The Central Committee of Militias of Catalonia—Expeditions to Aragon—The false accusation that we withheld our forces from the front—Political and revolutionary collaboration

We defeated the military revolt. We never knew the exact price in dead and wounded. During those days no one measured the magnitude of sacrifice; only victory mattered. Victory was ours, and those of us who were lucky enough to be left standing did not have any time to shed tears for the dead, among whom were friends, beloved brothers and the most effective collaborators in our old battles. The result of that victory was an almost unprecedented outpouring of popular euphoria. All power was in the streets, the moral power by virtue of the indispensable part played by the people’s fighters in bloody combat, and the material power, the power of force and of arms. The coercive institutions of the old State had melted into the popular masses; in any event, its force could no longer serve as a counterweight to the rebirth of Spain and its fate. In those first weeks after July 20, the parties and organizations could not even control their own members. Something superior to parties and tendencies had suddenly been constituted; a people had been formed and this people felt and worked as one. Wasn’t this the time to renounce all selfish interests to join this people, each with his capabilities and his initiatives, his intelligence or his heroism? The day will come when it will be necessary to summarize the lessons of the experience of our revolution; then, the least that can be done will be to harshly judge the split that divided the people of July 20 into rival factions, hostile groups, and schismatic gangs.

We cannot hold ourselves responsible for this unfortunate turn of events; after the victory all the bickering of parties and factions seemed insignificant to us, and even our own organization, to which our victory was due, seemed too confining; the only framework that seemed to be suited to the tenor of the moment was the people, a people drunk with victory, but still capable of every sacrifice, of making every decision and above all capable of building the new world towards which we aspired. Eternal Spain had risen from its age-old slavery and stood amid its broken chains. To make this possible, parties and organizations, doctrines and programs had been necessary; now, all that was needed was for each person to bring what he possessed to the people, bearing arms or working in a factory, conducting research in a laboratory or cultivating the land.

We had been told that certain gangs associated with the defeated revolt were still committing outrages using various disguises, that there were instances of treacherous sniping directed at groups of militiamen, and that automobiles of unknown provenance were being driven around the city. We could confirm none of these rumors. Now that the arms had passed into the hands of the people, any plans the enemy forces may have had with regard to reorganizing belligerent operations in the city were absolutely abandoned for many months. A big city like Barcelona, however, is always home to elements that are not capable of merging with the great communion of the people. The overthrow of so many walls and the subversion of so many values had caused the cup of the patience of the masses to overflow, and irresponsible demagogues had already begun to take advantage of the situation, but this was not a major concern for us as long as the masses in question were the working class masses, with a moral sense and a consciousness of their responsibility that were always vigorous and alert.

Between 1808 and 1814 the Spanish people took the initiative into their own hands, which at that time exclusively involved the struggle against Napoleon’s hosts. It was right for the people to be swept away by a sense of jubilation, and it was right that they should joyfully bask in the glorious aura of the promised land. But not everyone who heeded the first call, appealing to their reason and to their feeling, were members of the working class; there were people from social strata that did not understand the greatness of the moment and we feared that the victory for which we paid such a high price would be sullied by thoughtless or malicious elements.

The Committee of Antifascist Militias was formed as an authentic expression of the people’s victory at a time when the smoke from the fighting was still in the air. It was mostly due to our decision that representatives of all the antifascist political and trade union forces were invited to join the Committee, not so that they could devote themselves, as zealous representatives of this or that cause, to forwarding their particular partisan interests, but rather with the intention that they should merge together into a single will. The “Estat Catalá” was without direct representation, in view of the fact that the Esquerra de Cataluña and the Government of the Generalitat were suitable for representing the autonomous region as such.

We gave the Catalonian UGT, despite its small membership, the same representation that we gave the CNT, which represented the majority of the organized workers in Catalonia; the delegates of the rival trade union were shocked, as they did not expect this gesture. We thus made it clear that we wanted to collaborate as brothers and that we desired that in the rest of Spain, and in the regions where we were temporarily in the minority, we should be treated with the same consideration and respect that we showed all those who had cooperated to a greater or lesser degree to bring about our victory.

At the first meeting of the Committee we dispatched some delegates to reconnoiter the situation in the region bordering on Zaragoza and to seek information concerning the enemy’s positions, and since a rumor was making the rounds to the effect that an organized column had formed on the other bank of the Ebro to attack Barcelona, we issued the order to mine all the highway and railroad bridges over the river to prevent the advance of motorized columns. The delegates we sent out as scouts, who might fall unawares into the hands of enemy forces, bore no documentation, which circumstance might have saved their lives unless they were killed outright, but they were taken prisoner as suspicious persons.

Without waiting for the reports from these delegates, we resolved to act as quickly as possible. The Committee of Militias was recognized as the only effective power in Catalonia. The Government of the Generalitat still existed and deserved our respect, but the people only obeyed the power that they had constituted by virtue of their victory and the revolution, for the victory of the people was the economic and social revolution. We then initiated a collaborative effort of tendencies and sectors in the Committee that had no relations with each other that morning but which were now in daily contact with each other and engaged in a common effort, and would now show their true colors.

Even though our plans for the Committee still had a lot of rough edges, if there were times when we would really doubt the wisdom of the path we had chosen, it was because of the always unfaithful conduct that was gradually and at first timidly engaged in during the first few months by the representatives of Moscow communism. With the republican and liberal forces we were always able to maintain such cordial and amicable relations that we never once had reason to regret establishing contact with them.

