CHAPTER XV. Prisoner in El Puerto de Santa María

Like many of those who participated in the January 8 rebellion, Durruti and Ascaso were able to elude the police and disappear for a time while they waited for the storm to pass.

The Police Chief was then the ex-conspirator Miguel Badía. In 1925, he had planted a bomb on the Garraf coast in an attempt to blow up the train carrying Alfonso XIII to Barcelona. He asked Los Solidarios to help him carry out the attack and they provided him with the dynamite that he needed. Miguel Badía thus had extensive and longstanding knowledge of the anarchists, although that did not stop him from being a much more violent Police Chief with the Confederals than Colonel José Arlegui. Induced by a hatred of anarchism, he took the repression to the extreme, particularly against García Oliver, who escaped death by a pure miracle. With respect to Durruti and Ascaso, he swore that he would beat them to a pulp as soon as he laid a hand on them.

The days passed slowly for the two men hunted by Badía, who were hiding in a house in Horta. Durruti probably saw his daughter and compañera more frequently during the two months that he spent concealed there than at any other time, since he was in the home of the person who cared for Colette when Mimi began working in the cinema box office.

In March 1933, some unions and libertarian ateneos were closed and Soli was banned, but the CNT officially carried on its activity. As previously noted, the CNT’s Regional Committee called a meeting around the time that settled the conflict with “the Thirty.” They and their supporters formally split from the CNT and soon formed “Opposition Unions,” which continued to identify as revolutionary syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist. While the CNT was breaking in two, there was also a deep crisis in the government as a result of Azaña’s violent campaign in January, which reached new heights of barbarism in Casas Viejas. When the Parliament met in February, Eduardo Ortega y Gasset, a member of the Radical Socialist Left at the time, questioned the government about what had happened in Casas Viejas. Azaña consulted briefly with Carlos Esplà, the sub-secretary of the Interior, and then cynically replied: “Nothing happened in Casas Viejas but what had to happen.” In general, the public was still unaware of the full horror of events there. It also didn’t know that the Civil Guard had seized the town and that a section of Assault Guards arrived later and began a house-to-house raid. In one of these, an old peasant nicknamed “six fingers” had dug himself in with his children, grandchildren, and two neighbors. They refused to surrender. More Assault Guards arrived with machine-guns, who were under the command of Captain Rojas. The siege lasted throughout the night. At dawn, the Assault Guards set fire to the hovel (more of a hut than a home), which collapsed in flames. “Six fingers” was incinerated in the blaze, and Guards machine-gunned those attempting to flee. There was something else that the public didn’t know at the time, but that a judicial summary and parliamentary investigation revealed later: two hours after burning down the hut that “six fingers” lived in, Captain Rojas ordered an attack on the town and executed eleven people in it for no reason whatsoever. Did Azaña know the magnitude of the savagery? If not, he was obliged to find out about it and not reply, as he did, as if the peasants were animals.

The crimes in Casas Viejas were very useful for the Rightwing and its war against the Republican Socialist government. The government was so stupid that it persevered in its repressive conduct, thereby exasperating the CNT and giving more weapons to its political enemies. Azaña and his cabinet lost all their credibility—what little they still had—in the two-month parliamentary debate that followed. The government’s situation became even worse when it came to light that Azaña had told Captain Rojas to “take no prisoners.”

When the parliamentary debate was at its most bitter, the Regional Committee of Andalusia and Extremadura called an Extraordinary Congress of Unions in Sevilla on March 27. Avelino González Mallada represented the CNT National Committee. Local CNT members asked the National Committee to send several orators to speak at the Congress’s closing rally as well as other events that they had planned in Andalusia. It gave this mission to Durruti, Ascaso, and Vicente Pérez Combina, who left Barcelona for Sevilla in late March.

Numerous localities in Andalusia and Extremadura organized rallies and conferences in their respective areas when they learned that Durruti and Ascaso would be passing through. The CNT’s Propaganda Secretary in the region collected seventy-five requests for public events, which he hurried to present to the Civil Government in order to obtain the necessary authorization to hold them. This was a formality: the Governor could only deny such petitions in exceptional cases, such as when declared martial law had been declared, which was not the case in Andalusia at the time.

