The Spanish Holocaust (55 page)

The Republican government reacted in a way that was in stark contrast to the official encouragement of atrocities in the rebel zone. Indalecio Prieto visited the prison and, appalled by the Dantesque scenes that were reported to him, said that ‘the brutality of what has happened here means quite simply that we have lost the war’.
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Late on the night of 22 August, the government took steps to put a stop to irregular ‘justice’. At the suggestion of Vidarte, and with the backing of Prieto, Giral’s government set up ‘special courts against rebellion, sedition and crimes against State security’, known as Tribunales Populares, under the reluctant authority of the acting president of the Supreme Court, Mariano Gómez. With remarkable courage, Gómez had a tribunal set up and working in the prison by 9.00 a.m. on 23 August. It was hoped that the new tribunals would temper the revolutionary excesses, although they had only a limited effect in the first weeks of their existence.
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Two reporters from
El Socialista
, Fernando Vázquez Ocaña and Manuel Pastor, had managed to gain access to the interior of the prison on the evening of 22 August and what they found resembled an abattoir. One of the patios was strewn with corpses. They returned to the newspaper’s offices shaking with indignation. On the basis of what they recounted, the editor Julián Zugazagoitia and his senior staff composed a strongly worded condemnation which was published in a prominent position under the headline ‘An Unavoidable Moral Imperative’. Zugazagoitia was determined to help the government emerge from the
position into which it had been placed by the extremists who had taken justice into their own hands, writing, ‘to judge those who have transgressed, we have the law. As long as we have it, we must respect it. With the law, everything is legitimate; without it, nothing is.’ On the same day, Izquierda Republicana also condemned violence in the rearguard.
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Among those most appalled was the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña. On the morning of 24 August, his brother-in-law, the playwright Cipriano Rivas Cherif, found him shocked and horrified by what he called ‘the hammer blow’, almost unable to speak. ‘They’ve murdered Melquíades!’ he said, and after a silence, ‘This cannot be, this cannot be! I am sickened by the blood. I have had as much as I can take; it will drown us all.’ He felt ‘despair’, ‘horror’, ‘dejection’, ‘shame’. ‘In mourning for the Republic’, he considered resigning.
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In his novel,
La velada en Benicarló
, drawing upon this experience, Azaña has one of his characters hear the screams of agony of political prisoners being shot at night in a cemetery.
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The massacre was only one among the many human tragedies concerning prisoners. An extraordinary case was that of Rafael Salazar Alonso. Given his record as Minister of the Interior in 1934, Salazar Alonso was a marked man. Fearing that various militia groups were after him, he went into hiding at the beginning of the war. At first he was in the Portuguese Embassy but, when the Chargé d’Affaires had to leave Madrid, Salazar had gone to the house of a friend called Cámara. In the hope of forcing them to reveal his hideout, a Communist militia group had arrested his sixteen-year-old daughter, Carmencita, and his wife, Cecilia, whom he was in the process of divorcing. In return for their freedom, Cecilia revealed Cámara’s address, but when the militiamen got there, he had already moved on. He hid briefly in the flat of an ex-lover, Irene Más, who had taken refuge with her husband and son in Melchor Rodríguez’s Palacio de Viana. Now, fearful that Salazar would be arrested, Irene arranged for him to be given sanctuary by one of her neighbours. Irene visited him every day. Her outraged husband arranged for him to surrender himself to Melchor Rodríguez.
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Salazar Alonso was arrested on 31 August 1936 by three members of Melchor Rodríguez’s Libertos. He recalled in his prison diary that all three, Melchor Rodríguez and two others, were ‘three splendid fellows, all three perfect gentlemen, who were completely horrified by the violence’. He remained in the Palacio de Viana for three days, well fed and treated with courtesy by Melchor Rodríguez. Other anarchists sent by Eduardo Val interrogated Salazar Alonso. They wanted to know about
double agents that he had infiltrated into the FAI while he was Minister of the Interior in 1934 and were keen to shoot him. To avoid further problems, Melchor Rodríguez, at the suggestion of Salazar Alonso himself, spoke with the Minister of Justice, Manuel Blasco Garzón, and arranged for him to be taken into custody. On 2 September, Melchor conveyed him to the Cárcel Modelo where he was handed over to Manuel Muñoz, and to Mariano Gómez, the president of the Supreme Court.
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Once transferred to the Cárcel Modelo, Salazar Alonso was allowed visits, although the only people who actually came were, on one occasion, the Chilean Ambassador Aurelio Núñez Morgado, various lawyers and a woman from Villafranca de los Barros, Amparo Munilla. Irene Más did not visit, but Amparo came almost every day. Her courage and commitment in doing so was extraordinary. She had given birth to a son on 2 August. Five days later, Amparo, along with her baby and a daughter, had been arrested by militiamen. In a book written by another daughter, it is claimed that during her week-long detention, she was repeatedly raped by these men, who were allegedly led by the Socialist Mayor of Villafranca de los Barros, Jesús Yuste, and the deputy Mayor, Manuel Borrego. However, on 7 August, Yuste and Borrego were still in Extremadura. Borrego would be executed by the rebels in Mérida some days later and Yuste remained fighting Franco’s columns in the south. Even more damaging to her daughter’s allegations is a post-war letter to the Francoist authorities about her experiences, written by Amparo Munilla herself. Amparo’s only reference to maltreatment is to being threatened with death if she did not reveal the hiding place of Salazar Alonso and other friends. This she bravely refused to do. She was detained in four different places including the Dirección General de Seguridad and the Checa de Bellas Artes and was released on 14 August.

