at dawn on 27 July. Some hours later, they reached Segorbe, where the force was joined by more Civil Guards from the local garrison and from Cuenca. The town was entirely in the hands of the CNT–FAI. The situation there, with evidence that members of the column were stealing, clinched the determination of the Civil Guard officers to change sides as soon as an opportunity arose. Setting off towards Teruel at dawn on 28 July, the force totalled approximately 410 Civil Guards, some Carabineros and an indeterminate number of militiamen, ranging from 180 to 600. The imprecision over numbers reflects the fact that new volunteers joined and others dropped out along the way. Whatever their number, all were recent volunteers, totally untrained, and many without weapons. Among them were several local politicians from Castellón.81
As they neared Teruel, the columns split up. Casas Sala led one group, the bulk of the militiamen and a small contingent of Civil Guards, to capture Mora de Rubielos further to the north. Fernández Bujanda headed directly for Teruel with the Carabineros and Civil Guards and about fifty militiamen. En route, they stopped to rest overnight at the tiny village of Puebla de Valverde, south-east of Teruel. Using the excuse of looting by some of the militiamen, the Civil Guards made their move. They surrounded the resting militiamen and, in a battle lasting barely twenty minutes, murdered most of them, the Carabineros and between fifty and sixty inhabitants of the town. When the news reached Mora de Rubielos, the other column hastened to Puebla de Valverde. Casas Sala halted the trucks outside the village, believing that he could negotiate a solution. When he and Major Sirera entered the village alone, they were quickly overpowered. The bulk of the militiamen abandoned them to their fate and fled back to Castellón. On 30 July, the Civil Guards took Casas Sala, Colonel Fernández Bujanda and about forty-five other prisoners to Teruel, where they were executed without trial the following day. Their deaths were inscribed in the town registry as caused by ‘internal haemorrhage’. The reinforcement of the tiny garrison at Teruel by the treacherous Civil Guards guaranteed its immediate survival for the rebels.82
When the survivors carried back the news of the massacre to Sagunto, there was a wave of outrage. Twelve people were murdered in the port on 21 August and a further forty-five some days later in Sagunto itself. When the Column regrouped, its members insisted that the remaining Civil Guards in the town be disarmed to prevent them fleeing to Teruel. A compromise was reached whereby their weapons were handed over and the Civil Guards placed in the custody of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the lieutenant in command was assassinated on 23 September.83
According to an article in the Republican press, before the expeditionary force set out, Colonel Fernández Bujanda had stated that he wanted only officers of proven loyalty. Concerned about one of the Civil Guards, he offered him the chance to drop out. The officer refused and begged Fernández Bujanda to let him join those going to Teruel and so prove his loyalty to the Republic. Fernández Bujanda was so impressed that he placed the officer in command of the Civil Guards in the expedition. Although unnamed in the article, the officer in question was clearly Major Ríos Romero. If the story is true, it explains why, after reaching Teruel with his men, and commanding the firing squad that shot Colonel Fernández Bujanda, Ríos Romero committed suicide.84
The survivors of the episode at Puebla de Valverde were among those who formed the Iron Column. Founded by José Pellicer Gandía, the Column was a hard-line anarchist group. It was composed largely of construction workers and dock labourers from Valencia and metalworkers from Sagunto. However, it also included substantial numbers of common criminals who, on being released from the prison of San Miguel de los Reyes in Valencia, had been offered the chance of ‘social redemption’. According to the Communist Minister Jesús Hernández, many Falangists, including the Marqués de San Vicente, took refu
ge in the Column. The POUM theorist Juan Andrade described the Iron Column as entirely undisciplined and consisting of both committed revolutionaries and ‘shady and depraved individuals’, driven by their basic instincts and an urge for vengeance. The ex-prisoners desired revenge on the society that had imprisoned them. Others sought vengeance against rebel supporters for what had happened at Puebla de Valverde.85
In consequence, members of the Iron Column often just left the front to go to Valencia and other towns of the region where they were responsible for wreaking terror. The criminal records of the Civil Governor’s offices were burned. Policemen were murdered. The scale of robbery and vandalism committed in the Valencian rearguard by the Iron Column led both Communists and Socialists to deem it to be as much of an enemy as the fifth column. In clashes with its militants, there were numerous cases of prominent militants of the PCE and the UGT being assassinated. In late September, with the excuse of raising funds to buy arms for the front, members of the column left their posts and carried out robberies and other crimes in Castellón, Valencia and Gandía. The Bank of Spain, police headquarters, the Palace of Justice and the Treasury delegation in the provincial capital were sacked and their documentation burned. Shops, especially jewellers, were looted. Hostelries of all kinds were stripped of alcohol and cigarettes and their clients robbed. The secretary of the Valencian UGT, Josep Pardo Aracil, was murdered on 23 September. It was widely believed that the assassin was one of the more prominent leaders of the Column, Tiburcio Ariza González, ‘El Chileno’.
