A People Betrayed

The owners of the great estates, unwilling to engage in artificial fertilization or expensive irrigation projects, preferred instead to build their profits on the exploitation of the great armies of landless day labourers, the braceros and jornaleros.12 The latifundios were usually administered by bailiffs, who took every advantage of a mass of surplus labour. When seasonal work was available, the braceros and jornaleros were obliged to work long hours, often from sun-up to sun-down. Work was often available only far from home which meant having to sleep in insanitary huts provided by the landowners. The labourers endured harsh working conditions on starvation wages and lengthy periods of unemployment. When the more easy-going clerics and nobles of an earlier age sold up and the common lands were enclosed, most of the social palliatives which had alleviated rural misery were curtailed. The encroachment on the lands of religious orders or the sleepier aristocrats saw the collection of windfall crops or firewood, the occasional hunting of rabbits or birds, the watering of domestic animals, which had hitherto kept the poverty-stricken south from upheaval, come to an end. Paternalism was replaced by repression. Thus was intensified the process of the proletarianization of a great army of landless labourers. The powder keg of resentment was kept in check by the institutionalized violence of the Civil Guard and armed thugs hired by the bailiffs.

Other devices were used, such as conspiracies fabricated or wildly exaggerated in order to justify the repression of the principal working-class organization, the FTRE. Its weekly journal, the Revista Social, was subject to censorship and occasional confiscation. In the last week of September 1882, the FTRE’s second congress was celebrated in Seville. A total of 209 sections and nearly 50,000 members were represented, mainly from Andalusia (30,000) and from Catalonia (13,000). The FTRE was portrayed by the authorities as a band of bloodthirsty revolutionaries. In fact, the organization’s immediate objective was the eight-hour day and its long-term ambition the collectivization of agriculture and industry. However, this relative moderation was undermined by the fact that members of the FTRE were being discriminated against by landowners and industrialists. In numerous towns, the alcaldes banned public meetings and the Civil Guard treated private ones as subversive. Accordingly, a breakaway group, Los Desheredados, advocated secret revolutionary action and the use of terrorism.13

A drought in the summer of 1881 led to crop failures across Andalusia but especially in the provinces of Cadiz and Seville. The consequent hunger the following winter saw landless labourers and their families begging in the streets of the towns. There were dramatic increases in the number of deaths from malnutrition and related illnesses such as measles, particularly among children. There were violent attacks on property, crop burning and sheep rustling, thefts from bakeries and other food shops and cases of banditry.14 There were some towns where the authorities vainly tried to raise funds to ameliorate the predicament of the starving labourers and isolated incidents of charitable donations for the poor. In some cases, municipal resources were used to finance road mending or irrigation projects to give work to the unemployed. More often, however, labourers were simply advised to seek work in other provinces. By the autumn of 1882, social tension had intensified notably. A wave of strikes was met by heavy-handed repression at the hands of a substantially reinforced Civil Guard. In Jerez, there were demonstrations by labourers demanding work which soon degenerated into food riots. In December 1892, four murders were registered in the area.15 The panic-stricken authorities seized the opportunity to claim that the killers in Jerez and the perpetrators of numerous other unconnected crimes, brawls and robberies belonged to the Mano Negra (Black Hand), a name referring to the dirty hands of manual labourers. The Mano Negra was said to be conspiring to avenge the crimes committed against the working class by the landowners. Allegedly, it aimed to wage war on the southern rich by means of murder, kidnappings and robbery. Furthermore, it was claimed that this secret organization had over 70,000 members. In this context, many workers were imprisoned on the basis of denunciations by a landlord, a magistrate or a Civil Guard, without any need for proof.