Since her husband was also in danger, on the same day that Salazar Alonso entered the Cárcel Modelo the family sought safe refuge in the Norwegian Legation, where the Consul, Felix Schlayer, sheltered many rebel supporters. Despite the danger, Amparo regularly left the safety of the Legation in order to visit the man many assumed was her lover. She wrote to Salazar Alonso often and brought him books and a wristwatch. His prison diary, in which there is not a word about Irene Más, reveals his desperation on the days that Amparo did not visit or write. The diary entries leave no doubt of his intense feelings for her. Her deep regard for him was revealed when, at enormous risk, she even appeared at his trial on his behalf.
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Mariano Gómez, who presided over the Tribunal Popular operating in the Cárcel Modelo, was an experienced Republican magistrate. He was also personally opposed to the death penalty, on which he had been writing a book. Despite the extraordinary wartime circumstances, he made every effort to put a stop to judicial decisions being made on the basis of passion and hatred. Instead, he tried to impose due legal process.
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This ensured that the trial of Salazar Alonso, and of many others, would be significantly different from the procedures pertaining in the military trials within the rebel zone, where those accused were given no facilities for their defence. Initially, the moderate Republican Juan Botella Asensi, a distinguished lawyer who had been Minister of Justice in late 1933, had offered to defend Salazar Alonso but later withdrew the offer. The reasons for his change of heart are not known, but possibly derived from the fact that Salazar Alonso had broken his Masonic oaths.
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Nevertheless, Salazar Alonso was provided with the services of two lawyers and was also given the indictment to help him prepare his defence. Accused of implication in the military plot, his trial began on 19 September.

The first day consisted of four hours of questioning by the prosecution, largely concentrated on statements made in his book
Bajo el signo de la revolución
. This demonstrated his role in provoking the Asturian uprising of October 1934 with a view to crushing the labour movement. However, the prosecution could produce no proof of any involvement in military conspiracy. There followed statements from defence witnesses. With the exception of the intervention by Amparo Munilla, which moved him greatly, he was disappointed by his witnesses, who seemed mainly concerned to distance themselves from him. On the following day, he opened his defence. He pointed out that thorough searches of his home and those of his friends had found no evidence that he was involved in any way in the military conspiracy. The prosecutor admitted that this was the case. Indeed, the Republican press had commented on the fact that his fascist friends had not kept him informed of the date of the uprising. Nevertheless, Salazar Alonso was found guilty and the prosecutor successfully requested the death sentence.
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The final decision was passed for approval to the government which had been formed barely three weeks earlier. Azaña, as President, regarded the death penalty for Salazar Alonso as ‘an outrage’, but the cabinet was deeply divided. The two extremes were explained by Indalecio Prieto, who said:

It is likely that there is no one among you who feels such unquenchable loathing towards Salazar Alonso as I do. After building his career on extreme demagoguery, he let himself be seduced by the blandishments of the right and went over to them, presenting as his qualifications the vicious persecution carried out against us when he was Minister of the Interior. However, in the records of the trial, there appears no proof of the indictment that he had participated in the military uprising. Therefore, I vote in favour of pardon.

