Kitabı oku: «A People Betrayed», sayfa 10

Alfonso XIII with the coalition government formed by Antonio Maura on 21 March 1918 in response to his threat to abdicate.

5
A System in Disarray: Disorder and Repression, 1918–1921

The coming of peace in November 1918 brought an intensification of Spain’s political crisis. The huge profits made in mines, steel production and textiles had not, in the main, been invested in new technology. Indeed, widespread publicity given to spending by the nouveaux riches on luxury items, at a time of food shortages, had intensified working-class resentment of what was seen as a parasitic plutocracy. The return to peacetime production of British, French and American industry plunged the Spanish economy into crisis.1 Thus, while military brutality had permitted the discredited political system to survive the crisis of 1917, mass hunger and unemployment after the end of the war would intensify the pressure on the establishment. Already in 1918, there were strikes, bread riots and looting of shops. Nevertheless, the repression of the August 1917 strike had damaged the relationship between the Socialists and the anarchists and also divided both movements internally. The PSOE, too traumatized by the events of August 1917 to pursue further revolutionary action with the CNT, sought, instead, an electoral strategy in collaboration with the Republicans. This provoked a reaction from more militant elements that would eventually secede to form the Communist Party. While the Socialist leaders were worried by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia, hard-line anarchists were thrilled. Oblivious to the authoritarian elements of Leninism, they believed that the events in Russia heralded the coming of a worldwide anarchist utopia. However, the more thoughtful syndicalists like Ángel Pestaña and Salvador Seguí would have been prepared to countenance joint strike action with the UGT.2

In the immediate aftermath of 1917, while UGT membership stagnated, the CNT grew substantially. One reason for this was the greater militancy of the anarcho-syndicalists. This had hitherto been rendered ineffective because the Catalan working class was dispersed into myriad small federations across individual trades and neighbourhoods. In 1917, there were 475 federations in Barcelona alone. The difficulty of arranging collective action played into the hands of the employers. The situation changed when the congress of the Catalan CNT, the Confederació Regional del Treball, held at Sants from 28 June to 1 July 1918, adopted a much more effective strategy. This was the creation of the so-called Sindicatos Únicos (united unions), in order to gather all the workers in each industry into a single body. It was further decided that all the Sindicatos Únicos in a given area would be grouped together in a local federation. Moreover, to prevent the growth of bureaucracy, union dues were abolished and paid administrative posts reduced to a bare minimum. With the help of some violent coercion of reluctant workers, the 475 small, weak unions in Barcelona were reduced to thirteen powerful ones. Henceforth, there would be fewer but much longer strikes, many of them initially successful. The Sindicato Único provided a channel for the resentments of the thousands of immigrant labourers who had arrived during the war years and were crammed into unhygienic tenements and paid starvation wages. The new union structure effectively imposed the militancy of the majority of these unskilled workers on the labour aristocracy and ensured that trade disputes quickly escalated. The brainchild of Seguí and Pestaña, the Sindicatos Únicos were adopted by the CNT nationally. By the end of 1918, the CNT had 70,000 members in Catalonia and 114,000 nationally. Within a year, this had swelled to 800,000.3

However, helped by the divisions within the working class and reinforced by the collaboration of the Lliga, the turno system was not quite dead yet. After the fall of the second national government, Alfonso XIII appointed a Liberal government under Manuel García Prieto, the Marqués de Alhucemas. It would be merely the first of ten brief administrations between November 1918 and September 1923, some of which would last for only a matter of weeks. La Cierva’s presence was divisive but necessary to keep the army in check, albeit at a high price. By accepting the Juntas as an army trade union, La Cierva was effectively tolerating indiscipline and demands which were a step towards military dictatorship. Riddled with factionalism, incapable of agreeing on a common agenda, one government after another failed to resolve ever-intensifying problems.4