Our first published declaration was a public announcement, with instructions concerning how the population should conduct itself. The announcement was as follows:

The Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia, having been constituted in accordance with the Decree published by the Government of the Generalitat in today’s “Official Bulletin”, has approved the following resolutions, whose observance is compulsory for all citizens:

1. A revolutionary order is established, which all the member organizations of the Committee are committed to upholding.

2. For public order and safety, the Committee has appointed the patrols needed to ensure rigorous compliance with all the orders the Committee may issue. For this purpose, the patrols will bear the credentials of the Committee, which will testify to their identity.

3. These patrols will be the only ones accredited by the Committee. Any person who acts outside of the Committee’s authorization will be considered to be a rebel and will suffer the punishments that will be determined by the Committee.

4. The night patrols will be strict with all those who attempt to disturb the revolutionary order.

5. From one until five in the morning the only persons who will be allowed to leave their homes will be the following:
   All those who have documentation proving that they are members of one of the organizations that constitute the Committee of Militas.
   Those persons who are accompanied by one of the above elements, who will vouch for their moral integrity.
   Those who can justify their presence in the streets as being due to force majeure.

6. In order to recruit elements for the Antifascist Militias, the organizations that constitute the Committee are authorized to open up their own centers for enlistment and supply of recruits. The conditions under which this recruitment can be conducted will be set forth in detail in an internal regulation.

7. The Committee hopes that, in view of the need to constitute a revolutionary order in order to confront the fascist groups, there will be no need, to ensure obedience to its decrees, to resort to disciplinary measures.

And this Proclamation was signed in the name of the Esquerra, the republican Action Parties and the Republican Left, the Unión de Rabassaires, the Marxist parties—the Stalinist party and the more or less Trotskyist one—the CNT, (Durruti, García Oliver and Asens) and the FAI (Santillán and Aurelio Fernández), the principal delegations.

The Committee allocated various tasks: a general secretary for administrative work (Jaime Miravitlles); a section for organizing militias, subdivided into Barcelona militias (the responsibility for which was given to us), and the militias of the other counties of Catalonia—a subdivision that later proved to be impractical, so that this task was also allocated to us; an operational section (García Oliver was appointed to lead this section); a department of investigation and public safety (Aurelio Fernández, José Asens, Rafael Vidiella and Tomás Fábregas were named to be cochairmen of this section); a department of provisioning (under the leadership of José Torrents); and a department of transport.

Each of the above sections was further subdivided into other subsidiary departments, such as statistics, for example, in the section of the general secretary; the quartermaster general and munitions department, a subsection of the department of militias; a department of censorship and radio transmissions, cartography, a military school and a signaling and radio school, subsections of the department of war and operations, etc.

The most crucial and urgent task naturally fell on our shoulders as the representatives of the most numerous and active part of the proletariat of Catalonia. We not only assumed responsibility for the most important tasks, but also for those in which physical exhaustion due to our enormous efforts would most quickly threaten us. More than twenty hours a day of incessant nervous stress, resolving thousands of problems every day, attending to the crowds of people who swarmed around our offices with the most various requests, all comprised an environment that was hardly propitious for tranquil meditation.

We managed to normalize life in a big city within an extraordinarily brief span of time and we also succeeded in making everyone understand that they could not take advantage of the situation created after the suppression of the revolt in order to pursue private ends, nor could they settle personal grudges, no matter how justified they may have been, nor could they wantonly squander supplies and provisions without urgently restocking the warehouses. There is no question that some excesses were inevitable; the explosion of so many concentrated hatreds and the breaking of chains that had seemed to be unbreakable, could not take place without consequences. To meet the needs of the combatants a number of public dining halls were improvised, under the auspices of all the parties and organizations. The army barracks themselves were converted into people’s hotels where free food was given to the militiamen in the improvised units that formed patrols, manned barricades, etc. It took no small effort to finally close down the free dining halls, evacuate the barracks, dismantle the barricades and resume work in the factories and the transport sector. Eight days after the revolt, the only new spectacles offered by Barcelona were the uniforms of the militiamen and the heavily-armed control patrols. It was through our initiative that all the available open land, even in the middle of the city, was subjected to cultivation. And the groups that left the city during the first few days to try to obtain provisions from the peasant villages of the region had to establish a system of exchange, bringing the industrial products that the city possessed to pay for what they received from the workers of the land.

We publicized very stern warnings that we would punish anyone who exceeded these limits, and in order to prevent anyone from thinking that these warnings did not apply to everyone, we shot some of our comrades and friends who had overstepped their bounds. This was the fate of J. Gardeñes, who could not save himself even by expressing his remorse over the actions for which he confessed responsibility in good faith, knowing that we had declared that we would not allow them; and this was also the fate of the president of one of Barcelona’s biggest trade unions, the Food Workers Trade Union, who was accused of having been responsible for an incident of personal vengeance and whose reputation as an old, battle-tested militant did him no good at all.[14]

That is how the FAI and CNT dealt with their own members and comrades and thereby gave notice to all that the revolution could not be dishonored, and set the standard for the Committee of Militias to operate on the same rigorous basis in defense of the revolutionary order. We intervened in thousands of difficult cases, and we only needed to refer to the prospect of prompt justice being the fate of anyone who attacked the established revolutionary order to pacify the impatient and tame the ancestral instincts that were fighting to come to the surface.

