CHAPTER XXVII. February 16, 1936

Manuel Azaña and the Socialist Party began discussing the creation of the electoral coalition on November 14, 1935. Leaders of the SP proposed a platform that could serve as its foundation, although only the clause on amnesty in their suggested program would be retained later. The program that was ultimately adopted was an extremely modest republican platform in every sense. It called for:

a) Amnesty for prisoners convicted of social-political crimes committed after November 1933. Anyone sentenced for such crimes between 1931 and 1933 would not receive amnesty, which meant that a large number of anarchist militants would remain in prison.

b) Rehire state employes that the Rightwing fired for their political views.

c) Reestablish the Constitution.

d) Address socials problems in the countryside and carry out administrative reforms, like reducing taxes, etc.

Other points included were: salary increases, educational reform, and the reestablishment of the Catalan Autonomy Statute. The document was silent on the increasingly pressing question of Morocco.

The following organizations and political parties accepted and endorsed the program: for the Izquierda Republicana, Amós Salvador; for the Unión Republicana, Bernardo de los Ríos; for the Socialist Party, Juan Simeón Vidarte and Manuel Cordero; for the Unión General de Trabajadores, Francisco Largo Caballero; for the Juventudes Socialistas, José Cazorla; for the Communist Party, Vicente Uribe; for the Syndicalist Party, Angel Pestaña; and for the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, Juan Andrade.

While the Left formed its coalition, Joaquín Chapaprieta’s government entered into crisis as a result of another financial scandal. Alcalá Zamora held meetings with Rightwing leaders, but was unable to find a Prime Minister who could assure even minimal political stability. To resolve the matter, on December 13 Portela Valladares pledged to form a government without the CEDA or the Radicals, which would mean the dissolution of the Parliament and new elections. In response, CEDA leader Gil Robles urged Rightwing members of the government to resign (both Melquíades Alvarez and Martínez de Velasco did so). This would be the last crisis of the rightwing governments, as Alcalá Zamora formed a government made up by individuals entrusted with dissolving the Parliament and organizing the elections scheduled for February 16, 1936.

The elections presented a difficult problem for the CNT: should it tell its members to abstain or to vote for the leftwing list? The latter option was attractive, because a Popular Front victory would mean freedom for the prisoners (most of whom were CNT members).

On January 9, the CNT’s Catalan Regional Committee issued a circular calling the unions to a regional conference in Barcelona’s Meridiana cinema on January 25. The topics to discuss were: “1. What should the CNT’s position be on an alliance with institutions that, without being in solidarity with us, have workerist nuances? And 2. What concrete and definitive stance should the CNT adopt toward the elections?” [445] The very presence of these points on the agenda indicates the confusion among the men on the CNT committees, whom Durruti found “suspicious” and with whom he had clashed. A certain indecision, if not coercion, is evident in the submission of the above agenda, which limited or nullified the discussion of the immediate political challenges. In part, this reflects the fact that some CNT militants had responded favorably to Largo Caballero’s calls for the CNT to form a “brotherhood in the proletarian revolution” with the UGT. It was also a way to make it easier for CNT militants to justify voting for the Popular Front.

Authorities released Durruti a day after the mentioned circular was issued. The atmosphere in the street had changed during his short incarceration. As if by magic, the bombings, attacks on individuals, and clashes with the police had stopped. This suggested that at least some of those actions had been the work of Falange provocateurs. An air of tragedy seemed to float in the air and there was a general feeling of dispiritedness. Few could hazard a confident guess about the outcome of the political moment. Durruti noted the confusion in conversations he had with militants, who didn’t know whether or not they should abstain (as they had in November 1933). He expressed himself bluntly in one of those discussions:

We anarchists are really very few in Spain. Although our ideas and propaganda influence the workers, this only happens under the right conditions. The results of the November 1933 elections would have been the same whether or not we had advocated abstention, for the simple reason that the Socialists and Republicans were completely discredited. There were no other Left candidates and the workers wouldn’t have voted for the Right. They would have abstained on their own accord. Then, the important thing was making the abstention conscious and active; a way of making the proletariat class conscious. We did that and the Republican Socialist policies actually helped us. But the situation is different today. We’ve suffered two years of harsh oppression and the immense majority of the working class is fed up with it.

