Kitabı oku: «A People Betrayed», sayfa 14

In the early hours of the morning of 13 September 1923, Primo’s coup d’état was launched. He had long since ingratiated himself with the Catalan elite. It was alleged at the time that he had held secret meetings with Junoy, the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, President of the Catalan assembly of local councillors, the Mancomunitat, and other Catalan business leaders at the Font-Romeu health spa on the French side of the border. There, apparently, he agreed, in return for their support, to promote their ambitions in terms of greater autonomy, protectionist policies and public order.87 In what must be presumed to be a cynical pantomime, he had made efforts to speak Catalan at public events and gave every sign of admiring Catalan culture, especially the national dance, the sardana. When he coincided with Cambó, he would always ask, ‘How are you, my dear Chief?’ He regularly dined with the leading industrial barons of the most conservative elements of the Lliga, such as Félix Graupera of the Federació Patronal, Domingo Sert of the Foment de Treball Nacional, the Marqués de Comillas and Ferran Fabra y Puig (Marqués de Alella).88 In that sense, Primo’s coup was more about meeting Catalan determination to see the CNT crushed than silencing the Picasso report on the responsibility for Annual, although that certainly clinched the support of both the Africanista generals and Alfonso XIII. The role of the King was crucial, not because he played an active role but rather because he irresponsibly stood and watched. When the crunch came, the response of the government was feeble largely because of a conviction that the overall political situation required desperate measures. Thus, despite knowing what Primo and the Cuadrilátero were up to, nothing was done to stop him returning to Barcelona. In fact, far from sure of success, he was fearful, as he had been in June, that he would be arrested on the way back. According to López Ochoa, Catalanist supporters had a car ready to spirit him across the French border if things went badly.89

Meanwhile, the carefree monarch was trying out a new sports car on the road between San Sebastián and Biarritz. On 12 September, Santiago Alba, the minister deputed to accompany Alfonso on his summer holiday learned of the imminence of the coup. Knowing how much military hatred was directed at his person, Alba resigned. Moreover, Martínez Anido, a key collaborator in the plot, was in San Sebastián with orders to arrest Alba as soon as the coup had succeeded, subject him to a summary court martial and shoot him. Warned of this and fearing for his life, Alba crossed the international bridge into France.90 In Madrid, the government dithered. García Prieto was in favour of arresting Primo, but the Minister of War, General Luis Aizpuru, was reluctant to believe that he was involved in a plot. By the time of their inconsequential conversation, Primo de Rivera had already issued orders for the establishment of martial law in Barcelona, for the occupation of all major public buildings and for street patrols by the Somatén. At the same time, he published a manifesto to the nation in which he described himself as the long-awaited iron surgeon who would clear away the incompetence and corruption of the venal professional politicians as the first step to national regeneration. To do so, he would perform radical surgery on the sick body politic. Among the problems to be solved, he listed subversion, social violence, public disorder and separatism but was non-committal about his plans for Morocco, declaring only that he aimed to find a ‘prompt, worthy and honourable’ resolution.91

