Пол Престон – The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (страница 28)

October 1934 saw only sporadic clashes elsewhere in Spain. However, there were casualties in Albacete, at both Villarobledo and Tarazona de la Mancha, during assaults on the town halls and other public buildings. In Villarobledo, four people were killed as order was restored by the Civil Guard, which suffered no casualties. In Tarazona, earlier in the summer, the Socialist Mayor had been removed from his post by the Civil Governor of Albacete, the Radical José Aparicio Albiñana. Now, his right-wing replacement was badly wounded in the struggle. Aparicio Albiñana responded to the situation by sending in reinforcements of the Civil Guard. One Civil Guard and several municipal policemen were killed during the defence of the town hall. The rest of the province was hardly affected by the revolutionary movement.¹⁰⁷

In the province of Zaragoza, the call for a general strike was ignored by the CNT and therefore a failure. However, there were bloody confrontations in Mallén, Ejea de los Caballeros, Tauste and Uncastillo in the area known as Las Cinco Villas, one of the parts of Aragon where social conflict was fiercest during the Republican years. It was a cereal-producing area of huge holdings, where a few landlords held many properties and the local day-labourers depended for survival on their access to common lands which had been enclosed by legal subterfuge in the nineteenth century. The bitterness of the election campaigns of November 1933 and the June harvest strike had contributed to the intensification of class hatred in the area and this was reflected in clashes on 5 and 6 October.¹⁰⁸ In Mallén, one Civil Guard was killed and another wounded and a villager shot dead. In Ejea, a Civil Guard and a villager were wounded. In Tauste, a revolutionary committee took over the village and the Civil Guard barracks was attacked. The revolutionaries were crushed by a regiment of the army which fired on them with machine-guns and an artillery piece. Six villagers were killed.¹⁰⁹

The most violent events in Cinco Villas took place at Uncastillo, an isolated village of barely three thousand inhabitants. In the early hours of the morning of Friday 5 October, emissaries arrived from the UGT in Zaragoza with instructions for the revolutionary general strike. The mild-mannered Socialist Mayor of Uncastillo, Antonio Plano Aznárez, told them that it would be madness. He was no revolutionary, but rather an unusually cultivated man adept at navigating the complex bureaucratic mechanisms of the agrarian reform. He had earned the hatred of the local landowners by dint of his success in introducing equitable job-sharing, in establishing reasonable working conditions, in recovering some common lands that had been taken from the village by legal subterfuges in the previous century and in improving the local school. Now, however, contrary to his advice, the urgings of the men from Zaragoza were enthusiastically taken up by the local labourers, many of whom were unemployed and whose families were starving.

At 6.00 a.m., when the strikers demanded the surrender of the village Civil Guard barracks, the commander, Sergeant Victorino Quiñones, refused. Plano himself spoke to Quiñones who said that his men were loyal to the Republic but would not surrender. Their conversation was cordial and Plano, albeit without much hope of success, undertook to try to dissuade his neighbours. In fact, as he left the barracks, the strikers surrounding the building opened fire and in the subsequent gunfight two of the seven Guards were killed, Sergeant Quiñones and another badly wounded and yet another blinded. The two remaining Guards fought on until the arrival of reinforcements. Antonio Plano came out of his house with a white flag and tried to talk to them but, when they opened fire, he fled into the surrounding countryside. In the course of the fighting, the home of one of the most powerful landowners, Antonio Mola, was assaulted when he refused to hand over arms to some of the strikers. In the subsequent skirmish, his niece was wounded and Mola shot dead one of the attackers who had burned down his garage and destroyed his car. The others were trying to burn him out when the Civil Guard arrived and drove them off. One of the many wounded strikers died on 8 October.¹¹⁰