Prieto’s intervention swayed the cabinet, which voted by seven votes to six in favour of the death sentence being commuted to life imprisonment.

Mariano Gómez was informed immediately. Shortly afterwards, while the cabinet was still in session, Gómez appeared and asked to speak to Prieto. He told him that, although he had received Salazar Alonso’s file with the cabinet’s decision:

I have informed no one because I am sure that as soon as it is made public, there will be a terrible riot in the prison which will start with the shooting of the prisoner. The Government, without sufficient means to impose its decision, will be unable to save his life and, defeated on this issue, its remaining authority will crumble. But this is not the worst. The Tribunal Popular, I am sure, will refuse to continue working and, after Salazar Alonso, perhaps this very night, all the political prisoners will die riddled with bullets.

Prieto explained why he had voted as he had done. Gómez was in complete agreement but repeated that the decision could cost over one hundred lives. Accordingly, Prieto went back into the cabinet, explained what Gómez had said and changed his vote. Salazar Alonso was executed on the morning of 23 September.
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Salazar Alonso was executed – despite not being guilty of the crime of which he had been accused – because of his part in the provocation of both the peasant strike of June 1934 and the Asturian uprising of October. His role as Minister of the Interior was believed to have caused untold suffering and many deaths and so brought civil war nearer. That he was not accused of this was clearly a legal error which exposed the contradictions between conventional justice and popular justice. The extraordinary episode of Prieto’s volte-face over Salazar Alonso illustrated the continuing weakness of the government in the face of the
armed militias. As Manuel Muñoz had been with the anarchists who hijacked the trainload of prisoners from Jaén, the moderates were totally inhibited by fear of a confrontation between the forces of order and the revolutionary militias.

Nevertheless, despite what had happened in the case of Salazar Alonso, the newly instituted tribunals functioned relatively well and increasingly reconciled public opinion to the idea that the Republic could administer justice in the interests of the people. The Colegios de Abogados (Bar Associations) in each provincial capital invigilated procedures and ensured that prisoners were ably defended. Sessions of the tribunals were attended by substantial audiences. There was often applause and even cheering when, if the accused were found not guilty, the president of the tribunal made a speech praising the generosity of popular justice. A remarkable example took place in mid-September in Madrid with the not-guilty verdicts reached against three officers accused of an offence committed at the battle front. Addressing the jury, the president said: ‘Every day I feel greater pride in chairing this people’s court, which has to be inexorable with traitors to the Republic but which has its heart full of justice and mercy for those who have done their duty.’ One of the accused, on behalf of all three, then thanked the tribunal and the jury, shouting ‘Long Live the Republic! Long Live the Popular Front! Long Live the People’s Tribunal!’
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Throughout September and October, piecemeal measures to control the
checas
and centralize the militias would continue to be introduced but with relatively little effect. Only when the war was on the doorstep in early November and the militias had other priorities could a central control be imposed. The will to reimpose order had been there all along among the Republicans and moderate Socialists. However, the Communists would provide the singleminded ruthlessness that made a significant difference. Even then, a price would be paid in blood in terms of the fate of thousands of prisoners.

Meanwhile, the moderate Socialists and the Basque nationalists were in the forefront of efforts to put a stop to rearguard outrages. Along with Prieto and Zugazagoitia, Dr Juan Negrín opposed with equal fervour the repression on either side. His friend Marcelino Pascua recounted Negrín’s foolhardiness. Throughout the late summer of 1936 ‘he made every effort, at serious risk to himself but with considerable success, to save people in Madrid who for various reasons including personal vendettas were afraid for their lives. This involved rash acts of daring which came as no surprise to his friends who were fully aware of his
personal bravery.’
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Having become Minister of Finance in the government of Largo Caballero on 4 September 1936, Dr Negrín showed no inclination to restrain his temerity in trying to put a stop to the repression. His efforts to prevent the nightly
paseos
outraged the anarchist
checas
. One group even went into the Finance Ministry in Madrid to threaten him. In the ensuing confrontation, they were prevented from killing him only by the intervention of the security staff of the Ministry.
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