On 2 October, the provincial prison in Castellón was assaulted by the Columna de Hierro and at least fifty-three detainees murdered. The arrival of Ricardo Zabalza as Civil Governor of Valencia in early October was a major step towards the re-establishment of order. The Republican authorities, with the support of Socialists and Communists, created the Guardia Popular Antifascista, which began to clamp down on the violence. In one bloody clash, Tiburcio Ariza was killed. Ariza had served prison sentences for drug dealing, extortion, rape, theft and running prostitutes. He was shot by UGT members of the GPA in a shoot-out when they tried to arrest him for the murder of Pardo Aracil.86
Ariza’s funeral on 30 October saw the decisive showdown between anarchists and Communists in Valencia. The leaders of the Iron Column called on their militiamen and those of other CNT columns to abandon the front in Teruel to attend the burial of their comrade and make those responsible for his death pay. Knowing this, the authorities decided, contrary to usual practice with public funerals, to take the cortège down the narrow Plaza de Tetuán, where both the PCE offices and the local Republican military headquarters were located. A bloody battle ensued. The Communists claimed that shots had been fired from an armoured truck that led the procession. Fire was returned by militants in the PCE building and by soldiers in the military headquarters. A later statement by the Columna de Hierro alleged that there had been a trap and that crossfire had come first from machine-guns set up in both buildings. Certainly, the memoirs of Carlos Llorens, a Communist eyewitness, suggest that the Guardia Popular Antifascista had prepared an ambush. The members of the Iron Column fled, abandoning their banners and the corpse of Tiburcio Ariza. Around thirty people were killed, either shot or else drowned trying to escape by swimming across the River Trubia. The anarchists were set on bloody revenge, but further violence was prevented when the CNT leadership, which was about to join Largo Caballero’s government, persuaded the columns to return to the Teruel front. In many respects, the events of October 1936 in Valencia anticipated what would happen in Barcelona in May 1937.87
In Alicante, the round-up of local right-wingers began immediately after the defeat of the uprising in the city. Many of the military personnel arrested were transferred to the prison ship Río Sil, whose passengers were to be murdered in Cartagena in mid-August. Corpses began to appear on beaches and in the fields. Many house searches were merely an excuse for robbery. Militia groups, and among them many recently released common criminals, were largely responsible for the wave of killings and other abuses. However, the murders of several prominent Republicans indicated that Falangist hitmen were operating under cover of the prevailing confusion. As early as 28 July, the Civil Governor published an edict: ‘anyone who, whether or not they belong to a political entity, carries out acts against life or property, is threatened with the immediate application of the maximum penalty, since such criminals will be regarded as rebels at the service of the enemies of the Republic’. Moreover, by the end of August, even the CNT newspaper El Luchador felt obliged by the ‘monstrous’ occurrence of house searches for theft, arrests and murders based on personal grudges to adopt an ‘authoritarian and statist’ stance and to express a determination to put an end to such abuses. It was to little avail. The biggest massacre took place on 29 November 1936 when forty-nine right-wingers were shot against the walls of the cemetery in reprisal for a bombing raid.88
Moving further south, in the province of Murcia, the death toll was much lower than in Valencia or Catalonia. This was a reflection of the lesser presence of the FAI. As elsewhere, the bulk of the violence took place in the early months of the war. The deaths of 84 per cent (622) of the total number of rightists killed in the city (740) took place between 18 July and 31 December 1936. Unusually, however, there were relatively few deaths in the immediate wake of the coup – eighteen in the remainder of July, only two of them in the naval port of Cartagena, the province’s second city. This reflected the fact that on 21 July the Popular Front Committee issued a manifesto in which it declared: ‘Those who feel and understand what the Popular Front is and what it represents at this moment, must scrupulously respect people and property.’ Nevertheless, complaints about the house searches and arrests carried out by extremist militia groups saw the Popular Front Committee in Cartagena issue an edict, on 13 August, banning unauthorized house searches, the confiscation of property and arrests. It declared that anyone contravening the edict would be shot. Since the activities of the militias continued, a further edict was issue on 12 September threatening that further house searches would be punished by execution without trial.89