Without popular support, the government could do little to stand in the way of the army. Even less was it likely to stand against Alfonso XIII, who may not have been actively involved in the coup but certainly knew about it and was not displeased to see it prosper. He had long been indiscreet about his impatience with the inefficiency of various governments and their weakness in the face of revolutionary threats. He believed that he represented the national will better than any corruptly elected government. There had been his rash speech in May 1921 in Cordoba. In February and March 1923, rumours that he was thinking in terms of a dictatorship were fed by the right-wing daily La Acción, whose director, Manuel Delgado Barreto, was a prominent figure on the extreme right. Now there was the immediate advantage of preventing parliamentary discussion of the Picasso report.92 It was therefore no surprise that, on 14 September, a beaming Alfonso XIII, wearing army uniform, arrived in Madrid and announced his support for the military rebels. He refused to dismiss the rebellious generals and thereby obliged his civilian government to resign. He then summoned Primo de Rivera to Madrid and named him head of a Military Directory with executive and legislative powers. García Prieto seemed more relieved than anything, commenting to journalists, ‘I have a new saint to whom I can pray: St Miguel Primo de Rivera, because he has freed me from the nightmare of government.’93 Around 4,000 well-dressed Catalans headed by the Mayor of Barcelona, the Marqués de Alella, the President of the Mancomunitat, Puig i Cadafalch, and the most prominent industrialists, were at the station on the evening of 14 September to bid farewell to Primo on his journey to Madrid to take power.94 The significance of what had just happened has been frequently expressed in medical metaphors for the obvious reason that Primo himself adopted the classic regenerationist image of the iron surgeon. For Raymond Carr and Shlomo Ben-Ami, Primo butchered the mewling democracy of García Prieto’s cabinet, while for Javier Tusell and José Luis García Navarro, he simply buried a corpse. Both views rather let Alfonso XIII off the hook. After all, without his intervention, the coup could easily have been stopped. By indulging his penchant for military government, the King left himself with no alternative when the military too ran out of ideas. More subtle altogether is the brilliant conclusion of Francisco Romero: ‘In fact, the “iron surgeon” had just switched off the life support system of the comatose patient. Having thought to do so himself, the chief consultant, King Alfonso XIII, was not troubled to sign the death certificate.’95

Miguel Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII, together with the generals of the recently formed Military Directory.

7
The Primo de Rivera Dictatorship: The Years of Success, 1923–1926

The manifesto published by Primo de Rivera on 12 September consisted of a diatribe against the nepotism and corruption of the political system of the constitutional monarchy. Primo invited the population to denounce any ‘perversion of the course of justice, bribery or immorality’ and promised ‘to punish implacably those who had thereby offended, corrupted or dishonoured Spain’.1 This laudable ambition seemed at odds with the fact that his own meteoric military career had benefited immensely from the patronage of his uncle, Fernando Primo de Rivera, and that he had tried unsuccessfully to achieve a parliamentary seat in Cadiz not by election but by getting a place in the encasillado. Ángel Ossorio described the manifesto as ‘a hotchpotch of boorish, coarse clichés and idiotic vulgarity’ and mocked its whitewashing of the responsibilities of the military for the condition of Spain. The choleric philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called it ‘pornographic’. Honourable politicians were outraged; others, such as Juan de la Cierva, simply assumed that the criticisms were directed at others.2

It was typical of the frivolity of Alfonso XIII that he failed to realize that, as the King who had chosen the politicians of the old system, some of the mud splashed on him. Gabriel Maura wrote: ‘it is very possible that neither he [Primo] nor the King perceived at the time, as most ordinary Spaniards did not notice until much later, that among the institutions overthrown by the new regime was to be found the monarchy’.3 Thus Alfonso XIII blithely made the crucial individual decision not to support the constitutional government and to offer power instead to Primo. He delayed his return to Madrid, despite the pleas of the government, claiming that he was held up by bad weather. In fact, he was visiting Burgos, Valladolid and Zaragoza to take the pulse of the garrisons there. Advised by General Sanjurjo to keep these visits secret, he then returned to San Sebastián to begin his journey to Madrid.4

That the government of García Prieto had hardly been the harbinger of real democracy was revealed by how little opposition there was to the coup. Indeed, it was greeted without drama. In the towns, in cafés and around newspaper kiosks, the reaction ranged from indifference to enthusiasm.5 There was rejoicing aplenty from the upper classes, many senior generals and, above all, the King. The Supreme War Council had been due to meet on 15 September and hear the case against the officers accused of responsibility for Annual. On 20 September, the special parliamentary commission charged with examining the Picasso report was also due to meet to finalize its conclusions that would then be debated on 1 October in the Cortes. Unsurprisingly, the King, after spending an anxious summer, was delighted by a coup that put an end to the judicial process. As one of Primo’s fellow conspirators, General Cavalcanti, said: ‘You will understand, Miguel, that I haven’t made a revolution just to be found guilty.’