The cracks in the Restoration system were worsened by the machinations of the King. Concerned by the fall of other European monarchies and fearing that his own downfall might be precipitated by the outbreak of revolution in Barcelona, on 15 November Alfonso XIII tried to secure the loyalty of Cambó. He told him that he saw Catalan autonomy as the only certain way to divert the revolutionary threat. Cambó made the mistake of falling for what was simply a cynical ploy and went ahead with a project for autonomy. Although received sympathetically by Romanones, who had formed a new government on 10 December 1918, it was rejected violently in the Cortes by both the Liberals and Maura. Niceto Alcalá-Zamora scored a direct hit when he pointed out the contradiction between Cambó’s two ambitions, autonomy for Catalonia and hegemony of the Spanish state. He said: ‘the problem with Cambó is that he wants to be at the same time the Bolívar of Catalonia and the Bismarck of Spain’ – a phrase later accepted as true by Cambó himself. The defeat of his aspirations for Catalonia deeply embittered Cambó and led to the Catalan deputies withdrawing from the Cortes for six weeks. Cambó himself was moved to break with Alfonso XIII. On 16 December, he made a speech in Barcelona under the title ‘Monarquia? República? Catalunya!’ in which he declared that the Lliga, while not expecting a republic to bring about autonomy, would not abandon campaigning for autonomy out of any concern that it might bring about the fall of the monarchy.5

In 1919, the Liberal senator Amós Salvador, without naming him, compared Alfonso XIII to a naughty child: ‘Dealing with kings is like dealing with children. One is inclined to let them do whatever they want despite being convinced that there is no better way to do them the most damage.’6 In his memoirs, the Conservative Manuel Burgos y Mazo wrote: ‘After 1919, I promised myself that I would not serve again as a minister for a disloyal King who could never be trusted by any one of his advisers.’7 Cambó had a similar perception, believing that the King was behind the creation of the virulently anti-Catalan Unión Monárquica Nacional, a group that would eventually play a key role in the conspiracy to overthrow the Second Republic. Essentially, Alfonso XIII’s meddling would contribute to the definitive break between conservative Catalanism and the monarchy.8

Despite these fissures and the aspirations of the coalition governments, at the end of the First World War Spain was still broadly divided into two mutually hostile social groups, with landowners and industrialists on one side and workers and landless labourers on the other. Only one numerous social group was not definitively aligned within this broad cleavage – the smallholding peasantry. Significantly, in the course of the second decade of the century, the Catholic farmers of Old Castile were mobilized in defence of big landholding interests. As left-wing ideologies captured the urban working classes, the more far-sighted landowners realized that efforts had to be made to prevent the poison spreading to the countryside. Counter-revolutionary agrarian syndicates sponsored by landlords had begun to appear from 1906. The process was systematized by Ángel Herrera, the éminence grise of political Catholicism in Spain, and founder in 1909 of the Asociación Católica Nacional de Propagandistas (ACNP), a group of dynamic, high-flying Catholics in the professions. From 1912, Herrera and the Palencian landowner Antonio Monedero Martín set out to divert the smallholders away from socialism and anarchism by the implementation of the Christian-social encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. In the next five years, through the efforts of the determined activists of the ACNP, a series of Catholic Agrarian Federations appeared in León, Salamanca and Castile and tried to prevent impoverished farmers turning to the left by offering them credit facilities, agronomic expertise, warehousing and machinery. Access to such assistance was made explicitly dependent on adherence to a militantly conservative Catholicism. Taken to its logical extremes, the rhetoric of the federations implied a challenge to the economic interests of big landowners. Only in the more prosperous north was it possible to maintain an uneasy balance between the mitigation of poverty and defence of the socio-economic status quo. By 1917, the various local federations were united as the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria (CNCA), but their implantation was intermittent outside the provinces of León and Old Castile. This was understandable since, in the south, the only palliative that landowners could offer the braceros, possession of the land, involved an unacceptable transfer of wealth.9 The credibility, in the eyes of hungry labourers, of rich landowners arriving in limousines to establish a ‘union’, was necessarily minimal.10

The CNCA would almost certainly have remained confined to the smallholding areas of central and northern Spain had it not been for the massive upsurge in the revolutionary militancy of the rural proletariat of the south after 1917. Social tensions had been intensifying since the desamortización. Both the more ruthless exploitation of church and aristocratic lands by their new owners and the enclosure of the common lands had put an end to many practices that had eased rural hardship. The economic model of southern latifundismo was the exploitation of the labour of the landless rural proletariat.11 For the majority, work was available only at harvest time and involved long hours of backbreaking labour often from sun-up to sun-down on starvation wages. The situation was dramatically worsened during the First World War. While landowners were enriched by the massive export of agricultural produce, the day labourers were impoverished by the inability of wages to keep pace with rocketing food prices.12

