The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston Page A

sweeping challenge to the very structures of rural power. The hostility of the landowners towards the new regime was first manifested in a determination to block Republican reforms by any means, including unrestrained violence. The hatred of the latifundistas for their braceros would find its most complete expression in the early months ofthe Civil War when they would collaborate enthusiastically with Franco’s African columns as they spread a wave of terror through south-western Spain.
    The Republic’s attempts to streamline the officer corps had provoked the hostility of many officers but especially of the Africanistas. General José Sanjurjo, Director General of the Civil Guard and a prominent African veteran, was one of the first officers publicly to identify the subject tribes of Morocco with the Spanish left – a transference of racial prejudice which would facilitate the savagery carried out by the Army of Africa during the Civil War. Sanjurjo blurted this out in the wake of the atrocity at the remote and impoverished village of Castilblanco in Badajoz, when villagers murdered four Civil Guards in an outburst of collective rage at systematic oppression. The Socialist landworkers’ union, the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), had called a forty-eight-hour strike in the province to protest against the landowners’ constant infractions of the Republic’s social legislation. On 31 December 1931, in Castilblanco, urged on by the Mayor, Civil Guards opened fire on a peaceful demonstration by strikers, killing one man and wounding two others. Shocked, the infuriated villagers turned on the four Civil Guards and beat them to death. For the left, the events of Castilblanco were the result of the area’s long history of appalling economic deprivation. 52
    Sanjurjo was furious because the obligation to go to Castilblanco forced him to miss a big society wedding banquet in Zaragoza. 53 On 2 January 1932, when he arrived in the village, now occupied by a substantial detachment of Civil Guards, the officer in charge indicated the hundred or so prisoners with the words: ‘Here are the murderers, just look at their faces!’ Sanjurjo burst out, ‘But haven’t you killed them yet?’ The prisoners were severely mistreated. For seven days and nights, they were kept stripped to the waist and, in temperatures below freezing, forced to stand with their arms upright. If they fell, they were beaten with rifle butts. Several died of pneumonia. Speaking to journalists at the funeral of the murdered guards, Sanjurjo compared the workers of Castilblanco to the Moorish tribesmen he had fought in Morocco, commenting, ‘In a corner of the province of Badajoz, Rif tribesmen have a base.’ He declared mendaciously that after the colonial disaster at the battle of Annual in July 1921, when nine thousand soldiers had died, ‘even in Monte Arruit, when the Melilla command collapsed, the corpses of Christians were not mutilated with such savagery’. 54
    This prejudice was echoed in the national and local press by journalists who never actually visited Castilblanco. The monarchist daily ABC remarked that ‘the least civilized Rif tribesmen were no worse’. 55 Right-wing journalists described the landless labourers of Extremadura as ‘these Rif tribesmen with no Rif’ and as ‘Berbers, savages, bloodthirsty savages and Marxist hordes’. In general terms, the local newspaper reports of Castilblanco reflected the belligerently racist attitudes of the rural elite. The inhabitants of Castilblanco, and by extension the rural proletariat as a whole, were presented as an inferior race, horrible examples of racial degeneration. It was common for them to be described as sub-human and abnormal. Colourfully exaggerated descriptions pandered to the ancestral fears of the respectable classes: the allegation that a woman had danced on the corpses recalled the witches’ Sabbath. 56 The often explicit conclusion was that the