Furthermore, there are thirty thousand inmates in the prisons and it seems like all we need to do is vote to get them out. That’s what the leftwing politicians encourage us to think in the rallies that they’re holding throughout Spain. Unfortunately, the workers are too generous. Do you remember when Barcelona workers supported Francisco Largo Caballero’s deputy candidacy to get him out of prison after the sad strike in August 1917? They forgot the Socialists’ behavior during that strike and only thought of freeing an incarcerated man. Today most of the workers have forgotten the repression from 1931 to 1933 and only think of the Right’s atrocities in Asturias. Whether or not we advocate abstention, the workers will vote for the Left, but we should do the same thing that we did in November 1933. We must not deceive the proletariat. We have to make it aware of the reality that’s right under our noses: if the Reactionaries win, they’ll impose a dictatorship legally and, if they lose, they’ll attempt a coup. Either way, a confrontation between the working class and the bourgeoisie is inevitable. That’s what we have to say clearly and decisively to the working class; so that it’s warned, so that it’s armed, so that it’s prepared, and so that it knows how to defend itself when the time comes. Bourgeois democracy is dead and the Republicans killed it.[446]

Durruti will maintain this position consistently in the months of life remaining to him. The regional conference took place on January 25, 1936:

The majority of the delegations (142 delegates representing ninety-two unions, eight Local Federations, seven counties, the National Committee, and the Regional Prisoner Support Committee) did not carry mandates from their respective unions, the bulk of which were still closed. The limited time between the call for the conference and the conference itself meant that militants could not make decisions in the normal way. Most of the decisions emerged out of meetings of militants. This prompted sharp criticisms against the conference organizers. Many claimed that the Regional Committee was trying to force them to take an accommodating stance toward the electoral situation. The delegation from Hospitalet del Llobregat was particularly emphatic. It proposed censuring the Regional Committee for alleged coercion.

A delegate pointed to a decision from a national meeting of regionals (on May 26, 1935) as a response to the issue. That decision established the following:

All propaganda, during elections and otherwise, will be a doctrinal exposition of our principles and practical goals. We will fight politics and its parties in equal measure, without falling into demagogery. We will carry out abstentionist propaganda at every possible opportunity, in a way that is consistent with the organization’s decisions and without subordinating our conduct to elections. The relevant Committees will oversee these efforts.

But, nevertheless, most delegates saw the CNT’s anti-electoral position as a matter of tactics more than principle and thus managed to start a debate on the topic. The discussion revealed a state of ideological vacillation within the CNT, despite all the exegetes who spoke endlessly about the intrinsic value of the “apolitical” and “anti-political” perspectives. The conference finally nominated a committee to issue a statement. The committee’s declaration reasserted the CNT’s principles and goals, affirming that it had “to demonstrate the inefficiency of voting to the workers, pointing to historic events such as those in Germany and Austria.”

In the discussion of the worker alliance, conference attendees agreed that the “UGT must recognize that the emancipation of the workers is only possible through revolutionary action. Accepting that point, it must break off all political and parliamentary collaboration with the bourgeois system.... For the social revolution to be effective, it must completely destroy the regime that presently controls Spanish economic and political life.... The new social relations born of revolutionary victory will be governed by the express will of the workers, gathered publicly and with complete and absolute freedom of expression for all.... The defense of the new society requires the unity of all forces and that the particular interest of each tendency is put aside.” They added a note for the CNT National Committee asking it to convene a national conference of unions in April to explore the possibility of an accord with the UGT. It concluded by calling autonomous organizations to join the CNT or UGT, in accordance with their affinities. [447] This statement about the necessary foundations of an alliance with the UGT simply reaffirmed the CNT’s longstanding position. Unfortunately, the Socialist’s stance also remained the same. Largo Caballero was still trying to win CNT votes, although he was also becoming dangerously Bolshevik.