The consequence was a wave of strikes, land occupations and bread riots across Andalusia, especially in Cordoba, Jaén, Malaga and Seville, between 1918 and 1920. The period was termed the ‘three Bolshevik years’ by the great chronicler of the events, Juan Díaz del Moral, the liberal notary from Bujalance in Cordoba. The initial objectives were wage increases and better working conditions, although, inspired by the Russian revolution, some militant leaders saw the possibility of ‘a red dawn’.13 Even though the intentions of the majority of the strikers were considerably more reformist than revolutionary, the peasant agitations were seen by the big landowners as equivalent to the Russian revolution. Fear of insurrection provoked cursory interest in the CNCA from some latifundistas. That was hardly surprising since, as an acute observer of the revolutionary agitation of the spring of 1919, the distinguished agronomist Pascual Carrión, noted, ‘we cannot forget the extension and intensity of the workers’ movement; the strike in Cordoba, among others, was truly general and impressive, managing to frighten the landowners to such a degree that they were ready to hand over their estates’.14

From early 1919 until late 1920, the CNCA had received financial support each month from Alfonso XIII himself. As the class conflict intensified, however, he switched his support to the more aggressive landowners’ organization, the Liga de Terratenientes Andaluces. There was a vain hope that this organization would collect money to combat ‘the red wave’, but during the trienio bolchevista it resorted to more violent measures. Throughout Andalusia, the sons of landowners formed cavalry units to support the Civil Guard in clashes with the workers.15 In Andalusia, as in Catalonia, the King had little interest in promoting social cohesion, just like the majority of the latifundistas, whose intransigent response to the strikes intensified the social resentments of the rural south. The consequences of the trienio bolchevista would be masked by the imposition of a military dictatorship between 1923 and 1930. Nevertheless, the conflicts of 1919–21 ended the previous uneasy modus vivendi of the agrarian south. The repression intensified the hatred of the braceros for the big landowners and their estate managers. What remained of those elements of paternalism that mitigated the daily brutality of the braceros’ lives came to an abrupt end.

The CNCA began an extensive propaganda campaign in Andalusia in January 1919, denouncing the blind egoism of the landowners, who were ‘Catholics who boasted about their charity but then paid lower wages and exacted higher rents than they would ever dare admit to their confessor’. Teams of CNCA representatives toured the southern provinces and were egged on by the ACNP newspaper, El Correo de Andalucía, which declared: ‘Anarchy is spreading amongst those below and is being fomented by the apathy of those above. We live in serious times; either Andalusia will be saved now if she follows you or will die for ever in the clutches of hatred and revolution … If the landowners of Andalusia follow you, they will be saved; if they repudiate you, they will be drowned in their own blood.’ In the first months of the year, the CNCA campaign was extremely successful with the owners, but the orators sent to workers’ centres were booed off the stage. In their panic, a few latifundistas put up money and made available small plots of wasteland for settlement by suitably deferential labourers. However, the majority of landowners were not prepared to make substantial concessions and preferred to paralyse strikers with the unrestrained violence of their estate guards (guardas jurados) backed by the Civil Guard. In some towns such as Puente Genil, the local bourgeoisie created a well-armed militia to assist the Civil Guard in clashes with strikers, a pre-echo of what would happen in many Andalusian towns in the summer and autumn of 1936. Some landowners abandoned their estates and fled to Madrid, while those who stayed bought stocks of weaponry for themselves and their retainers. The CNCA continued to preach the gospel of class collaboration, but its real position was starkly exposed as conflict grew more acute.16