And we must point out as a matter of record that we seldom found that members of our organizations were implicated in punishable acts that we had to repress. Thousands of denunciations were received and the coercive departments that we created had to investigate them, and as a result many persons with shady backgrounds were detained and brought before the people’s tribunals.

In such cases, the suspects usually did not have a hard time convincing the tribunals of their innocence. And in those cases involving persecution of or abuses perpetrated against elements from the old regime, we very seldom discovered that any of our comrades were behind them.

Starting on the 20^th of July we posted improvised guards at Banks, medical clinics, pawn shops, etc., and we prevented many reprisals and acts of vengeance. But a convulsion of such depth had shaken everything and had liberated primitive forces that lacked the self-control possessed by conscious revolutionaries, a certain level of culture, a firm moral sense and a clear understanding of the objectives pursued and the means that lead to the attainment of those objectives.

We did not know the true situation of the enemy forces, but it was possible that they would try to attack us, now that they were strongly entrenched in Aragon and Navarre. Elitist republicans like Martínez Barrios tried to create a Government in Valencia and to keep the troops of the garrison in their barracks, maintaining that they were loyal to the government. We had no guarantee of this, and a sneak attack on Catalonia combined with active support for the rebel assault by the troops in Valencia would mean disaster.

We had to threaten to send columns of militiamen to Valencia if the garrison was not disarmed, and as for the threat issued by Mola and Cabanellas, we resolved to go on the offensive and declare war on the rebels in their strongholds in order to take vengeance for the massacre of revolutionary workers and leftists, republicans and socialists, that they had ordered in Zaragoza and in all the counties of Rioja.

We set a date and a time, July 24 at 10:00 a.m. The staging area was the Paseo de Gracia. Durruti and Pérez Farraz, one as the political chief and the other has the military commander, would lead the first expedition. We calculated that we would need twelve thousand men to take Zaragoza.

Only a few hours earlier, we had no idea of how we were going to figure out where the militiamen would be mobilized, or where the weapons would come from, or where we would get the means of transport; but the column left for Zaragoza on the day and at the time we had set. While the militiamen were gathering, we called upon some officers and noncommissioned officers who had distinguished themselves on July 19 by fighting on our side, or who were known due to their conduct before that date. We found remnants of the Alcántara Regiment in the barracks at the Artillery Depot and at our request they offered volunteers, with captain Salavera at their head, to join the expedition with some machine guns and mortars. That unit was the only organized force that marched down the streets of Barcelona on that day amid the cheers of the population.

In spite of the widespread enthusiasm, the column under Durruti and Pérez Farraz fell far short of our projected figure of 12,000 men. This was the first miscalculation. The war was supposed to absorb everything: men, arms, labor, thought, life, everything. It was thought that the first expeditionary column would have a surplus of combatants and that it would accomplish its mission without any problems. The three thousand volunteer militiamen who departed to perform this mission did so with an indescribable joy, pride and élan.

A person who could by no stretch of the imagination be counted among the victors of July characterized these first joyful warriors who left the city to sacrifice everything so that Spain and the world would have a better future, the future that others of their kind had already begun to prefigure in the factories, the farms, the mines and the schools. Fortunately for Catalonia and for Castille, these bold tribesmen who attacked tanks multiplied and, instead of waiting for fascism to attack, the emancipated people, occupying the most strategic positions, forced the enemy forces to dig in on the other side of the Ebro.

Within a few days, more than one hundred fifty thousand volunteers had signed up to fight wherever they were needed against the military revolt. And to organize this enormous mass of volunteers with even the least effectiveness, we could not rely on any vestige of the old army. We had ourselves been committed anti-militarists all our lives, and inveterate enemies of war. The first time we had ever set foot in a barracks was when we accepted the surrender of its defenders, symbols of a past that we wanted to leave behind us forever. The power of the will and the eagerness of the people were such that we mobilized as many men as there were rifles to give them, and we sent them to the front organized into centuries, which were like light infantry companies, and we tried to ensure that they were led by men who enjoyed a certain moral authority. After the first column, which established its general headquarters in Bujaraloz, we sent another column to the southern Ebro, which set up its general headquarters in Caspe; another departed for Tardienta, others for Huesca, etc.

Within two months we had formed a front more than three hundred kilometers long in Aragon, with thirty thousand armed militiamen assigned to the various columns who carried out operations with a good record of success, captured materiel and prisoners from the enemy, and did not yield one inch of territory. The only victories of any consequence before Guadalajara were those won on the Aragon front, formed and maintained by us. At the same time, we also carried out the expeditions to Mallorca, those that were under the command of Captain Bayo and those that were under the command of Juan Yagüe, the maritime worker, who organized the Roja y Negra [Red and Black] Column. These operations in Mallorca involved landings on the islands and, by putting pressure on the enemy’s forces in the vicinity of Palma, prevented them from consolidating their victory in the Balearic Islands and also prevented the Italians from turning the islands into a naval and air base to be used against the Peninsula.

During the first few days following the victory of July, the Navarran colonel Jiménez de la Beraza, who had managed to cross the border into France in time to avoid falling into the hands of the raquetés and Mola’s forces, arrived in Barcelona. He was asked what he thought of everything that had been done so far and he responded with a unique perspicacity:

“Militarily this is chaos, but it is a chaos that works. Don’t disturb it!”