Claridad printed a speech that he gave in early June at a meeting of the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña. He said that “Preventing the Socialist Party from being the sole leader would betray the Party’s very essence.... When the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, the government will have to fight anyone who disagrees with it, just as the Bolsheviks permitted no opposition and destroyed their opponents.” [448]

The February 16 elections occurred in an environment of unprecedented calm. Even the conservative paper La Vanguardia recognized that they had been held in “perfect discipline.” The Left coalition was victorious, but only by a small margin:

Left: 4,838,449 263 deputies

Right: 3,996,931 129 deputies

Center: 449,320 52 deputies

The Socialist Party elected ninety deputies, which meant that it had lost twenty-six posts since the 1931 elections. That was surely part of Socialist’s concession to the Communist Party, which gained thirteen deputies. The Izquierda Republicana (Azaña) and Unión Republicana (Martínez Barrio) won the liberal bourgeois vote, sharing 117 deputies between them. In Catalonia, the Esquerra Republicana elected thirty-eight deputies.

The CEDA continued being the most important faction on the Right, with ninety-four deputies. La Falange Española ran its founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera as an independent candidate and did not elect even one deputy.

As for the Center, the Radical Party (Lerroux) suffered a huge defeat. It went from eighty deputies in the 1933 elections to eight on February 16. According to the Constitution, Portela Valladares and his government had to wait one month before handing power over to the victors of the February 16 elections. However, to prevent a coup in the interim, Alcalá Zamora violated the Constitution and got Manuel Azaña and his ministerial team to assume power in three days.

Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles asked Portela Valladares to decree a state of emergency in the early morning of February 17. Meanwhile, General Franco tried to get Minister of War General Molero and Civil Guard Inspector General Pozas to support an intervention of the Army with the forces that they commanded. Molero and Pozas refused, and so General Franco set out to organize the coup on his own. According to Joaquín Arrarás: “General Franco had the appropriate orders drafted and circulated. He also initiated a series of discussions with the commander generals, but had to suspend them when an aide told him that Mr. Portela needed to see him at once. It was to express his irritation.”[449] Although there was no coup that night of February 18, that had less to do with Portela Valladares and Alcalá Zamora’s actions than the indecision among the military leaders that Franco consulted. But, given the circumstances, Alcalá Zamora decided that it would be imprudent to wait a month to transfer power and entrusted Manuel Azaña with forming his government on February 19.

Manuel Azaña put together a leftwing Republican government. The workers, who had been holding public demonstrations and forcibly releasing inmates from the prisons, again awarded their trust to the left Republican leaders, hoping that this time they understood the need to break with the policies of the past and take the country along a new path. During the electoral campaign, the left coalition had presented itself as an obstacle to fascism; the people would receive their first disappointment when the new government acted oblivious to and made no attempt to stop the conspiracy initiated by Gil Robles, Calvo Sotelo, and General Franco, despite the fact that they had clearly revealed their ploys.

On February 19, everyone thought that authorities would surely arrest General Franco. Indeed, Franco himself went directly to the Interior Minister, perhaps hoping to reduce the severity of his punishment. He was surprised to discover that not only did Amós Salvador leave him in liberty, but that he also recognized his fidelity to the Republic. Manuel Azaña made Franco the Military Commander of the Canary Islands in order to remove him from the Peninsula and made General Goded (another plotter) military chief of the Balearic Islands, where Mussolini—in Majorca—had set up his operational headquarters for Italian activities in Spain.

By taking such measures, Manuel Azaña and his government were simply rehashing the policies of Gil Robles or Lerroux. People felt the deception like a slap in the face and the government’s enactment of amnesty on February 21 did not diminish the impact of the insult. That was because the people had already partially imposed amnesty themselves by opening the provincial prisons and also because the government was beginning to limit the scope of the amnesty. Its restrictions left endless CNT social inmates in prison, as well as many sentenced for common law offenses who were actually social prisoners, given that they were peasants whose crimes had been motivated by hunger.