Indeed, one of Primo’s first actions would be an attempt to seize the report and the supporting documentation. However, the commission’s President, Bernardo Mateo Sagasta, anticipating this, had removed the material from the archive of the Cortes and hidden it.6 On 27 June 1924, the Supreme War Council found General Berenguer guilty of responsibility for the collapse of the Melilla command and sentenced him to expulsion from the army. However, a wide-ranging amnesty one week later would annul the sentence and effectively draw a line under further investigation of the disaster of Annual. Primo airily dismissed the catastrophe as the consequence of ‘the adversity that occasionally occurs in the best armies’. The amnesty included political offences.7

The nature of the new regime was in fact revealed when, on Primo’s first day in Madrid, Alfonso XIII signed a decree establishing a Military Directory. Under the presidency of Primo, it consisted of a general from each of the eight military regions and an admiral, Antonio Magaz, who would serve as official Vice-President of the Directory. On the same day, martial law was imposed and would not be lifted until 16 March 1925. The press was subjected to rigid censorship. The Cortes was shut down and constitutional guarantees suspended. Ministries would continue to exist but be headed by under-secretaries, with Primo himself as a kind of super-minister with overall responsibility for all departments. However, on 22 September, his crony Severiano Martínez Anido was named ‘subsecretario de Gobernación’, effectively Minister of the Interior and rather more his effective deputy than the merely symbolic Admiral Magaz. Martínez Anido’s erstwhile deputy, the disgraced chief of police in Barcelona, General Miguel Arlegui, was restored to prominence as Director General of Public Order; his deputy was the sinister Captain Julio de Lasarte Persino, who specialized in fabricating ‘information’.8

The three principal problems facing the new regime were the class war in Barcelona, the corrupt political system and the difficulties in the Moroccan Protectorate, although Primo’s rhetoric focused on his proclaimed campaign against corruption. However, the group of largely inexperienced cronies assembled by Primo would have difficulty in resolving the latter issue given the extent of their own enjoyment of the spoils of office. In the caustic phrase of Eduardo Ortega y Gasset, elder brother of the philosopher José: ‘There was too much fun to be had with arbitrary rule to leave any space in such mediocre minds for more serious work.’9

The inability of previous constitutional governments to resolve these problems explains the relief that greeted Primo de Rivera’s coup. The first group to express support for the new regime was motivated by enthusiasm for its anticipated role in suppressing social disorder and by the prospect of an end to caciquismo. The Fomento Nacional del Treball was quick to inform Primo of ‘its unshakeable commitment to the programme of government and regeneration of our motherland outlined in the manifesto with indisputable competence and authority’.10 The other organizations of Catalan industrialists and landowners were not far behind. In a series of secret meetings with the top brass of the Lliga Regionalista and the Foment, Primo had made explicit promises that, once in power, he would expand Catalan autonomy in return for their support for his coup.11 The President of the Mancomunitat, Josep Puig i Cadafalch, sent an optimistic note to Primo declaring: ‘If the conflict is between an illegal act and corruption, we choose the former.’ This was hardly surprising. Primo had made numerous earlier pro-Catalan and federalist statements. On this basis, Puig i Cadafalch was convinced that Primo could be relied upon to promote the importance of Catalonia within Spain. Accordingly, he went on to promise optimistically, ‘we will collaborate with the generous project now begun’.12

Francesc Cambó, however, was much more cautious. Despite suggesting that the coup was ‘the only sweetness tasted in many bitter years’, he advised his followers not to commit themselves to the Directory. Indeed, he maintained that he had always believed that a dictatorship would be a disaster for the country.13 Shrewd as ever, he clearly saw that Primo’s pro-Catalanism was never more than at best superficial and at worst a device to secure support for his plans. He could never have sold Catalan autonomy to the rest of the army. His move against all regional nationalisms – seen specifically by Gabriel Maura as ‘the anti-Catalan crusade’ – began on 18 September with a decree ordering that only the Spanish flag could be flown on public buildings and that, at public events and in schools, only Castilian Spanish could be used. In the Basque Country, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco and its cultural clubs, the batzokis, were banned. In Catalonia, the militant nationalist parties, Estat Català and Acció Catalana, were dissolved. The sardana and the singing of the unofficial anthem ‘Els Segadors’ were banned and the Catalan half of bilingual street signs removed. Primo declared that of the crimes of syndicalism, communism and separatism, the latter was the worst. He replaced Puig i Cadafalch as President of the Mancomunitat with the centralist Alfonso Sala of the Unión Monárquica Nacional (UMN). However, as his own Spanish nationalism intensified, against the advice of his Director General of Local Administration, José Calvo Sotelo, he abolished the Mancomunitat in the summer of 1924. From exile, Cambó became a bitter critic of the government. More importantly for the future, outrage at what was perceived as the betrayal by the Lliga saw the leadership of the Catalanist cause pass to the left-wing groups.14