And he came over to our side, along with the few other professional officers who helped us, with their advice and support, organizing the available artillery batteries for the front, and finding loyal officers for them. Not all of them had the same intuition. The state-worshipers of the various parties and those who were dazzled by the cinematic fantasies about the Russian red army, utilizing every means to undermine the work of the people, turned “chaos”, thanks to the Russians who arrived three or four months later, into “order”, at least as seen from the vantage point of the “Gazette”, and turned order into defeat.

Ever since the militias were transformed into an “army”—an army minus its officers and minus the spirit that had been destroyed in July—we have seen nothing but disasters. The new directors of the war were incapable of understanding, or else understood it all too well, that they could not simultaneously fight both the military rebellion and the people. They waged both wars simultaneously, and first they lost the people, and then they lost the cause that they wanted to defend.

Although it was done without our approval, party and trade union sections were formed within the militias, which were supposed to be a single, unified expression of the people in arms. It was the Marxist tendencies—Stalinists and so-called Trotskyists—which first split the anti-fascist people to line them up behind their party slogans. A column appeared at the front with the name of the Carlos Marx Column. What did Karl Marx have to do with our epic struggle? We christened a column that departed for Huesca with the name, Francisco Ascaso, the hero of the Barcelona July days, killed in battle at the Atarazanas barracks, but not for a partisan purpose, but simply to honor heroism and the revolution. The Catalonians had their Macías-Companys Column, the confederal comrades formed their sections within the columns organized by the Committee of Militias, and the Trotskyists had their own militias. It was not all harmony between these various party-based forces at the front. This excess of partisan feeling should undoubtedly have been avoided. The only column organized by the CNT and the FAI was the one that was conceived and sent to the front by García Oliver, Los Aguiluchos [Young Eagles]. All the others were formed at the instigation of the Committee of Militias and were answerable to its authority, to which, by the way, Los Aguiluchos also submitted.

There has been a lot of talk about the anarchists at the front being models of indiscipline and disorder. I must point out that the most well organized and most disciplined forces were always libertarian units and, during the period when we were at the front with the militias, they were also the only ones that were regularly manned, supplied and commanded. And after the new army was formed and after it was defeated by Franco’s armies, the divisions that were composed predominantly of anarchists, with anarchist commanders, were seen marching into France in perfect military formation, a fact that even the enemy press was able to note at the time.

It was resolved to give every tendency represented on the Committee of Militias a barracks for recruitment and training. These barracks had been assaulted and taken by militants of the FAI and the CNT, which maintained their control over them until we decided that the time was right to hand them over.

In compliance with this resolution of the Committee of Militias, we gave Montjuich to the Esquerra, the Lepanto barracks to the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista [POUM], the Artillery Depot to the Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña [PSUC], and a former monastery to the Partido Federal Ibérico, subject to the condition that all of them would still remain under the supreme authority of the Committee of Militias. The CNT and FAI retained the barracks of Pedralbes, San Andrés, the cavalry barracks of Santiago, the barracks on the Avenida Icaria, and the Engineers Barracks. The barracks of the Quartermaster’s Corps and the Artillery Depot were intended to remain free of particular party interference, due to the functions that they performed. The Marxists began to give their barracks new names, calling one the Carlos Marx barracks and the other the Lenin barracks. Then the men of the FAI and the CNT did not want to be left out, so they baptized one of their barracks as the Miguel Bakunin barracks, another they called the Salvochea barracks, another the Spartacus barracks, and so on.

Each of the militia training centers in the barracks named a political chief, who attended to the directives of the various parties that operated them, and a military commander, who was supposed to be without any party preference, although, and this was especially true of the Marxists, the process of choosing these commanders was arranged in such a way that persons who were party members or sympathizers were selected. Otherwise, we succeeded in performing these functions with a good degree of harmony and we carried out daily inspections of the barracks in order to remedy any defects and put an end to any abuses.

In order to provide for the provisioning of the population with food and other necessary goods we formed a Provisioning Committee as a core working group, independent of the Committee of Militias itself, which was exclusively devoted to questions of provisioning and clothing the militiamen at the front and behind the lines.

We continued to organize expeditionary columns and to attend as far as possible to the demands of all the fronts. In September we sent reinforcements to Madrid, a column of Civil Guards under the command of colonel Escobar, and a column of militiamen, approximately 3,000 men, equipped with rifles and ammunition, machine guns, and a few batteries of artillery. When the second column departed for Aragon we already had a disagreement with some of the most outstanding military officers of the libertarian organizations themselves. While it was our opinion that the most capable and popular comrades should depart for the front at the command of the centuries, battalions and columns, certain comrades expressed the view that we should preserve the most outstanding militants for after the war; according to them, we had suffered significant losses in July, which was true, and that if combat at the front were to deprive us of those that remained, we would be in a disadvantageous position with respect to the other parties and organizations after the war was over. We saw that this was a case of counting your chickens before they hatch. Maybe because we had more accurate information, or maybe because we had a more correct view of the situation, this opinion caused us such profound pain that we shed tears; tears of rage, or of grief.