On 18 April 1919, Antonio Monedero Martín was made Director General of Agriculture and his appointment was greeted by El Socialista with the headline ‘Scabs in power’. There was little proletarian faith in the CNCA’s declared ambition of creating a class of smallholding peasants. Monedero soon confirmed the Socialist view that he was the puppet of the landowners when he called for the closure of working-class organizations and for the deportation or imprisonment of strike leaders. In mid-April, the government of Antonio Maura intensified the repression by suspending constitutional guarantees, declaring martial law in Cordoba and sending in cavalry units to reinforce the Civil Guard. The Africanista General Manuel de la Barrera was put in command of the 20,000 troops sent against the landless labourers. He declared that ‘the Andalusian problem will not be solved without a cruel and energetic persecution of the propagandists who organise the masses’.17 There were more than 2,000 arrests. The leaders of all unions, except Antonio Monedero’s Catholic unions, were detained. Republican and Socialist leaders who had had nothing to do with the strike were deported from the province specifically to disrupt their campaigns for the April 1919 elections. With the area under virtual military occupation and the owners free to intimidate strikers, the revolutionary movement was gradually brought under control.18 However, the repression of 1919–20 and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1930 did nothing but douse an agitation which continued to smoulder until the Second Republic revived the spectre of land reform.

Indeed, Pascual Carrión noted that the landowners’ instinctive intransigence and ready resort to repressive violence during the trienio bolchevista ensured that peasant rebellion was unlikely to end soon:

Nobody who knows the history of those movements could possibly think that, after that period, the caciques and the landowners would not recover their previous domination. The weight of the government repression, the deportations and reprisals carried out by a well-known general [Manuel de la Barrera] sent by the government in May 1919 to Andalusia, put an end to the proletarian movement. Instead of channelling that movement, it was crushed with cruelty as so often before and, for that reason, it is not surprising that hatred of the latifundistas was fomented among the humble classes and that now [in 1932] there is a resurgence of agitation and revolts with greater violence than ever.19

While the Spanish countryside seethed with conflict, the failures of the two national governments in 1918 were exacerbated by the social crisis in industrial cities that followed the end of the First World War. The Basque iron and steel industry was hit by the dumping of the wartime surpluses accumulated in Britain and the United States. The shipping industry, which relied on transporting ore to Britain, was hit by the post-war slump in the British steel industry. During the war, Asturian mines and the Catalan textile industry had expanded but profits had not been ploughed back into achieving greater efficiency. Everywhere in industry and agriculture, the end of the war saw wages reduced and workers laid off.20 Working-class militancy increased and was met by military intervention. The Spanish state faced similar challenges to those confronting the defeated belligerent nations of Europe. In Madrid, there were strikes and food riots during which trams were set alight. According to significantly understated official figures, the number of strikes mushroomed from 71,440 in 1917 to 244,684 in 1920, while the number of working days lost in those strikes increased from 1.75 million to 7.25 million.21 Already terrified by the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, the Spanish ruling classes were further alarmed by the foundation in Moscow of the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. Although defeat in 1917 had traumatized the Socialist leadership, it had not marked the end of the assault on the system. Between late 1918 and the beginning of 1921, industrial workers in northern Spain followed the example of the anarchist day labourers of the south. Industrialists responded to economic recession by limiting production, cutting wages and laying off large numbers of workers. This inevitably provoked greater worker militancy, to which industrialists in Catalonia and landowners in the south reacted by turning to the army.

In Catalonia in 1919, determined to crush the CNT, intransigent industrialists were backed by the hard-line Captain General of the IV Región Militar, Lieutenant General Joaquín Milans del Bosch y Carrió. He in turn enjoyed the support of the Juntas Militares de Defensa. Conflict intensified after a strike broke out on 8 February at the Anglo-Canadian-owned Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company or Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro, known as La Canadiense. It began in protest at the arbitrary dismissal of eight administrative staff for trying to unionize. It mushroomed as successively the sacked men’s department, then the entire factory and finally, in a show of power by the Sindicato Único of Gas, Water and Electricity, all the power workers in Catalonia went on strike. By 21 February, three-quarters of Catalan industry had been forced to close down for lack of power. Trams were stalled in the streets, and cafés and theatres had to close. Milans del Bosch, himself an upper-class Catalan with connections to the industrialists, called for a declaration of martial law. The government of Romanones hesitantly agreed on 1 March. Workers were conscripted, a measure that exposed strikers to the threat of four years’ imprisonment for mutiny. Despite the arrest of 3,000 workers, the strike did not fold. Romanones appointed a distinguished criminal lawyer, Gerardo Doval, as chief of police. He also named a conciliatory Civil Governor, Carlos Montañés, and sent the Under-Secretary of the cabinet office, José Morote, to negotiate with the strikers. Helped by the moderation of Seguí, these mediation initiatives led to the Canadiense agreeing in mid-March to rehire the workers and raise wages. At a mass meeting of nearly 30,000 initially hostile workers on 19 March, Seguí’s oratory secured agreement for a return to work conditional on the release of prisoners. However, it was to be only a brief truce. Within five days, the city was again paralysed.22