In fact, the swift jettisoning of the promises of Catalan autonomy and the pre-eminence of Martínez Anido and Arlegui suggested that the most important of the tasks assumed by Primo was the counter-revolutionary one. Inevitably, the fortunes of the Libres were revived by the return to prominence of the two. Membership was up to 111,252 by 1925 and to 197,853 by 1929, mainly in provincial Catalonia and Valencia. This suggests that, with the CNT banned, those of the rank and file who were not ideologically doctrinaire anarchists sought refuge in any organization that could protect their wages. However, the political preferences of Catalan workers would be seen clearly enough when, after the fall of Primo de Rivera in 1930, support for the Libres evaporated once again and there was a boom in CNT membership. In April 1931, when the left Republican Esquerra came to power in Catalonia with CNT votes, the Libres were finished.15

The delight of the Catalan bourgeoisie was fed by the decree of 18 September which, as a step towards the militarization of society, established the Somatén in every town in Spain. Conservative citizens were invited to join these armed militias under army supervision and act as an auxiliary force to the police and army in order to put an end to the disorder of the years of pistolerismo.16 As an armed militia, the Somatén was meant to be part of the regime’s repressive machinery. Although the dictatorship cannot under any circumstances be seen as bloody, in many respects, including the leeway given to the Somatén, it would constantly abuse the rule of law. A decree of 14 October 1926 authorized the government to suspend any sentence that it adjudged to be ‘prejudicial’ to the interests of the administration. Members of the Somatén often committed acts of violence. In some cases, membership of the Somatén was used to cover up acts of poaching; in others, murder. On one occasion, a somatenista, in resisting eviction for failure to pay his rent, killed the house owner. When brought to trial, he asked: ‘So, why did they give me this rifle?’ If crimes committed by somatenistas came to trial, they were pardoned by the regime’s decree of 16 May 1927, a decree denounced by the distinguished criminologist Quintiliano Saldaña as a ‘juridical monster’.17 Outside Catalonia, the Somatén was not the success anticipated by Primo. Many people joined only to avoid having to pay for a hunting licence. At the time of their creation on a nationwide basis, the Somatén had 21,868 members. This rose to a peak of 100,425 in 1925 and then declined rapidly until, by 1928, it was reduced to 22,492. Moreover, their main function was to provide numbers in official parades and ceremonies.18

One politician who could have no doubt of the manifesto’s targets was Santiago Alba, since the manifesto announced that proceedings were in train against this ‘depraved and cynical minister’. Primo and Alba, as advocates of the abandonment of the Moroccan colony, had previously had cordial relations, but now Primo made a cheap and unfounded accusation that, in going into exile, Alba had stolen a government car. He even blamed Alba for the military coup, telling a journalist from El Imparcial: ‘the activity of this politician was the trigger for this movement. We have conclusive proof of his crimes which will be the basis of the prosecution.’19

These dark references hinted at Alba’s murky relationship with Juan March. In an interview given three days after the coup, Primo repeated his accusation that Alba had provided a motive for his movement: ‘Señor Alba has signed commercial contracts with capitalist elements for his personal benefit … Señor Alba is mixed up in contraband.’ The smuggling activities of Juan March were well known, but Primo and his fellow generals had no hard evidence against Alba. His house was searched by the police and his bank accounts frozen. An investigating magistrate was sent to Valladolid on a fishing expedition. His job was to implicate Alba in alleged corrupt dealings connected with a proposed railway from Valladolid to Toro that was paid for but not built. He found no evidence that Alba was involved. The Tribunal Supremo eventually dismissed the forty-one charges and also reprimanded the magistrate for making them up. However, the regime censorship prevented publication of its judgment.20