In the words of James Joll, the Mano Negra ‘may never have existed outside the imagination of the police, who were always ready to attribute isolated, unconnected acts of violence to a single master organization’. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that in 1880 some member organizations of the FTRE had agreed to carry out reprisals against the owners. By the spring of 1883, as a result of indiscriminate arrests of members of workers’ societies and readers of (legal) anarchist newspapers, 5,000 prisoners were being held in Cadiz and Jerez. Little or no distinction was made between union activity and crime as confessions of membership of the Mano Negra were extracted by torture. The FTRE denied the existence of the Mano Negra and accused the government of concocting a supposed revolutionary organization out of unconnected criminal elements. In fact, it seems that, while there may possibly have existed since the late 1870s a small criminal mafia called the Mano Negra, the link between it and the transparent and moderate FTRE was an invention to justify the repression of the rural labourers’ movement. Indeed, documents produced at the trial of its supposed members in the summer of 1883 revealed that the decisive ‘proof’ of the existence of Mano Negra just happened to have been provided by the commander of the Jerez garrison of the Civil Guard who had conveniently stumbled across a copy of this secret society’s written constitution under a rock in the countryside. Many were sentenced to life imprisonment, which meant confinement in filthy dungeons, and seven were publicly executed by garrotte in June 1884.16 The repression decimated the membership of the FTRE to the extent that, at a congress held in Valencia in September and October 1888, it was dissolved.17

The Spanish Socialist Party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), was founded in 1879 but constituted little challenge to the anarchist movement. Its trade union strength was largely in the printers’ union in Madrid, the Asociación General del Arte de Imprimir, and the textile union in Barcelona known as the Tres Clases de Vapor. The party’s founder, Pablo Iglesias, admitted that, in the 1880s, the PSOE had only around 200 members. Rigidly Marxist, the PSOE leadership both refused alliances with bourgeois republicans and rejected the violent revolutionism of the anarchists. It thus remained isolated. It was not until 1886 that its newspaper El Socialista was published and only in 1888 that its trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), was established in Barcelona. So poor was its development that, in 1899, its headquarters were moved to Madrid. The key to the strategy adopted by Pablo Iglesias was to achieve political power by electoral means which rendered questionable the refusal to make alliances with the liberal republicans. For Pablo Iglesias, the purpose of strikes was not revolutionary but reformist, the improvement of working conditions, and thus insufficiently combative to attract workers in the miserable conditions of late nineteenth-century industrial Spain. By the end of the decade, the UGT was acquiring substantial support in the mining districts of the Basque Country and Asturias.18

Throughout the 1880s, and indeed beyond, the much larger anarchist movement was divided on tactics and strategy. Broadly speaking, on the one hand, there were the so-called collectivists who favoured the building of economic power through legal trade union activity that could eventually implement the social revolution. On the other, there were the so-called communists, who rejected this reformism as consolidating the capitalist system. In its stead, they advocated revolutionary violence. To replace its collectivist ideology, relative moderation and reliance on legal methods, there was emerging a more individualistic anarchism committed to ‘propaganda by the deed’ carried out by fragmented clandestine cells or ‘affinity groups’ such as those advocated by Los Desheredados.19

Strikes and demonstrations started to give way to acts of terrorism. As anarchism took ever deeper root in the small workshops of the highly fragmented Catalan textile industry, there was a wave of bomb outrages that provoked savage and indiscriminate reprisals from the forces of order. Between June 1884 and May 1890, there were twenty-five bomb incidents in Barcelona. The most frequent incidents came as a result of labour disputes and targeted factories, the homes of the managers or the owners, the offices of the industrialists’ association, the Foment del Treball Nacional, and police stations. There were three fatalities and many injured. From 1890 to 1900, there would be another fifty-nine incidents which caused a further thirty-five deaths. The worst years in terms of violence would be those between 1893 and 1896. The intensification of social violence was not simply a result of the ideology of anarchist revolutionaries. Their ideas spread in the fertile soil of a Catalonia experiencing a profound process of social and economic transformation. Rural workers were being attracted to Barcelona and other cities by the growth of industries, especially in textiles. The recent arrivals, relying on insecure work, were forced to live in appalling shanty towns of unhygienic hovels without basic sanitation or adequate nutrition, resulting in high levels of infant, and indeed adult, mortality. Moreover, there was no schooling available for their children. Radicalization, similar to that taking place in France and Russia, was facilitated by the recent invention of dynamite which was available for purchase without restriction in Barcelona. It was not uncommon in the taverns of the poorer parts of Barcelona to encounter men passing the hat for ‘a few pence for dynamite’.20