Durruti denounced these affronts in a meeting held in Barcelona’s Price Theater on March 6. “We remind the men in government that they’re there because the workers voted them in and they can throw them out just as easily if their patience is exhausted. There is already reason to think that the working class is reaching the limits of its tolerance with the government.”[450]

The situation was becoming increasingly desperate in the countryside. Many landowners abandoned their fields, perhaps because they feared revolution or to protest the new government. The landowners who remained found any excuse to halt productive activity, which preserved the crushing rates of unemployment among the peasantry. On February 27, the government issued instructions for rehiring workers who had been fired for their political views or for participating in the October 1934 revolutionary events. The rural and industrial bourgeoisie ignored those directives and refused to readmit the laborers in question. Although unions in the industrial areas were able to force the bourgeoisie to follow the government’s orders, the only solution in the countryside was to occupy the abandoned lands. Rural expropriations spread like wildfire once the Cenicientos peasants took the first step:

The peasants of Cenicientos in the province of Madrid have occupied in a body the pasture land called “Encinar de la Parra,” covering an area of 1,317 hectares, and have begun to work it. When the occupation was completed, they sent the following letter to the minister of agriculture:

“In our village there is an extensive pasture land susceptible of cultivation, which in the past was actually cultivated, but which today is used for shooting and grazing. Our repeated requests to lease the land from the owner, who, together with two or three other landowners, possess almost the entire municipal area—at one time communal property—have been in vain. As our hands and plows were idle and our children hungry, we had no course but to occupy the land. This we have done. With our labor it will yield what it did not yield before; our misery will end and the national wealth will increase. In doing this, we do not believe that we have prejudiced anyone, and the only thing we ask of Your Excellency is that you legalize this situation and grant us credits so that we can perform our labors in peace.” Two weeks after the Cenicientos occupation, the peasants of eight towns in Salamanca did the same thing. Four days later, the inhabitants of some towns in the province of Toledo followed suit and, by daybreak on March 25, eighty thousand peasants in the Cáceres and Badajoz provinces were taking over the lands and beginning to cultivate them.[451]

Press reports on these occupations made it clear that a battle was unfolding: “Two thousand hungry residents of this locality [Mansalbas-Toledo] just took over the ‘El Robledo’ farm, which the Count of Romanones appropriated twenty years ago without giving anything to the people.” [452]

Popular Front leaders had assumed that they could continue manipulating the peasantry with their speculations about whether “we will or will not apply agrarian reform,” but quickly realized that would no longer work when the first land occupations began in Murcia, just a few days after they took office. They resorted to the time-tested procedure of expelling the peasants with the Civil Guard, who injured twenty-seven on this occasion. The peasants responded with the dramatic rebellion described above, which made Manuel Azaña understand that he couldn’t rely on mausers alone and had to send agronomical engineers and legalize the occupied farms. This proved once again that the only effective reforms are those imposed by force from below. Indeed, direct action was infinitely more successful than all the parliamentary chatter that took place between 1931 and 1933 about whether to institute the approved Agrarian Reform law.

There were other actions after the land occupations. There were attacks on churches, for example, whose pulpits had become sites of open conspiracy against the government and whose vestries were being used to store arms. The revolution began from below and had little to do with defending bourgeois democracy, the supposed purpose of the Popular Front.

Statistics from the period between February 16 and June 15, 1936 show that a class war was breaking out: “One hundred sixty churches burned down; 269 deaths; 1,287 injured; 113 general strikes, 228 partial strikes, and 145 bombings.” The political physiognomy of the country was: “UGT, 1,447,000 members; CNT, 1,577,000 members.” These numbers totaled more than three million, indicating that more than a third of the country’s eight million workers were unionized.

The Right “had 549,000 enrolled in its diverse organizations; from 20,000 to 30,000 retired soldiers; 50,000 falangists; 50,000 priests, and millions and millions of pesetas.” [453]

That was the distribution of forces when the CNT held its Fourth National Congress on May 1, 1936 in Zaragoza’s Iris Park Theater.