The April 7 closing rally was a success. The theater where it took place was too small to accommodate all the attendees and organizers had to place amplifiers on the street so that those outside could listen to the speeches.

Durruti, Ascaso, Combina, and several other militants planned to start their propaganda tour through the province of Sevilla on April 8. The night of the rally they met with Avelino González Mallada and Paulino Díez and unsuccessfully tried to convince them to participate in some of the events planned in the 106 villages. Avelino said that he had too many obligations in Madrid and left for the capital in the early morning of the following day. The police showed up at the boarding house where they were all staying shortly after Mallada’s departure. They told them to come to the Police Station, without explaining why. Durruti, Ascaso, and Combina went and the inspector informed them that they were under arrest for “insults to authority and incitation to rebellion,” crimes that they had committed during the previous day’s rally. Authorities sent them to the Sevilla prison under this charge. Paulino Díez joined them shortly afterwards, as a “governmental prisoner.”

The Sevilla prison was packed with men that the police had arrested that day. No one knew why they were being detained.

Vicente Ballester, secretary of the CNT’s Andalusia and Extremadura Regional Committee, met with the Governor, Mr. Labella, and asked him why Durruti, Ascaso, and Combina had been seized. The Governor responded that he “arrested them to expel them from Andalusia [as permitted by the “Law for Defense of the Republic”] because he wasn’t going to tolerate anarchist propaganda in the area.” The governor’s attitude precluded any other attempt to secure their freedom and they had no choice but to try to settle the “insults” charge as soon as possible. As expected, the judge visited them in prison and communicated the charges to Durruti and Combina (Ascaso hadn’t spoken at the rally). He acknowledged that the crime was minor and said that they would be released once they paid one thousand pesetas in bail each. Four days after the visit, Vicente Ballester gave the bail to the judge and signed for the detainees’ freedom. But, just as they were about to be let out, authorities told them that their incarceration would continue: at the Governor’s request they would remain as governmental prisoners. The Madrid papers reported on Durruti’s arrest. The La Voz newspaper stated that “it was because Durruti was organizing an uprising in Andalusia similar to the one that took place in Barcelona on January 8.”

Pío Baroja was in Madrid at that time and decided that he wanted to meet with Durruti when he learned about his detention. He traveled to Sevilla for the purpose and saw him behind bars. About their meeting, Durruti wrote: “When Pío Baroja came to see me in the Sevilla prison he told me: ‘It’s terrible what they do to you all!’ And I asked him: ‘What position, Mr. Pío, do you think we should take toward these arbitrary measures?’ He didn’t know what to say. I later read an article that he published in Ahora which contained the response that he didn’t dare give me through bars.” [379]

We have been unable to locate the article mentioned by Durruti and therefore do not know what Pío Baroja asserted in it. But we do know that Durruti had exercised a strong attraction on the writer since their meeting in Barcelona after the proclamation of the Republic. Baroja compared Durruti to Pablo Iglesias in his memoirs: “Buenaventura Durruti was diametrically opposed to Pablo Iglesias. He was not doctrinaire; he was a condottiero, restless, bold, and valiant. One could see him as the incarnation of the Spanish guerrilla. He had all the traits of the type: courage, shrewdness, generosity, cruelty, barbarity, and a depth of spiritual heart. In another epoch, he would have done very well as a Captain with El Empecinado, with Zurbano, or Prim.... Durruti appeared in the reception room of the hotel on the Rambla, where two or three of his friends and I were. His presence alarmed many of those there, so I suggested that we go to a café on a nearby side street. We sat and chatted in this small café.” Pío Baroja recorded a conversation about Durruti’s adventures—which the reader already knows and we will not repeat—and clearly took pleasure in this literary personage. “Durruti is the type to have a romantic biography, on a sheet of string literature [ literatura de cordel] with a blurry engraving on the front.” [380] Baroja escaped the temptation to make him into a literary character, perhaps because the flesh and blood Durruti was simply too real. The same is true of Ilya Ehrenburg, who also spoke with him around that time.