The social conflicts deriving from the painfully slow but inexorable progress of industrialization matched those arising in the southern countryside from the brutal social injustices intrinsic to the latifundio economy. The rural proletariat existed on the most meagre subsistence diet. There was rarely more than one meal per day, and it was usually poor-quality bread and gazpacho, a soup made from tomatoes, onions, cucumber, peppers and garlic. Such a diet never contained more than secondary sources of protein, since meat, fish and eggs were beyond the means of the day labourer. A common cold could be disastrous.21 The 1890s were a period of economic depression which exacerbated the grievances of the lower classes, both in the urban slums and in rural areas.

The misery of the southern peasantry was the motive force behind direct action. The indiscriminate repression unleashed in the midst of the Mano Negra panic fostered the belief that any direct action up to and including individual terrorism was licit against the tyranny of the state. In a context of poor harvests with the consequent price inflation and mass unemployment, there were increasing levels of social violence in the form of sporadic estate occupations, thefts of livestock and grain and attacks on owners and estate managers. In late 1891, a building worker from Madrid, Félix Grávalo ‘El Madrileño’, preached anarchist ideas in the villages surrounding Jerez. Among his disciples grew the naive idea of seizing Jerez in order to create an anarchist stronghold as the first step to taking control of the entire province of Cadiz. On the night of 8 January 1892, more than 500 braceros from Arcos de la Frontera, Ubrique, Trebujena, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, El Puerto de Santa María and other towns in Cadiz and Lebrija in Seville, gathered on the outskirts of the city. Armed only with sickles, scythes, pitchforks and sticks but driven by hunger, they invaded the city centre. In part, they were intending to free dozens of workers recently imprisoned after the Mano Negra trials. Their battle cry was ‘Brothers, we are coming for you!’ However, parallel uprisings in several other towns of the province of Cadiz suggested Grávalo’s wider revolutionary purpose. The braceros briefly held Jerez, although their belief that the local military garrison would join them was entirely misplaced. Their triumph was short-lived and the police swiftly regained control. Two innocent passers-by, a commercial traveller and an office worker, had been killed by elements of the mob in an outburst of class hatred. Because they were well dressed and wore gloves, they had been assumed to be ‘oppressors’.22 Fear of the spectre of revolution provoked by the Jerez events ensured that the consequent repression would be severe and extend right across western Andalusia. In subsequent military trials, despite lack of concrete evidence, other than the testimony of Grávalo obtained under duress, four labourers were condemned to life imprisonment. Four more were sentenced to death and executed by garrotte in the market place of Jerez.23

One of the consequences of the repression was the creation of an anarchist martyr in the form of the saintly Fermín Salvochea. He was accused of being the brains behind the entire event in Jerez despite already being in prison. In 1873 he had been Alcalde of Cadiz and had long been a target of the authorities who were frightened by his immense popularity. In April 1891, they had shut down his newspaper La revolución social and, after the May Day celebrations, arrested him. While in jail, he had been visited by the organizers of the Jerez invasion whom he had tried to dissuade from what he saw as a suicidal project. It was claimed that he was behind the assault on Jerez via ‘El Madrileño’ who was deemed to be his puppet. Several prisoners were taken out and tortured so that they would declare that Salvochea had offered the support of the anarchists of Cadiz for the Jerez operation. He was sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour but was amnestied in 1899 after serving for eight years.24