Given their previously warm relationship, the malice of Primo’s persecution of Alba requires explanation. Alba was loathed by the military and by Catalan industrialists. During the First World War, as Minister of Finance he had infuriated the northern industrialists with proposals for a tax on their spectacular war profits without a corresponding measure to deal with the profits of his allies the agrarians. Alba’s attempts to reduce the military budget, both in Morocco and in the Peninsula, were reviled within the army. More specifically, the Africanistas had never forgiven him for permitting the payments made to Abd el-Krim for the release of the prisoners taken after Annual. According to Francisco Franco, when the Foreign Legion attacked a Moroccan position, they advanced chanting ‘Long live Spain! Death to Alba!’ Thus an attack on Alba was part of Primo’s strategy of consolidating support among his important early supporters.21 There was also an element of personal resentment in that Primo unjustly blamed Alba for his failure to secure a seat in the Cortes. He believed, wrongly, that Alba had refused to persuade one of his political allies, the Liberal cacique of Cadiz, Primo’s principal opponent in the province, to drop his opposition to Primo’s candidacy.22 Unsurprisingly, in exile, Alba would offer to finance the anarchists and others committed to the overthrow of the regime.23

One of the first initiatives in Primo’s declared war on corruption and contraband was the beginning of an investigation into the massive tobacco smuggling that significantly diminished the revenue of the government monopoly, the Compañía Arrendataria de Tabacos. Inevitably, it focused on Juan March. An investigating magistrate was given material from various government departments relating to the issue and more than 400 house searches were carried out in Mallorca. It was alleged in the press that Juan March, like his puppet Alejandro Lerroux and Alba, had fled into exile and that he had a million pounds sterling (34 million pesetas) awaiting him in foreign banks. Frontier police had been given orders to arrest him. They were unable to do so because he had remained in Madrid. In fact, already, on 19 or 20 October, March had audaciously requested an interview with Primo. Whatever was said in that first of many meetings, March somehow persuaded Primo that his tobacco business benefited the state and that the regime would gain more from collaboration than from conflict with him.

Despite evidence that he was continuing with his smuggling activities, it soon became clear that the dictatorship no longer considered him one of its targets. March’s shipping concern, the Compañía Trasmediterránea, began to receive significant government subsidies, his company Petróleos Porto Pi benefited from a change in the import duty on fuel and, in 1927, he was eventually granted the state tobacco monopoly for Morocco. Regarding the latter decision, Primo had had to overcome the misgivings of some ministers, most notably José Calvo Sotelo. In return for these favours, and at the explicit request of Primo himself, March supplied the tobacco needs of Spanish forces in Morocco, helped finance pro-regime newspapers such as La Correspondencia Militar and La Nación, bought land in Tangier for the Spanish state and paid for the building of a Catholic church there.

Juan March’s corrupt activities during the dictatorship and before would be investigated by the Responsibilities Commission set up by the Cortes in 1931. A heated debate in the Cortes was provoked on 8 May 1934 when a lengthy speech by a member of the Commission, the Socialist Teodomiro Menéndez, detailed the long history of the corruption carried out by Juan March, from 1911 onwards, in securing the tobacco monopoly. Menéndez demonstrated that the investigations of the Responsibilities Commission had exposed how money provided by March, at the request of Primo, to bail out La Correspondencia Militar coincided exactly with the renewal of contracts for the tobacco monopoly. He also recounted how March had paid off huge debts accumulated by Queen Victoria Eugenia with various jewellers in Paris.

In the corridors of the Cortes afterwards, journalists overheard Cambó congratulate Menéndez for his speech while also pointing out that he was not the first politician to try to put a stop to March’s corruption. Cambó then told the journalists that, when he was Minister of Finance, he had discovered that, to facilitate his smuggling operation, March had put numerous officers of the Carabineros on his payroll. Accordingly, to stop the practice, Cambó had threatened the senior commanders with disbanding the corps. He also discovered that, when March’s vessels were captured by the navy, the cases against him were dismissed by naval courts and his ships returned to him. Cambó therefore introduced a law bringing smuggling offences into civilian juridiction. On receiving howls of complaint about this from the admirals who feared losing March’s bribes, Cambó sent a message to them declaring that, if they didn’t desist, he would reveal what they had been doing. Cambó also put a special watch on March, as a result of which ex-prime ministers and ex-ministers stopped visiting his house. He ended with an explosive declaration: ‘The whole business of March is the most scandalous that the world has seen, because, for eleven years, he had one-time prime ministers and ministers at his service and effectively ran Spain. He could bring down governments whenever he liked and his influence even reached parliament.’24