In all of Spain, Civil Guard casualties in combating the insurrection of October 1934 were 111 killed and 182 wounded, the bulk of which were in Asturias.¹¹¹ The memory of this would influence the part played by the Civil Guard in the Civil War. More immediately, it had a profound effect on the way in which the revolutionaries were punished. Once the Asturian miners had surrendered, the subsequent repression was overseen by the forty-four-year-old Civil Guard Major Lisardo Doval Bravo, who had a record of bitter hostility to the left in Asturias. Indeed, he was widely considered in Civil Guard circles as an expert on left-wing subversion in Asturias. He had served in Oviedo from 1917 to 1922 and, having reached the rank of captain, he had commanded the Gijón garrison from 1926 until 1931. He earned notoriety for the ferocity with which he dealt with strikes and disorder. On 15 December 1930, during the failed general strike which was intended to bring down the dictatorship of General Berenguer, he had been involved in a bloody incident in Gijón. The strikers attempted to remove from the wall of a Jesuit church a plaque in honour of the Dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera. The Jesuits opened fire on the demonstrators, killing a worker and wounding another. In response, the mob set the church ablaze and the Civil Guard was called. Doval led a cavalry charge against the workers. Afterwards, he authorized the savage beating of strikers in his quest to identify the ringleaders. In April 1931, he planned to repel a workers’ attack on his barracks with banks of machine-guns. A man who knew him well, the conservative Republican Antonio Oliveros, editor of the Gijón newspaper El Noroeste, wrote: ‘In my opinion, Doval is a man of exceptional talents in the service of the State. Brave to the point of irresponsibility, his concept of duty leads him to the worst excesses and that accounts for his frequent abuse of suspects when trying to get proof of guilt.’¹¹²

Doval was subsequently involved in the abortive Sanjurjo coup in Seville in August 1932. Although suspended for his part therein, he had benefited from the amnesty for the conspirators passed on 24 April 1934. Until 19 September that year, when he was posted to Tetuán, he had been on secondment training the JAP militia. On 1 November, Doval was appointed ‘Special Delegate of the Ministry of War for Public Order in the Provinces of Asturias and León’. The appointment was made by Diego Hidalgo on the specific recommendation of Franco, who was fully aware of Doval’s methods and his reputation as a torturer. They had coincided as boys in Ferrol, in the Infantry Academy at Toledo and in Asturias in 1917.¹¹³ With an authorization signed by Hidalgo himself, Doval was given carte blanche to bypass any judicial, bureaucratic or military obstacles to his activities in Asturias. His fame as a crusader against the left had made him immensely popular among the upper and middle classes of the region.

As Franco knew he would, Doval carried out his task with a relish for brutality which provoked horror in the international press.¹¹⁴ It was not long before there were reports of his abuses. The Director General of Security, the deeply conservative José Valdivia Garci-Borrón, on 15 November, sent one of his subordinates, Inspector Adrover, to investigate. Adrover was violently expelled from Asturias by Doval. In view of this and of the stream of information about Doval’s excesses, Captain Valdivia pressed the new Minister of the Interior, the Radical Eloy Vaquero, for Doval’s removal. On 8 December, the special powers were revoked and five days later he was posted back to Tetuán.¹¹⁵

Meanwhile in Zaragoza, after the suppression of the uprising in Uncastillo, the fugitive Mayor Antonio Plano was captured and badly beaten by Civil Guards. Back in the village, 110 men were arrested and tortured by the Civil Guard before being taken to the provincial capital for trial.¹¹⁶ The achievements of Plano’s time as Mayor were overturned. Over the next year or so, the Civil Guard in Uncastillo took its revenge. Numerous detentions and beatings on the slightest pretext led to the new right-wing Mayor making an official complaint. Unsurprisingly, an official investigation found no grounds for action. The trial of 110 villagers accused of participation in the events of 5–6 October took place throughout February and March 1935. It was heavily weighted in favour of the Civil Guard and of the local cacique, Antonio Mola. The prosecution’s aim was to place the blame for everything firmly on the Mayor. To achieve this, the highly respected and conciliatory Plano was portrayed as a hate-fuelled traitor to the Republic. His defence lawyer pointed out that, if the Civil Guard could not stop the revolutionary events, it was absurd to have expected Plano to do so single-handed.