The qualities that attracted intellectuals to Durruti terrified the politicians that governed Spain. After his arrest, Casares Quiroga hurled the most abject epithets at him; calling him an “idler and delinquent” and other insults of the nature. He was preparing to apply the law on vagrancy approved by the Republican-Socialist government. Naturally, he would not use it for “parasites and idlers” by trade, but for the militant workers of the CNT and FAI.

This time Durruti and his comrades will be imprisoned in terrible conditions from April 2 to October 10, without knowing why.

The Governor of Sevilla ordered the transfer of his four famous detainees—Ascaso, Combina, Durruti, and Díez—to the El Puerto de Santa María penitentiary. In mid-April, they entered what was known as the “Andalusian Montjuich,” which was used for preventative detentions. The prison had two wings: one for those who had been sentenced and the other for those awaiting sentencing, although the prison regime was identical for both types of inmates. It was like this during the Republic and also under General Franco. The climate is bad, the food abysmal, and the unsanitary conditions caused a high rate of tuberculosis among the prisoners.

When the four anarchists entered the penitentiary, they were immediately placed in cells and held incommunicado. Prison regulations indicated that inmates could write family members once weekly and that letters or cards had to be delivered open, so that the censor could read them. Durruti and his comrades protested these restrictions, alleging that they had not been charged with anything and didn’t even know why they were there. Durruti decried these circumstances in letters that he smuggled out and that El Luchador and Madrid’s CNT published. Paulino Díez also denounced (in a letter snuck out) their conditions: “The treatment is repugnant and the food terrible. A man subjected to this is bound to go crazy. This is a factory for making lunatics, as Torhyo said of the insane asylum! The regime of “bread and water” is so common that it’s normal. They forced it on one comrade for ninety-four days.... I asked to see the doctor four days ago and still haven’t seen him. Everyday I tell the clerk that I need medical attention, but nothing happens. My stomach problems are getting worse, and now I produce blood while having bowel movements. But you can’t complain, because they’ll punish you if you do. The threat of “bread and water” forces you to gnaw on your entrails and eat fists of anger.”

In June, Durruti sent his compañera a letter (always by the same route: “the submarine”). He wrote:

Comrades from Sevilla came here on Sunday, but weren’t able to speak with us. When we found out about this, Ascaso and I went to see the warden, so that he would tell us if we’re being held incommunicado. He told us that it’s not his fault, but the police’s doing, since the “Cádiz police come on visiting days to see who asks to speak with you and demand ID from anyone wanting to see Combina, Díez, or you two.” That prevents many comrades from visiting us... We’ve protested against these irregularities, but they don’t do any good, since we’re doing so from inside. It’s the comrades on the street who have to clarify the situation.

Deprived of communication and from reading the newspapers, the prisoners could only follow outside events through the “prison mail;” that is, from what other prisoners heard from family members or friends. That also wasn’t easy for our militants, since they were being held incommunicado (and in “disgusting cells,” according to Durruti).

The situation on the street continued to be extremely onerous for the CNT. Police raided union halls and arrested those inside on the pretext that they were holding “secret meetings.” Such harassment was pervasive in early June in both Madrid and Barcelona. In the first of the two cities, Assault Guards surrounded the Local Federation of Unions building on Flor Street at nightfall, just when union members were coming there to deliver their contributions or take care of other matters. They loaded everyone they found—some 250—onto trucks and took them to the General Office of Security. The local press described the caravan in the following terms:

A truck full of Assault Guards led the way. Two others followed, which were filled with detainees, and another took up the rear, whose occupants pointed their guns at the prisoners.

Their trip through the city streets aroused great curiosity among pedestrians. The Assault Guard occupied the CNT building and had arrested 250 by 10:00 in the evening. The cells were packed and, despite the guard’s requests, the prisoners wouldn’t stop insulting the Director of Security or the government. They later sang The International.

The same thing occurred simultaneously in Barcelona, although there every detainee received a beating and police tore up their CNT membership cards. In Sevilla, the governor ordered police to shut down all the CNT unions and filled the provincial prison with new inmates. There was a generalized offensive against the CNT, and the government didn’t even bother to justify it.