Since securing Tangier for Spain was one of Primo’s greatest ambitions, he expressed his delight at March’s action by hosting a dinner in his honour. On the following day, he visited the Royal Palace for an audience with the King and, as he left, told the assembled courtiers: ‘A great patriot has put his money at the service of the fatherland. You should all follow his example.’ The loathing for Primo of Alfonso XIII’s aristocratic intimates was thereby intensified. Also, at the behest of the Dictator, March had not only paid off the Queen’s jewellery debts but, more importantly, had financed both the Instituto del Cáncer of which she was honorary president and the building of a tuberculosis sanatorium in Mallorca (which, as late as 1936, remained unfinished). In return, March would be the beneficiary in 1924 of Primo’s interference in the judicial system and also of the Dictator’s frequent public acknowledgement.25

Unamuno swiftly perceived that the rhetoric about the dictatorship, being merely a short-term project to clean up politics, was a cover for the principal objective of crushing revolution. He declared that the promises, couched in regenerationist language, of ‘uprooting caciquismo and re-establishing authority’ were just ‘the theatrical scenery aimed at attracting the deluded idiots who have nightmares about communism and trades unions’.26 If anything, the task was much easier than it might have seemed. There was little opposition from any of the working-class forces. Neither union organization had any interest in fighting to defend the corrupt constitutional system. The CNT was already a broken reed.27

The Socialists were concerned primarily with safeguarding their union structures. Their initial response to the news of the coup was cautious. Given the social agitation of the previous years, intense popular hostility to the Moroccan enterprise and the furore over responsibility for Annual, a military intervention was eminently foreseeable. Nevertheless, the Socialists neither predicted the coup nor showed great concern when it came, even though the new regime soon began to persecute other workers’ organizations. While the King was still wending his leisurely way from San Sebastián to Madrid and rumours were circulating that Santiago Alba had been arrested, the front page of El Socialista carried a joint note of the PSOE and UGT executives declaring that ‘no tie of solidarity or political sympathy links us to the governing class’ and expressing ‘the harshest reproaches for the way our politicians broke the promises made on the road to power’. Referring to Primo’s claim that he would be putting an end to corruption and favouritism, the Socialist leadership was suspicious: ‘With what authority can such claims be made by those who got to the top thanks to political favours influenced in their turn by royal suggestions?’ The note ended ordering workers to take no initiatives without instructions from the executive committees of both the Socialist Party and the union. Primo’s immediate appointment of Martínez Anido as his effective Minister of the Interior was another factor that counselled caution.

A second Socialist note instructed workers to abstain from initiatives likely ‘to throw the proletariat into sterile movements that would justify precisely the repression longed for by reactionary forces’.28 The Socialists speedily rejected an invitation from the CNT and the Communist Party to join them in a general strike. Indeed, the Socialist leadership not only did not try to impede the establishment of the regime but was also soon collaborating with it. This reflected the extent to which the leadership had emerged from the trauma of 1917 convinced of the need to stick to a legalist strategy, never again to risk the existence of the unions in direct clashes with the state, and to safeguard at all costs the achievements of existing social legislation.29

The Socialists’ reluctance to oppose Primo’s coup derived from the belief that, although the political struggle was suspended, daily trade union activity had to go on. Francisco Largo Caballero and the trade union bureaucracy believed that their first task was to use any means possible to protect the material interests of their members. Soon collaboration with the dictatorship would go from pragmatic realism to an opportunistic desire to steal an advantage over the anarcho-syndicalists. Ever since the breakdown of the pact with the CNT in December 1920, Largo Caballero had been determined to attract the rank and file of the CNT to the UGT.30 He saw only advantage when the CNT and the Communist Party were banned and hundreds of their militants imprisoned.