The deaths of our most popular comrades did not weaken us for the future, but made us stronger. And after all, it was not a question of calculations, first you had to defeat the enemy, then we can debate, those of us who remain alive, or those who are still in any condition to do so. Our enemies did not warn us of either the magnitude of the threat they posed or the factors that they had in their favor! We were in a hurry to take the war to every corner of Spain, before the rebel military forces could go on the offensive. During those days in July, when it was a matter of victory or death, did we make calculations about the future and what we would do in the future? The July days in Barcelona were not themselves decisive; it was still necessary to fight with the same fortitude and the same tranquil and heroic dedication to be victorious or to die. Why stockpile elements in the rearguard that are needed at the front? Why let the columns leave for the front without competent leaders, so that their commanding officers are chosen almost randomly, with a corresponding reduction of their effectiveness?

We had very few military officers on our side and the ones that we did have performed for the most part the functions pertaining to General Staff operations and technical advisers. Furthermore, the militiamen did not want professional officers, and distrusted them, a quite understandable attitude after what had just taken place.

But the overriding concern of almost the high-level leaders of our organizations was the same as that of the leaders of all the parties, none of which wanted to send their leading figures to the front, all of them reckoning with the same faulty reasoning that their chickens were already as good as hatched. A predominant environment of mean-spirited, backroom politics thus arose in the rearguard that would have nauseated the professional politicians of the old regime.

We regret that we must present a review of these paltry details at such a tragic historical moment, which stand out in such striking contrast with the example of such a noble and dignified people; but we cannot remain silent about the attitudes of our own people as well as those of other organizations that made it impossible for us to do what was advisable and what promised to deliver definitive victories during the first few months of the war; the dispatch to the front of strong contingents of mobile and special operations forces, since the forces we had in Aragon, for example, were no more than a thin skirmish line. Thirty thousand rifles, twenty or twenty-five artillery batteries, very few machine guns; this was not enough materiel for such a long front.

We cannot remain silent concerning the fact that, while we had only thirty thousand rifles on the Aragon front, there were around 60,000 rifles in the rearguard, in the possession of parties and various organizations, more armament than at the front, where the enemy was.

Not only once, but dozens of times, we pleaded with the libertarian movement to surrender the military weaponry that it possessed. Or that if it did not want to hand over the arms, then some of the men who bear those arms might at least volunteer for service at the front. To keep order in the rearguard, women, children and stones were enough. They argued that we could not disarm our own people, while the other parties and organizations were getting ready to stab us in the back. We disputed this assertion. The day when our comrades, possessors of the greatest quantity of weaponry, would decide to hand over their guns or go to the front, that same day we would also begin the disarmament of all the other parties and we promised to employ those who were most suspicious about the fulfillment of this promise to help implement it. We would also disarm or assign to frontline duties all those men enrolled in the various institutions of public and judicial order, the Civil Guard, the Assault Guard, and the carabineros. But we would not have the moral basis to proceed against the others as long as we did not take a first step ourselves by adopting a resolution to do the same.

The danger of counterrevolution to which our comrades alluded, was as far as we were concerned represented for the most part by those 60,000 rifles in the rearguard of a front that only had 30,000 rifles and that had to severely curtail its operations due to the lack of the most indispensable materiel for combat, since the guns lacked ammunition most of the time.

The complaints of the combatants were continuous, strident and completely justified. Durruti, whenever he came to Barcelona and saw so many people with guns on the streets, roared like a lion. One day, he found out that there were eight or ten machine guns in Sabadell. He politely asked for them and his request was refused. Then he organized a century and sent it to Sabadell to obtain by force what the people with the machine guns in Sabadell would not hand over to the war effort voluntarily. Since Durruti told us what he intended to do, we were able to arrive in Sabadell before him and prevent a bloody battle, as we compelled the people in Sabadell to hand over a couple of machine guns, under the threat that if they refused we would join forces with Durruti’s century that was en route.

These machine guns were in the hands of communist elements, but in Barcelona there were perhaps fifty machine guns in the hands of our own comrades. We did not have that many machine guns on the whole Aragon front. And that is not counting the machine guns under the control of the other parties and organizations.

We are committed only to the truth, and we would fail in our commitment if we were not to relate the feelings that embittered us and the failures that in our view were necessarily fatal.

The parties that had already begun to conspire on July 20 loudly proclaimed that all military weapons must be sent to the front, but they hid their own weapons and bought what they could, confidentially, from foreign suppliers. Their complaints would hardly be valid if the libertarian organizations, that is, the leaders of these organizations, had seriously resolved to hand over all military grade weaponry and to send their best men to the front. Within twenty-four hours, all the other parties and groups, willingly or by force, would have done the same. And the war would have been won in a few months.

The work of the Committee of Militias cannot be described in a few brief and fleeting notes. Establishing revolutionary order in the rearguard, organizing forces that were more or less fit to fight a war, training officers, operating a school for radio and signaling operations, feeding and clothing the militias, organizing the economy, participating in legislative and judicial proceedings; the Committee of Militias did all these things, it attended to everything: the transformation of peacetime industries into war industries, propaganda, relations with the Madrid government, support for all points of conflict, relations with Morocco, the cultivation of all available land, health and sanitation, the coast guard and border patrols, and a thousand other details of the most varied kind.

We paid the militiamen, their families, and the widows of the combatants; in short, a few dozen individuals attended to the tasks that a government would require an extremely expensive bureaucracy to perform.

