LITMIR.BIZ

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of the town council voted in April 1932 for the removal of the statue of the Sacred Heart from the main square.⁴⁸

      Religious frictions were quickly exploited by the right. Processions became demonstrations, pilgrimages became protest marches, and Sunday sermons became meetings which often provoked anti-clerical reactions, sometimes violent.⁴⁹ It was but a short step from the rhetoric of persecution and suffering to the advocacy of violence against Republican reforms portrayed as the work of a sinister foreign Jewish–Masonic–Bolshevik plot.⁵⁰ In later years, Gil Robles would admit that he had deliberately set out to push his audiences towards conflict with the authorities. In April 1937, when Acción Popular was being dissolved and incorporated by Franco into his new one-party state, Gil Robles claimed proudly that the reserves of mass rightist belligerence which he had built up during the Republic made possible the victory of the right in the Civil War. He saw this ‘splendid harvest’ as the fruit of his own propaganda efforts. He was still taking pride in this achievement when he published his memoirs in 1968.⁵¹

      Gil Robles’s rhetoric during the Republic reflected the feelings and the fears of his most powerful backers, the big landowners or latifundistas. Their outrage at the sheer effrontery of landless labourers in daring to take part in the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–21 reflected their sense of social, cultural and indeed near-racist superiority over those who worked their estates. That the Republican–Socialist coalition should declare its intention to improve the daily lot of the wretched day-labourers implied a sweeping challenge to the very structures of rural power. The hostility of the landowners towards the new regime was first manifested in a determination to block Republican reforms by any means, including unrestrained violence. The hatred of the latifundistas for their braceros would find its most complete expression in the early months of the Civil War when they would collaborate enthusiastically with Franco’s African columns as they spread a wave of terror through south-western Spain.

      The Republic’s attempts to streamline the officer corps had provoked the hostility of many officers but especially of the Africanistas. General José Sanjurjo, Director General of the Civil Guard and a prominent African veteran, was one of the first officers publicly to identify the subject tribes of Morocco with the Spanish left – a transference of racial prejudice which would facilitate the savagery carried out by the Army of Africa during the Civil War. Sanjurjo blurted this out in the wake of the atrocity at the remote and impoverished village of Castilblanco in Badajoz, when villagers murdered four Civil Guards in an outburst of collective rage at systematic oppression. The Socialist landworkers’ union, the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), had called a forty-eight-hour strike in the province to protest against the landowners’ constant infractions of the Republic’s social legislation. On 31 December 1931, in Castilblanco, urged on by the Mayor, Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration by strikers, killing one man and wounding two others. Shocked, the infuriated villagers turned on the four Civil Guards and beat them to death. For the left, the events of Castilblanco were the result of the area’s long history of appalling economic deprivation.⁵²

      Sanjurjo was furious because the obligation to go to Castilblanco forced him to miss a big society wedding banquet in Zaragoza.⁵³ On 2 January 1932, when he arrived in the village, now occupied by a substantial detachment of Civil Guards, the officer in charge indicated the hundred or so prisoners with the words: ‘Here are the murderers, just look at their faces!’ Sanjurjo burst out, ‘But haven’t you killed them yet?’ The prisoners were severely mistreated. For seven days and nights, they were kept stripped to the waist and, in temperatures below freezing, forced to stand with their arms upright. If they fell, they were beaten with rifle butts. Several died of pneumonia. Speaking to journalists at the funeral of the murdered guards, Sanjurjo compared the workers of Castilblanco to the Moorish tribesmen he had fought in Morocco, commenting, ‘In a corner of the province of Badajoz, Rif tribesmen have a base.’ He declared mendaciously that after the colonial disaster at the battle of Annual in July 1921, when nine thousand soldiers had died, ‘even in Monte Arruit, when the Melilla command collapsed, the corpses of Christians were not mutilated with such savagery’.⁵⁴