The ship of state was going adrift. The Parliament approved laws and more laws, but the state slowed down any that it considered detrimental to the privileged classes or Church. Although the Parliament had approved the Law on Agrarian Reform, it was stalled in practice. Driven by caciquism, the results of the municipal elections were unfavorable for the government. These results encouraged the Rightwing—now led by José María Gil Robles—to heighten its attacks on the Azaña government. Alejandro Lerroux, who had simply been watching from the sidelines as Azaña and his team made their mistakes, began to feel strong enough to rip into the government in May. Azaña staggered, particularly after the storm of Casas Viejas, but stubbornly continued to maintain the government’s repressive policy against the CNT. The political scenario was extremely complicated and there was a growing threat of fascism, which had set roots in Germany and begun to insinuate itself in Spain through José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The latter founded the Spanish Falange, while Gil Robles created the Confederación Española de las Derechas Autónomas (Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, CEDA).

There was a minor governmental crisis at the time, which was resolved with various ministerial changes on June 14. The new government approved another oppressive law called Public Order on July 26. It seemed like the Socialists and Republicans were in a rush to give the Right all the legal tools necessary to establish fascism.

While these diverse and contradictory events threw the world into confusion, nothing had been sorted out for our four detainees or the rest of the state’s captives in the Puerto de Santa María.

In late May, the CNT’s National Prisoner Support Committee sent Eduardo Barriobero, its most prestigious lawyer, to meet with Casares Quiroga. Barriobero would try to make him listen to reason and end his system of “governmental prisoners,” which had resulted in the incarceration of more than six thousand people. The Minister gave Barriobero his “word of honor”: all governmental prisoners would be released in a few days. When the lawyer mentioned the case of the four most famous inmates in El Puerto de Santa María, Casares Quiroga replied that “they will be the first to get out.” The Minister was so convincing that the Prisoner Support Committee sent a telegram to El Puerto telling the men the good news. A few days later Durruti sent a letter in reply:

“We received your telegram. The comrades hope that the governor of Cádiz will release them soon. I say hope, because it appears that Combina and I will remain in prison. Apparently they don’t feel like letting us out.” Durruti states the reason:

“Moments before receiving your telegram, the local court came to the prison to notify Combina and me that the Court of Sevilla had voided our bail and, as a result, we are still in its custody and will have to respond to that damned charge of “insults and incitation to rebellion.”

Despite the fact that the minister gave his “word of honor,” no one was released and circumstances became even more desperate. A letter that Durruti sent to his family on July 14, 1933 described the situation:

I’m sure you’ve read in the press about the misfortune that haunts this vile prison.... The soldiers, those sons of the people who forget their own mothers once they put on a uniform, murdered a comrade on Monday morning. If you read the article in CNT that I sent, you’ll see the miserable way that they killed this peasant. The man wasn’t approaching the window as they claimed, but was hunted down like a rabbit. I wonder what induced the soldier to shoot that man.... A great uproar broke out when his comrades saw him killed, and it’s not true that they were in the cells, but rather in a crowd of two hundred.... I didn’t realize the monstrosity that had been committed when I first heard the comrades cry out for help. They stared at us with closed fists, as if to say: “What should we do?”... I knew that the Assault Guard would enter the prison at some point and use any pretense to blow us away with rifle fire. It was a horrible moment, and the only thing we could do was stop exactly what the guards were going to provoke; a massacre. I decided to go down to the courtyard, where there were about five hundred men waiting for someone to take the initiative and say: “Forward!” The first thing I saw were the well placed machine-guns. I got up on a bench and yelled out to my comrades. I felt an overwhelming desire to say precisely that: Forward! But that would have been a tragic mistake, something for which I would have never forgiven myself if I had emerged alive, which would have been unlikely. I told them exactly the opposite: to calm down, to recover their serenity, that it still wasn’t time. Some may have cursed me inwardly, thinking that I had “gone soft,” but it doesn’t matter. Everyone withdrew into their groups or cells. They removed the corpse and a heavy silence fell over the prison, terribly heavy, without any of us being able to face one another. That was the first time that Ascaso and I didn’t look one another in the eye.... Assault Guards marched through the prison, and we, after having lost a comrade, are held incommunicado.[381]