The Committee of Militias was a Ministry of War in a time of war, and a Ministry of the Interior and a Ministry of Foreign Relations at the same time, serving as the inspiration for the formation of similar institutions in the economic and cultural domains. There was no more legitimate expression of the power of the people. It had to be fortified, it had to be helped so that it could more effectively perform its mission, since salvation lay in its power, which was the combined power of all its component groups and parties, which would otherwise detract from each other’s power. In this dual interpretation, we were isolated from our own friends and comrades.

The great Dorado Montero said that the legislator or statesman who could abolish lawyers would perform a major service for the country. He thought that the abolition of that parasitic and corrupting institution is indispensable for a healthy administration of justice.

There is no question about it: we made haste to impose the resumption of productive life; we set in motion all the institutions, initiatives, and elements that could be of use to us for meeting the needs of the war and for the reorganization of the new economic and social order. When a serious case came to our attention, we met in council and reached a verdict. One day, a half hour after a minor accident at the port involving one of our military detachments, we met in council and summarily convicted the commander of the unit in question and stripped him of his command, yielding to the proposals of the sailors themselves. It did not even occur to us that you need lawyers and judges for such matters. The writings of Joaquín Costa and Dorado taught us many years earlier about the sterility of that profession.

So why did we decide to reopen the Palace of Justice, which had been closed since the days of the revolt, and no one had since tried to open it? What purpose would a judicial power serve in the new way of life that was being organized? One day, Angel Samblancat appeared at our General Headquarters to assist us in the planned occupation of the Palace of Justice, which had to be subjected to the Committee of Militias.

We did not have time to reflect on what we would do with this instrument of all oppression, but Samblancat, although he was a lawyer, deserved our complete confidence and we issued an order to raid its offices, which were guarded by squads of the Civil Guard, on the pretext of conducting a search for weapons. Allowed to enter the Palace of Justice by the Civil Guards, the militiamen who accompanied Samblancat did not leave the building.

And so the Palace of Justice was reopened, and the organization of a so-called revolutionary justice system commenced. People’s Tribunals were formed which judged crimes of rebellion and conspiracy against the Republic and against the new legal system. As soon as this function of the Tribunals was attributed to them, when the first opportunity arose the people’s judges were replaced by the old professional judges, who had more expertize as judges, and this instrument that we had thoughtlessly restored to life became a weapon of the counterrevolution.

We were never very sympathetic towards either the judicial or the police apparatus. What a bad idea it was to allow the so-called revolutionary tribunals to operate, when the Committee of Militias itself could have performed this task of judging the crimes of the counterrevolution with better judgment and more certainty of seeing to it that our judgments were executed! We had assumed with the Committee of Militias a function of total people’s power; why divide this power and surrender such essential custodial functions of the labor that we had taken upon ourselves?

The judges, even if they were members of the FAI, and the police, even if they were members of the CNT, were hardly to our liking; we found these functions somewhat repulsive. That is why we did not welcome the formation of the institution called the Control Patrols. We wanted to liquidate all the coercive institutions in the rearguard and send them to the front. A terrifying legend was soon woven around these Patrols. Most of the militiamen who staffed the Patrols were our comrades and they posed a threat, precisely because they were our comrades, to any possible schemes on the part of any particular group to impose its own political dominance. There were those who wanted to suppress these forces, and the first thing they had to do was discredit them.

It is possible that, among the 1,500 men in the Patrols in Barcelona, some of them exceeded their jurisdiction and were guilty of committing crimes; even if that was true, however, the proportion of wrongdoers was no higher in the Patrols than was ordinarily the case in the other repressive institutions. We are not defending the institution of the Patrols, just as we never defended the Civil Guard or the Assault Guard. Yet they did possess a sense of humanity and responsibility that kept them faithful to the preservation of the new revolutionary order.

If the Patrols had survived, they might have become just another police force, but the campaign of defamation to which they were subjected was without foundation. This campaign was waged mainly by the communists, and their subsequent activities, with the Chekas, the murders of prisoners, and secret prisons, revealed that the real reason for their criticisms had nothing to do with their alleged desire to remedy the temporary defects of the Patrols. Free of any partisan bias in this question, somewhat hostile towards the Patrols at a time when our own organizations accepted them without any reservations, we defended them when those same organizations abandoned them to the repressive dictates of the central power, and regardless of how many mistakes they made or how often they went too far, which is to be expected from police work, we would never identify their operations with those of the institutions that replaced them, the career Assault Guards and policemen or the new special agents, at the dictate of Moscow.

On numerous occasions we had to intervene to obtain the release of people whose political neutrality convinced us of their innocence, and we were able to observe that these defendants were treated in a way that we were never treated: as human beings. There were in fact conspirators in the rearguard and naturally they must not be allowed free rein to inflict harm on us.

But the population that had lived through the first ten months of the revolution in Catalonia would be able to testify to the difference, from the point of view of repressive methods, of what came later, under the egis of the “order” established by Prieto, by Negrín, by Zugazagoitia, with the torture chambers of the Communist Party or of the Dirección General de Seguridad [General Directorate of Security], which were one and the same, or with the horrors of the SIM, that perpetrated atrocities that not even the Civil Guard under the monarchy could have imagined.

And the campaign of slander waged against the Control Patrols was also extended to the members of the FAI. Once again, we do not say that there were never any cases where our comrades went too far or committed abuses. Even with regard to our own organization, we are far from applauding all of its actions.