Interestingly, in 1919, Lerroux had been placed on the payroll of the Canadiense (in addition to his many other income streams), in the hope that his rabble-rousing skills might help break the strike by undermining working-class solidarity. The company continued to pay him a monthly stipend for at least a further decade and half. In 1934, when he was Prime Minister, he was asked by the London offices of the Canadiense to try to reduce the company’s fiscal obligations. It is not known what action he took.23 Although the strike in the spring of 1919 had not been violent, the employers, shaken by the CNT’s ability to shut down Barcelona, were determined to destroy the union. Moreover, Milans and the Juntas were infuriated by the readiness of Romanones to work for a peaceful solution. Even before the Canadiense strike, confident of the support of the army, the industrialists were becoming more militant. In February 1919, the recently formed Unión Monárquica Nacional had called for action against both strikers and Catalanists. Fearful of losing its conservative support, the Lliga-dominated employers’ organization, the Foment Nacional del Treball, toned down its Catalanist aspirations and threw its support behind the coalition of the army and industrialists determined to destroy the Catalan section of the CNT, the Confederación Regional de Trabajo (CRT). The principal function of the industrialists’ organization, the Federació Patronal de Catalunya, under its belligerent president Félix Graupera, was simply to combat the Sindicatos Únicos. To this end, it emulated the structure and tactics of the Sindicatos Únicos. Against the general strike would be deployed the general lock-out. The Catalan Federation belonged to the nationwide Confederación Patronal Española presided over by the equally militant Francisco Junoy. In Barcelona, as in Bilbao, Madrid and Valencia, the most hard-line members of the Confederación Patronal Española were owners of small and medium businesses in the metallurgical, building and woodworking industries who were badly hit by the post-war economic crisis and the rise in labour militancy.24

With the enthusiastic support of industrialists and businessmen, Milans del Bosch was already going onto a war footing against the CNT. On 22 March, he authorized a citizens’ militia, the Somatén. Originally created in medieval times to repel Muslim raids, its name refers to the bells rung to summon the militia, so emetent, literally ‘emitting sound’ – that is, sounding the alarm. In fact, the revival of the Somatén had been long in preparation as a Guardia Cívica. However, now that it was armed by Milans del Bosch, this 8,000-strong auxiliary military force seriously worried Romanones, but he did not subject the Somatén to civilian authority. On 25 March, Milans decreed that anyone not a member of the Somatén caught carrying arms would be considered guilty of military rebellion.25 The Somatén ran public transport and patrolled the streets, arresting and mistreating strikers and obliging shops and cafés to remain open. Milans also approved the use of a parallel police force financed by the Federació Patronal de Catalunya and led by the recently released Manuel Bravo Portillo. This gang of well-paid gunmen and cut-throats recruited in the underworld carried out assaults on trade union leaders that ranged from beatings to murder. To facilitate these activities, military funds financed the compilation of a huge card index of prominent CNTistas, the so-called Fichero Lasarte, compiled by a Civil Guard, Captain Julio de Lasarte Persino, who had worked with Baron de Koenig. With the encouragement of the recently appointed Military Governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido, Lasarte’s often fabricated information was used to facilitate arrests and occasionally murders.26

Neither Milans del Bosch nor the Federació Patronal was interested in conciliation. When Milans refused to release prisoners, undermining the agreement for the return to work, the CNT was provoked into declaring a disastrous general strike on 24 March. With the loud support of the Barcelona garrison, martial law was reimposed, CNT offices were shut down and hundreds of union leaders, including Pestaña, arrested. The assault on the CNT was led by Martínez Anido, a brutal Africanista and a favourite of Alfonso XIII, who had been appointed Military Governor in February. The moderate syndicalists and the Romanones appointees, Montañés and Doval, were outflanked by the military. Milans was furious when Doval called on him to break up Bravo Portillo’s gang. He sent the intimidating Martínez Anido and Colonel Julio Aldir of the Civil Guard to threaten Montañés and Doval that they would be imprisoned if they did not leave Barcelona immediately. With the strike effectively broken, it took the oratory of Seguí to persuade another mass meeting that a return to work was the only way to avoid further disaster. Unsurprisingly, the principal military newspaper denied, in rather vague language, that the Barcelona garrison had had anything to do with the expulsion of Montañés and Doval.27