The knowledge that confessions had been obtained by torture intensified the spread of anarchism in other parts of Spain. In particular, in Barcelona there were numerous acts of solidarity with the Andalusian labourers which in turn provoked state violence in the form of indiscriminate arrests, torture and executions in the Catalan capital. Initially, anarchist efforts to emulate the terrorist campaigns taking place in France and Russia were notable for their incompetence.25 On 24 September 1893, as a direct response to the repression in Jerez, there was a failed attempt on the life of the Captain General of Barcelona, Arsenio Martínez Campos, who, it will be recalled, had led the military coup that had restored the monarchy in December 1874. He was noted for his open hostility to the workers’ movement. The bomb attack during a parade in honour of the patroness of the city, the Virgin of Mercy (La Mare de Déu de la Mercè) was the beginning of three of the bloodiest years of terrorism in Barcelona. One Civil Guard and several horses were killed and sixteen people badly injured. Although Martínez Campos was thrown from his horse and had shrapnel in his leg, he was otherwise unharmed. The would-be assassin, a thirty-one-year-old printer and father of three, Paulí Pallàs, a member of an affinity group, made no attempt to escape and was arrested on the spot.

It is an indication of the inefficiency of the police that Pallàs was the first author of a bomb outrage to be caught. He was arrested and tried five days later. He declared that his only regret was not to have succeeded in killing ‘that reactionary representative of the abuse of power’. He was sentenced to death on 30 September 1893 and executed by firing squad on 6 October. A huge crowd gathered and some of those present were heard to shout, ‘Long live dynamite!’ and ‘Long live anarchy!’ Pallàs’s execution was the beginning of a major repression. In subsequent years, the police persecuted his wife, who had known nothing of his plans. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, sixty anarchists were arrested and six innocent men were executed on 21 May 1894, on the grounds of a non-existent complicity with Pallàs in the attack on General Martínez Campos. Two of them had been in prison at the time and one of those, Manuel Ars i Solanellas, would be avenged years later by his son Ramón in the assassination of the Prime Minister Eduardo Dato. Over the next two years, more than 20,000 men and women were imprisoned, many to be tortured. The blind lashing out by the police confirmed the working-class view that the state had declared war on them. At the same time, Pallàs was regarded in anarchist circles as a martyr. His last words were allegedly ‘Vengeance will be terrible!’ and calls for his death to be avenged began to be heard in anarchist circles. The bloodiest possible revenge would soon be carried out in the temple of the Catalan bourgeoisie, the Gran Teatre del Liceu.26

Terrorism was facilitated by the fact that, until 1895, the poorly paid and inadequately led police in Barcelona lacked a photographic archive and even a basic filing system. Its consequent incompetence was compensated for by its brutality. Despised by the working class, it was known as the ‘muddle’ or the ‘stink’. It was not until September 1896, after one of the most extreme terrorist attacks, in the Carrer dels Canvis Nous, that the Conservative government of Cánovas del Castillo responded to the protests of prominent citizens and created a specialist unit or brigade for the investigation of political and social crimes. Given the inefficiency of the police, the government relied increasingly on the army. The high command considered that the only valid response to the threat of anarchist terrorism was blanket repression. Indiscriminate brutality hit those elements of the anarchist movement that condemned violence. The anarchists were already virulently anti-militaristic for both theoretical reasons and in response to the appalling experience of conscripts and their families who paid the cost of unjust colonial wars. As one anarchist newspaper declared: ‘If the bourgeois want war, all they have to do is enlist and go to Cuba.’ Repression exacerbated anarchist hostility to the army.27

Within one month of the execution of Paulí Pallàs, one of the most dramatic outrages took place on 7 November 1893, at the Gran Liceu de Barcelona, the opera house frequented by the wealthy bourgeoisie. Since there had been various warnings of an anarchist attack, to attend the opera in evening dress was an act of provocative irresponsibility. Before a packed house of 3,600 people, a performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell opened the season. At the moment in Act 2 when William Tell swears he will free his country from oppression, the anarchist Santiago Salvador i Franch hurled two Orsini bombs from the fifth-floor balcony into the high-priced stall seats. Fortunately, only one exploded but, even so, twenty people died including a fourteen-year-old girl and nine women and a further thirty-five were injured by shrapnel, shards of glass and flying splinters from smashed seats. It was estimated at the time that had both bombs gone off, the death toll would have been massive.28