It must be said that not even the FAI supported us in our insistence that all weapons must be sent to the front; but as for the slander and defamation directed against our comrades and broadcast to the four corners of the earth, we must proudly say that of all the parties and organizations, the one that exhibited the most generous and humane conduct after the cessation of the violent battles on July 20 was the FAI. At a plenary session of the Committee of Militias, which was attended by the republicans, the socialists and the communists, they angrily showed us safe conduct passes signed by the FAI and the Libertarian Youth for nuns, monks and priests allowing them to leave the country, without any in-depth investigations of the backgrounds of the individuals in question. There was nothing odd about that. It was precisely the most advanced sector of the Spanish revolutionary movement that was the most indifferent with respect to religious matters, and the hatred of clericalism, which had always been entirely justified in Spain, was hardly to be found among our ranks.

Take a look at the literature we published over the last twenty-five years; take a look at our press and you will note the scarcity of anti-clerical diatribes. In other countries, and even in France, the anarchists have published journals devoted exclusively to denouncing the lie of religion.

Our organization in Spain has never been fertile soil for such views. Perhaps this indifference towards religion was an error when the clergy wielded such great power and expressed such decidedly regressive political views; it is, however, a fact, and we must admit it.

The victory of July deprived the Church of its wealth and its functions—why should we persecute its servants? The nuns and monks expressed their desire to leave the country and we did not see any reasons to keep them there against their will; thus, patrols manned by members of other parties often discovered safe-conduct passes permitting emigration in the possession of nuns and monks who did not feel a spontaneous desire to join in the work of the people.

Was it not better for them to leave Spain, rather than to have remained there in a state of continuous conspiracy? How many people came to us to tell us that their relatives—priests, monks or nuns—were living with them, and they wanted us to help them! Has anyone ever heard of even a single case when we spoke or acted in such a way as to summarily and categorically refuse to help such people? Have we not given everyone the highest guarantees of respect as long as they did not meddle with the affairs of the new revolutionary order?

On one occasion a group of railroad workers reported to us that they had arrested eight heavily-armed young priests, who, when asked why they were bearing weapons, arrogantly responded that they were in the service of Christ the King and of fascism. We immediately intervened with the intention of taking the suspects into custody before an extremely predictable fate befell them. When we arrived, one of them asked us if we would let him recite the Lord’s Prayer. Why not? After his prayer, he faced us, saying: “You are better than us, because we would not have allowed you to do even this.”

Having gone with the intention of saving them, the angry and hateful demeanor they displayed caused us to turn around and leave and return to our work. We do not know what happened to them.

In the assault on the Simancas barracks, in Gijón, a similar case arose. A sniper was shooting with deadly accuracy at militiamen from a safe vantage point. Several houses were raided and in one of them a priest was found with a smoking gun in his hand. He understood that his final hour had come and he serenely said to his captors:

“I am at peace—I killed nine of you!”

A Church that fought like that for the worst causes has nothing to do with religion and cannot be defended against the rage of the people. A revolutionary organization like the FAI, however, never considered, not before and not after July 19, that it had to intervene against it, once it was deprived of its instruments of spiritual and material oppression. The FAI respected everyone’s beliefs and called for a regime of toleration and peaceful coexistence of religions and political and social beliefs. Among the military leaders on our side, general Escobar, formerly a colonel, the commander of the 19^th Regiment of the Civil Guard, hero of the July days, was profoundly religious. He followed up all his decisions with the words, “God willing”. The militiamen of the FAI were at first shocked by this kind of talk, but then grew fond of this man who fought at their side yet held such sincere religious beliefs.

As for the convenient ploy of blaming members of the FAI for wrongdoing, we would like to recall two incidents that reveal a little of what lies behind the curtain. And this is apart from the certainty that, if any of our comrades were to have been convicted of criminal activity, they would not have kept their heads attached to their shoulders for very long.

A unit of the Control Patrols composed of some of our militiamen from Casa Antúnez, at the foot of Monjuich, noticed that an automobile passed by their position two or three times, whose passengers were apparently militiamen along with one other individual who looked like a member of the bourgeoisie. Their papers were in order and the Patrol allowed them to proceed.

Sometimes the bourgeois individual returned with them, but at other times he did not. After this car had passed through their checkpoint several times, the Patrol ordered its occupants to get out of the car so that they could verify their identities. They turned out to be common criminals who had escaped from prison during the first days of the revolt. Brandishing the red and black flag, dressing up like militiamen, and obtaining some documentation that would authorize them to extort money from merchants and businessmen, they even killed their victims after getting their money, to prevent them from denouncing them to the real authorities. As soon as these persons were determined to be common criminals, the members of the Patrol shot them on the spot and escorted their intended victim to his home.

On another occasion, months after the July days, in Pueblo Nuevo, a neighborhood entirely controlled by people belonging to the CNT and the FAI, a big car flying the libertarian flag stopped in front of an expensive-looking house. The occupants of the car went into the house; no one in the neighborhood really paid attention to what was going on, assuming that these men were on an official mission. When the car came to a Control Patrol checkpoint, it was stopped and the driver’s papers were checked. Everything was in order.

“We’re from the FAI”, the passengers said.