The treatment of Montañés and Doval demonstrated the impotence of civilian rule. It provoked the fall of Romanones’ cabinet and opened up a major political crisis in which a key role was played by Alfonso XIII.28 Romanones asked the King to dismiss Milans, but Alfonso refused to accept the General’s token resignation. In the light of the King’s unreserved support for Milans, Romanones had no choice but to resign.29 Alfonso’s identification with the most reactionary elements of the army and the Church would consistently undermine any government attempts at conciliatory social policy. Indeed, the King was flirting ever more keenly with the idea of a military dictatorship. He chose to replace Romanones with a reluctant Maura on 15 April. It would be a temporary solution since Maura no longer represented the dominant sector of the Conservative Party, which was now led by Eduardo Dato. The shift in power within the party derived from disquiet at the methods of Juan de la Cierva and his links with the Juntas de Defensa. Dato and others inclined to a policy of negotiation with the moderate trade unionists. Suffering ill health, Dato had favoured a government under his ally, the moderate Conservative Joaquín Sánchez de Toca. However, the King granted Maura the dissolution decree. Despite his reputation as an opponent of electoral corruption, to secure success in the elections of 1 June 1919 Maura opted to exploit the worst kind of caciquismo. It was to no avail. Opposed by much of his own Conservative Party, he failed to win an overall majority. Moreover, his reputation was shattered and he resigned on 20 July.30

Under Maura and persisting after his fall, despite the defeat of the CNT’s ‘general strike’, the dirty war against the organization continued in Catalonia. At the behest of Milans del Bosch, the Bravo Portillo gang maintained its offensive against trade unionists, eliminating moderates in order to disrupt industrial negotiations. Among those murdered had been Pau Sabater (‘El Tero’), a distinguished leader of the textile Sindicato Único, whose bullet-riddled body was found on 20 July. Inevitably, there was a desire for reprisals. Moreover, the scale of the repression undermined the credibility of the moderate trade unionists among their own affiliates. And, as the economic repression bit harder and more workers were laid off, there were more men ready to take a small salary to become gunmen.31 When Bravo Portillo was assassinated on 5 September, his gang would be taken over by the sinister Prussian Friedrich Stallman who, it will be recalled, went by the fake title of Baron de Koenig. He was described by the conservative politician Francisco Bastos Ansart as ‘a prince of rogues’. Koenig was subsidized by the French secret service as well as by the bosses who paid him to murder trade union leaders. In turn, he also blackmailed the industrialists with a protection racket and was finally expelled from Spain in May 1920.32

To the delight of industrialists and landowners, in the twelve weeks that Maura was in government, aided by Antonio Goicoechea, his hard-line Minister of the Interior, he had responded with brutal force to social tension in Catalonia and the south. Constitutional guarantees were suspended and union leaders were imprisoned. As has been seen, he had sent General de la Barrera to Andalusia to smash the rebellion of the agricultural labourers. When Dato once more suggested as Maura’s successor the moderate Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, Alfonso XIII resisted, pushing for Maura, even threatening to appoint the relatively left-wing Melquíades Álvarez. Eventually, Dato was able to secure the appointment he wanted. An enlightened team consisting of Sánchez de Toca, his Minister of the Interior, the devout social Catholic Manuel Burgos y Mazo, and a new Civil Governor of Barcelona, Julio Amado, adopted a conciliatory line towards the unions. According to Burgos y Mazo, there were 43,000 syndicalists in prison. Believing that repression could only encourage the extremist wing of the CNT, the government was inclined to recognize the unions as the legitimate representatives of the workers in dialogue with the industrialists. To this end, prisoners were released, martial law lifted and the eight-hour day introduced. The intelligent application of conciliation resolved strikes in Valencia and Malaga and saw a significant reduction in the number of assassinations in Barcelona. In return, Seguí, Manuel Buenacasa and other moderate syndicalists issued a manifesto declaring that if the CNT was legalized, strikes would be peaceful. They denounced state violence as the cause of left-wing terrorism.33