The subsequent repression was carried out implacably by the fifty-eight-year-old General Valeriano Weyler, who was appointed Captain General of Catalonia on 5 December 1893.29 After more than 400 virtually indiscriminate arrests, six innocent men were put on trial. They were condemned to death after confessions of complicity in the attack on Martínez Campos had been secured by torture. Those death sentences were meant as a warning to the anarchists of the serious determination of the authorities to clamp down on terrorism. Santiago Salvador was not captured until 1 January 1894. A petty criminal of violent tendencies, he had previously been arrested for robbery and fighting. His family background was murky. In 1878, when he was thirteen, he had tried to murder his father, a notoriously violent man who was subsequently shot by the Civil Guard in 1891. In early 1893, Salvador had been badly beaten by the police in Valencia after which he is alleged to have said: ‘every blow that I received would cost tears of blood’. He denied that his action was meant as revenge for the execution of Pallàs. Yet, at another time, he claimed that ‘The death of Pallàs had a terrible effect on me and to avenge him, as a tribute to his memory, I decided to do something that would scare those who had derived pleasure from his death and thought that they no longer had anything to fear. I wanted to disabuse them and also enjoy myself.’

Salvador told a journalist that, after the explosion, he had remained in the street outside the Liceu to rejoice in the panic of the bourgeoisie. He had hoped to go to the funeral of the victims on 9 November to throw more bombs into the crowd of mourners, but his alarmed comrades refused to supply him with the necessary explosives. He and two others were not tried until 11 July 1894. While in prison, he faked reconciliation with the Catholic Church as a device to secure a more comfortable existence. In his well-appointed cell, he was surrounded by devotional books, holy pictures and crucifixes. He dropped the pretence when his sentence was confirmed and claimed that he had merely been playing one last joke on the bourgeoisie. When on 21 November, before a large crowd, he was executed by garrote vil, he died shouting, ‘Long live anarchy and social revolution’ and ‘Down with religion’. Despite having murdered numerous innocents and then fled, he was hailed as a hero by some elements of the anarchist press, although severely condemned by others. Like Pallàs before him, Salvador seemed oblivious to the fact that, in addition to causing so many innocent deaths, his actions brought down a fierce repression on the anarchist movement, many of whose members were opposed to terrorism.30

The Liceu bombing came in the midst of a series of catastrophes which, taken together, did nothing to consolidate public confidence in the political establishment. In October 1893, small-scale conflict had broken out in Morocco. The military governor of the garrison town of Melilla, General Juan García Margallo, had initiated fortification works on land considered sacred by local Berber tribesmen. When the tomb of a Rifian saint was desecrated, 6,000 Rifeño tribesmen armed with Remington rifles attacked Melilla on 3 October. They were driven back by artillery fire which destroyed a mosque and so escalated the initial conflict into a jihad which necessitated considerable Spanish reinforcements. Then a strategic error by Garcia Margallo occasioned numerous Spanish losses in an action in which he himself was killed. It was rumoured that he had been shot with a revolver by a young lieutenant, Miguel Primo de Rivera, who in 1923 would establish a dictatorship. Primo was allegedly indignant that the rifles with which the Moors were armed had been sold to them by the General. No proof was ever found, but the rumour exposed the entirely justified belief that the military administration was corrupt. Incidentally, Primo de Rivera was awarded Spain’s highest military decoration, the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando, and promoted to captain. The campaign was ended only by a massive show of force that Spain could ill afford.31

Four days before the Liceu atrocity, there had taken place the greatest civilian disaster in nineteenth-century Spain. On 3 November 1893, the cargo ship Cabo Machichaco carrying dynamite caught fire in the harbour of Santander. While crew members from nearby ships and local firemen tried to extinguish the fire, a vast crowd gathered to watch. When the ship blew up, the explosion threw up a huge column of thousands of tons of water which hurled many people into the sea. The shock wave destroyed many buildings in the town and fragments of iron and body parts were blown immense distances. Five hundred and ninety people died and a further 525 were seriously injured, nearly 2 per cent of the population of the city. Among the dead were the principal military and civilian authorities including the Civil Governor whose baton of office was found several kilometres away.