The Spanish Holocaust (34 page)

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.
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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.
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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
.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

When rightists hunting for ‘reds’ began to look for him, Lorca took refuge in the home of his friend the Falangist poet Luis Rosales. On 16 August, at the home of the Rosales family, Lorca was seized by Civil Guards who were accompanied by the sinister Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a one-time deputy for the local CEDA, Trescastro and another member of Acción Popular, Luis García-Alix Fernández. Ruiz Alonso, who had hitched his cart to the Falange, harboured grudges against both Lorca and the Rosales brothers.
¹³⁸
Lorca was ludicrously denounced by Ruiz Alonso to Valdés as a Russian spy, communicating with Moscow via a high-powered radio. Valdés sent a message to Queipo de Llano asking for instructions. The reply was ‘Dale café, mucho café’ – ‘give him coffee’ being slang for ‘kill him’.
¹³⁹
Federico García Lorca was shot at 4.45 a.m. on 18 August 1936 between Alfacar and Víznar to the north-east of Granada.
¹⁴⁰

Trescastro later boasted that he personally had killed the poet and others, including the humanist Amelia Agustina González Blanco. ‘We were sick to the teeth of queers in Granada. We killed him for being a
queer and her for being a whore.’ On the day after the poet’s death, Trescastro entered a bar and declared: ‘We just killed Federico García Lorca. I put two bullets in his arse for being a queer.’
¹⁴¹
Murdered with Lorca were a disabled primary school teacher, Dióscoro Galindo, and two anarchists who had fought in the defence of the Albaicín.
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The cowardly murder of a great poet was, however, like that of the loyal General Campins, merely a drop in an ocean of political slaughter.

A prominent figure in the right-wing support for the coup, the banker and lawyer José María Bérriz Madrigal, wrote to the head of his bank who had been on holiday in Portugal, on 18 August: ‘The way forward is to win or die killing rogues. The army wants to destroy by the roots the noxious plant that was consuming Spain. And I think they’re going to do it.’ On 22 August, he wrote approvingly: ‘Lots more shootings, union leaders, schoolteachers, small-town officials and doctors are going down by the dozen.’
¹⁴³
The following day, the American poet and novelist Baroness de Zglinitzki, a firm rebel supporter, commented with less enthusiasm that the executions were ‘increasing at a rate that alarmed and sickened all thinking people’.
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The victims referred to by Bérriz included the brilliant journalist and editor of the Republican daily
El Defensor
, Constantino Ruiz Carnero. In its pages, he had satirized Ruiz Alonso as the honorary worker who lived in considerable luxury and wore silk pyjamas. Ruiz Carnero had been Mayor for two weeks after the Popular Front election in February 1932.
¹⁴⁵
Seven other men who had been Republican mayors, including the present incumbent, Lorca’s brother-in-law Dr Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, were also shot. Ten professors of the University, five of whom had protested about Falangist disorders, were shot. Among them was the thirty-two-year-old rector of the University, the brilliant Arabist Salvador Vila Hernández, a close friend of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Vila’s arrest in Salamanca on 7 October was the last straw that led to Unamuno’s famous ‘you will win but you will not convince’ (‘venceréis pero no convenceréis’) speech. Vila’s German Jewish wife, Gerda Leimdörfer, was arrested with him and taken to Granada. He was shot on 22 October, but the intervention of the distinguished composer Manuel de Falla managed to save Gerda’s life only after she had been forcibly baptized. Gerda Leimdörfer’s parents, Jewish refugees, were deported to Nazi Germany. A friend of both Vila and Lorca, the architect Alfonso Rodríguez Orgaz, went into hiding and the Falange arrested his girlfriend, Gretel Adler, to use as bait to catch him. When this did not work, she was murdered. On 26 November, Unamuno wrote in his
notebook: ‘In Granada, poor Salvador Vila has been shot by the Falangists, degenerate Andalusians with the passions of syphilitic perverts and frustrated eunuchs.’
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