On July 1, Solidaridad Obrera published a photograph of five individuals behind bars: Díez, Ascaso, Durruti, Combina, and Lorda. A statement signed by Francisco Ascaso and Paulino Díez framed the photo. It was addressed to “citizen Santiago Casares Quiroga, Minister of the Interior.” The text informed the minister that, with “our patience exhausted, we must resort to the sad weapon of the hunger strike. Seeing that his honor didn’t manage to open the prison doors, we believe that this method will be successful. Santa María Prison, June 28, 1933”

Things were going from bad to worse in the Cabinet presided over by Manuel Azaña. The Rightwing was attacking furiously. Lerroux advanced his candidacy for President of Government and the Socialist Party entered into a deep crisis. Araquistáin, prompted by the experience of the social democrats in Germany, embraced Marxism and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Francisco Largo Caballero watched and worried as the UGT’s unity shattered and its rank and file rebelled against policies made by the Socialists in government. He started to look sympathetically on Araquistáin’s extremist stance. Other Socialist leaders began to recognize the catastrophic effects of the political line that they had followed, as their youth began to turn to the Communist Party. The CP, always led by Moscow, began to reap certain successes at the expense of the Socialists. All of this compromised Indalecio Prieto’s influence, who stubbornly continued working with Manuel Azaña. Alcalá Zamora dissolved Azaña’s Cabinet and on September 12 entrusted Lerroux with forming a new government. But, before resigning and withdrawing from the scene, the Republican-Socialist government took a final swipe at the CNT by applying the “Vagrants Law” to the governmental prisoners, including Durruti and Ascaso. On September 25, Solidaridad Obrera published the following article under the headline “The anarchist’s dignified attitude toward the Vagrants Law”:

Durruti, Ascaso, Combina, Joaquín Valiente, Paulino Díez, and Trabajano are inmates in El Puerto de Santa María penitentiary and the government intends to apply the disgraceful label of “vagrants” to them. Their “special” case has received the natural and dignified response that it merits. These comrades have refused to testify in the prosecution’s inquiry initiated against them for “vagrancy.”

We Confederation members must defend ourselves against these legal machinations—the work of “left” Republicans and especially Socialists!—by saying: “we aren’t vagrants and, as workers, we will not testify in such a wicked, shameful trial!”

The comrades incarcerated in the Andalusian Montjuich sent two letters to the present Minister of Justice, Botella Asensi, which we have published in our newspapers. They told him categorically that they reject the outrageous “vagrants” label and if the malignant matter is not resolved by September 25—today—that they will declare a hunger strike and hold the nation’s top judicial authority responsible for what could occur.

The last Cabinet meeting decided not to apply that shameful law to the fighting workers. Now the Minister of Justice must act.

Durruti sent some words to his family on October 5, 1933:

I hope you’ve read in the press that we decided to end our hunger strike, after eight days without eating, under the promise of our release. According to the most recent information telegraphed to us by the lawyers in Sevilla, we will get out today. One already left last night. I have the impression that all of us will be out by the time you receive this letter.

Durruti, Ascaso, and Combina arrived at the CNT editorial office in Madrid on October 7, after spending six months trapped in the terrible Puerto de Santa María.

They set off for Barcelona the following day, leaving behind a Madrid in turmoil. Indeed, the government that Lerroux presented to the Parliament on October 2 did not gather the votes necessary to assume power. Alcalá Zamora ordered several people to form a new government, but all failed in their attempts. This led to the dissolution of the Parliament and a new electoral referendum, to the Rightwing’s great satisfaction. The President entrusted Diego Martínez Barrio (from Lerroux’s party) with liquidating the Parliament and preparing the elections.

There are two additional matters to include in this summary of the first Republican-Socialist biennium, both of which will weigh heavily on Spain’s immediate future: the first is the great opportunity that the Republic had to do away with the cancer of the Moroccan Protectorate. Instead of seizing the chance, it advanced a policy that was even more destructive than the Monarchy’s Africanist policy. It only deepened the divide between Spain and Morocco and, like the French, made the relationship still more feudal. The second was the trip to Spain that French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot made in the spring of 1932. The government used his visit as a pretext to repress worker and peasant agitation in Andalusia, so that “peace reigns more fully in Casablanca.” [382] Herriot also managed to get Spain to sign a treaty requiring that it purchase arms solely from the French.