The members of the Control Patrol that stopped the car were themselves members of our local affiliates of the FAI, and this spontaneous declaration immediately aroused their suspicions. Not wasting any time, the men in the Patrol aimed their weapons at the men in the car and ordered them to get out; then they disarmed them and found valuable objects that appeared to have been recently stolen. They checked their identification papers and discovered that they were members of the PSUC, the main force behind the campaign of slander directed against us in the national and international press.

The members of the Patrol determined where the objects were stolen, and on the next morning the perpetrators were found on the side of the road to Moncada. It was only long after this act of summary justice was committed that we learned the details. Our indignation knew no limits.

Our men were enraged by hearing these people claim that they were from the FAI without actually being members of the organization, and by the fact that the burglary took place in a house in Pueblo Nuevo, and finally by the fact that the perpetrators were members of a Party that was a declared and irreconcilable enemy of the FAI. They did not want to forego the pleasure of executing justice with their own hands.

And, considering the fact that if the incident were to become public knowledge, they would have to hand over the detainees, they silenced them instead. In this situation, a significant role was played by both the customary practices of revolutionary struggles and the ethics of every clandestine and conspiratorial movement, which forbids one from denouncing even enemies. In this case, however, if we had ourselves obtained custody of the criminals, we would have been able to teach the Party to which they belonged, a Party that delighted in accusing us of every kind of crime, a good lesson. Nor would they have escaped the punishment that they deserved, but it would have been imposed in the full light of day by the responsible institutions. With regard to the way the Pueblo Nuevo Control Patrols operated, however, we had to bite our tongues and keep quiet.

What can we say that has not already been said about Antonio Martín, the commander of the border guards at Puigcerdá? Martín had been a smuggler and had successfully run guns from France since the time of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. He knew the border better than almost anyone and it was determined that it was there that his services would be most useful to us. While he served in that position, life was impossible for smugglers. No one passed through his zone except duly authorized individuals, or those who were performing missions for the responsible institutions. How many very interesting stories did Martín uncover on the border, some of which involved very high level personalities? He soon became the object of a blood-curdling legend that depicted his activities in the worst light.

He also complied with our order to prevent the volunteers for the so-called international brigades from entering Spain, an order we issued because we did not need men for the struggle, but weapons. He came to Barcelona to report to us, to report to his friends and comrades, not to the authorities. One can lie to the authorities, but not to one’s comrades, face to face. He told us the truth about everything that was going on at the border; certain elements were simply trying to make some money on the frontier—hence the opposition he faced.

As for his notorious reputation as a “murderer”, which his enemies had disseminated far and wide, he confessed to us that he had not taken his pistol out of its holster since July 20. It was true, but calumny followed its course and one day he went to a village in Cerdaña to pacify the anger of townsfolk whose traditional livelihoods as smugglers had been jeopardized by his vigilance, and he was assassinated with all the treachery characteristic of cowards. We went to Cerdaña on a couple of official visits, in the name of the Government of Catalonia, once in the company of J. Tarradellas.

Concerning Martín’s unimpeachable conduct we always had ample testimony.

At other times the occasional odd character would pop up who knew how to throw stones and then look innocent. We have, for example, come up against the aftereffects of the secret accords of the Masonic Lodges. It was due to their rivalries and internal disputes that Barriobero was imprisoned and then abandoned to be captured by Franco, not to mention other mysterious disappearances. There were also a few military commanders or commanders of the various police forces concerning whom we had no unequivocal evidence of their disloyalty, but who nonetheless aroused our suspicions by their sudden taste for demagogy. It was these elements that ordered the assassination one night of one of our closest collaborators, captain Escobar, and his adjutant commander Martínez. Escobar had reported to us on the attitudes of the staff officers and commanders of the old army and of the Civil Guard whom we were thinking of using for the militias.

Two years later we discovered the perpetrators of these assassinations: they had been told that Escobar and Martínez were traitors and double agents. We immediately had a good idea of the identity of the real instigators of these assassinations and we were not mistaken. Just when we were ready to proceed against and punish the guilty, we lost control over the militias and the case was closed, to our disgust, as we knew that demagogues who were more dangerous than the occasional Franco supporter were making their appearance in many of the anti-fascist institutions, and that these demagogues did not hesitate to irresponsibly incite elements that were unaware of the fact that they were being manipulated.

No dictatorship has ever been creative, nor can any dictatorship ever be creative, especially in countries like Spain, even if we were to be the dictators. A revolution must arouse energies and give free rein to all fertile initiatives; it must not be a force for regimentation and tyranny if it wants to ensure that it is following the path of social progress.

Persons who hold any kind of power whatsoever have a natural propensity to abuse the force they have at their disposal; and the abuse of this force is always employed for the suppression of those with whom they disagree, or against those who have interests that are different from theirs.

We had been masters of the situation in Catalonia since July; we could have done anything yet we did not take advantage of the incomparable opportunities that we had except for the purpose of fighting the war and engaging in revolutionary construction. We did not use our power as an instrument of oppression except against the enemy upon whom we had declared war. No one can accuse us of having been disloyal collaborators or of having used our influence to oppress or exterminate any of the other tendencies that subscribed to the anti-fascist cause.

We committed more than one mistake, and were guilty in more than one instance of misunderstanding the situation; we had no qualms about publicly admitting and denouncing the errors that came to our attention. But the biggest mistake that we will be accused of making must be that of having been loyal and sincere in our every public action, even while those whom we thought were on our side were sharpening the daggers of treason in the shadows. Furthermore, this is the only mistake that we will commit again in the future.