The numbers of assassinations rocketed, with over three hundred deaths in August. Most of these were of military personnel in Cartagena. The naval and army officers who had risen in Cartagena were held on a prison ship, España No. 3. In another, the Río Sil, were held the Civil Guards who had taken part in the unsuccessful uprising in Albacete. With tension building up in response to news of the massacres in the south, crowds of militiamen and sympathizers gathered daily on the quayside demanding ‘justice’ – in other words, their execution. While being transferred to the city’s prison on the morning of 14 August, ten of the Civil Guards were murdered after provoking the crowd and then trying to escape. To prevent further assassinations, both ships put to sea. However, bloody events were triggered around 1.00 p.m. when the battleship Jaime I arrived in port carrying three dead and eight wounded crewmen as a result of being bombed by rebel planes in Málaga. The ship’s anarchist-dominated revolutionary committee linked with the port’s anarchist militias in demanding revenge. That night, the crew of the Río Sil threw overboard fifty-two of the nearly four hundred Civil Guards. On the España No. 3, ninety-four naval officers and fifty-three army, Civil Guard and Carabinero officers, 147 prisoners in total, were shot and then thrown overboard. Another five were shot the next morning.90
Thereafter, as will be seen below, the creation and operation of the so-called People’s Courts (Tribunales Populares) gradually reduced the scale of executions. During the worst month of the war, August 1936, nearly 70 per cent of the executions were of military personnel involved in the coup. Indeed, in the worst year, 1936, more than 40 per cent of the deaths were of army and naval officers. Over the entire war, military personnel constituted 31 per cent of the total rearguard executions in Murcia, although they constituted 66 per cent of those killed in Cartagena. The next most numerous group of victims were priests and religious,
around 9 per cent of the total, followed by a similar number of property-owners, industrialists and rightists in general.91
Rebel bombing attacks frequently led to popular reprisals in the Republican zone. In Málaga, this was a frequent occurrence in response to bombs dropped by a rebel seaplane. The city was largely in the hands of the CNT–FAI-dominated Committee of Public Safety. Approximately five hundred right-wingers had been detained by various militia groups working on its orders and were held in the city’s Cárcel Nueva. These groups, which had names like ‘Death Patrol’, ‘Dawn Patrol’, ‘Lightning Patrol’ and ‘Pancho Villa’, were predominantly anarchist, and included common criminals released in the immediate wake of the uprising. On 22 August, a furious crowd gathered after thirty women, children and old people were killed and many more wounded in a bombing raid. To appease the mob, the Committee drew up a list of sixty-five prisoners, who were taken out and shot. On 30 August, after another visit from the seaplane, a further fifty-three prisoners were selected and shot; on 20 September another forty-three; the following day, a further seventeen; on 24 September ninety-seven. In fact, 25 per cent (275) of all the rightists killed in the city of Málaga (1,110) while it remained in Republican hands met their fates in reprisals for bombing raids.92 Similarly, the bulk of killings in both Guadalajara and Santander were in response to bombing attacks on both cities.93
One of those murdered in Málaga was the seventy-year-old Benito Ortega Muñoz. He had been sought by FAI militiamen, who wanted revenge for the fact that he had been imposed as Mayor after the uprising of October 1934. He had gone into hiding and they had arrested his eldest son, Bernardo, who was shot when he refused to reveal his father’s hiding-place. Finally, Benito was denounced by a household servant and arrested by an FAI patrol on 11 August. Even though, as Mayor, he had acted fairly, he was among those shot on 30 August despite an attempt to save him by the then Mayor, Eugenio Entrambasaguas of Unión Republicana, who made constant efforts to stop the assassinations being carried out by the various patrols. Nevertheless, when Málaga was occupied by the Francoists, Entrambasaguas was condemned to death and shot.94