      This prejudice was echoed in the national and local press by journalists who never actually visited Castilblanco. The monarchist daily ABC remarked that ‘the least civilized Rif tribesmen were no worse’.⁵⁵ Right-wing journalists described the landless labourers of Extremadura as ‘these Rif tribesmen with no Rif’ and as ‘Berbers, savages, bloodthirsty savages and Marxist hordes’. In general terms, the local newspaper reports of Castilblanco reflected the belligerently racist attitudes of the rural elite. The inhabitants of Castilblanco, and by extension the rural proletariat as a whole, were presented as an inferior race, horrible examples of racial degeneration. It was common for them to be described as sub-human and abnormal. Colourfully exaggerated descriptions pandered to the ancestral fears of the respectable classes: the allegation that a woman had danced on the corpses recalled the witches’ Sabbath.⁵⁶ The often explicit conclusion was that the rural proletariat should be disciplined in the same way as the colonial enemy in Morocco, and there were calls for the Civil Guard to be reinforced with crack motorized units.⁵⁷

      Over the course of the week following the incident at Castilblanco, the bloody revenge of the Civil Guard saw eighteen people die. Three days after Castilblanco, they killed two and wounded three in Zalamea de la Serena (Badajoz). Two days later, a striker was shot dead and another wounded in Calzada de Calatrava and one striker was shot in Puertollano (both villages in Ciudad Real), while two strikers were killed and eleven wounded in Épila (Zaragoza), and two strikers killed and fifteen wounded, nine seriously, in Jeresa (Valencia). On 5 January 1932, there took place the most shocking of these actions, when twenty-eight Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Arnedo, a small town in the northern Castilian province of Logroño.

      One of Arnedo’s main sources of employment was a shoe factory, owned by Faustino Muro, a man of extreme right-wing convictions. Towards the end of 1931, he sacked several of his workers for failing to vote for monarchist candidates in the elections of April and others for belonging to the UGT. The case was put before the local arbitration committee, which declared in favour of the workers, but Muro refused to give them back their jobs. A public protest meeting was held in front of the Ayuntamiento (town hall). Without apparent motive, the Civil Guard opened fire, shooting dead a worker, a twenty-six-year-old pregnant mother, her two-year-old son and three other women bystanders. Bullet wounds were suffered by a further fifty townspeople, including many women and children, some of them babes-in-arms. Over the next few days, a further five died of their wounds and many had to have limbs amputated, among them a five-year-old boy and a widow with six children.⁵⁸ The inhabitants of Arnedo would suffer further in the early months of the Civil War. Forty-six would be murdered between late July and early October 1936, including some who had been wounded in 1932.⁵⁹

      Azaña observed in his diary that Spanish public opinion was now divided between those who hated the Civil Guard and those who revered it as the last-ditch defender of the social order.⁶⁰ After Arnedo, Sanjurjo declared that the Civil Guard stood between Spain and the imposition of Soviet communism and that the victims were part of an uncultured rabble that had been deceived by malicious agitators.⁶¹ His words after Castilblanco and the Civil Guard’s revenge reflected the way in which the cruelty and savagery of the Moroccan wars was imported into Spain and used against the working class. Sanjurjo, however, was not the first person to note the link. The Asturian miners’ leader, Manuel Llaneza, wrote after the repression of the revolutionary general strike of 1917 of ‘the African hatred’ with which the military columns had killed and beaten workers and wrecked and looted their homes.⁶²

      Unfortunately for the Republican–Socialist coalition, for an increasing number of middle-class Spaniards the excesses of the army and the Civil Guard were justified by the excesses of the CNT. On 18 January 1932, there was an insurrection by miners who took over the town of Fígols in the most northerly part of the province of Barcelona. The movement spread to the entire region of northern Catalonia. The CNT immediately declared a solidarity strike. The only place outside Catalonia where there was any significant response was Seville. There, the CNT, with the backing of the Communist Party, called a general strike on 25 and 26 January.

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