Kitabı oku: «A People Betrayed», sayfa 4
On occasion, over-zealous local officials would produce majorities comprising more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unknown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore on, after the introduction of universal male suffrage, casual falsification became ever more difficult and, if the requisite number of votes could not be mustered, the caciques sometimes registered the dead in the local cemetery as voters. In Madrid in 1896, fictitious voters, known as Lázaros, used the names of deceased electors. More frequently, they sent gangs of paid voters from village to village to vote for the government party. In 1879, Romero Robledo used the technique of ‘flying squads’ – 200 Aragonese raced around Madrid from polling station to polling station using their votes. It was said that one man had voted forty-two times. The alteration of the electoral list or the addition or subtraction of votes was known as pucherazo or tupinada, the packing of the pot. Sometimes, announcements were placed in the local press announcing, falsely, that a rival had withdrawn his candidacy. More common was to change the timing of elections so that hostile voters would not arrive in time or having thugs present to intimidate rival voters. At other times, the voting urns were placed where voters would not want to go, in a fever hospital, a pigsty or on a high roof. In 1891, in one voting station in Murcia, the supervisor obliged voters to pass their voting slips through a window so that he could change them at his convenience. Advantage could also be taken of some who simply did not bother to vote. If the vote was not going as planned, there were thugs on hand to raid the polling station and seize the voting urns. Sometimes, those likely to vote for the unofficial candidate would be thrown in jail or else threatened with investigation of their tax status. Most common of all was simply the falsification of the count.55
The USS Maine, blown up in Havana harbour, the excuse for the Spanish-American war of 1898. (The History Collection/Alamy)
2
Violence, Corruption and the Slide to Disaster
The consequence of the turno system was that politics became an exclusive minuet danced by a small privileged minority. As well as the caciques who were committed to one or other of the parties, the Conservative La Cierva or the Liberal Gamazo, there were amenable caciques who would work for both parties. This is illustrated by the oft-related story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local rich men’s club or Casino. Leafing through them, he declared to the expectant hangers-on: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will of God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections.’ Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. Their apathy allowed the local authorities to fabricate the results without too much opposition. Violent resistance guaranteed arrest, torture and perhaps execution. From 1876, the electorate consisted of men over the age of twenty-five who could afford to register to vote, by paying a 25 peseta tax on property or a 50 peseta tax on their economic activities. For the elections of 1879, 1881, 1884 and 1886, the electorate numbered approximately 850,000. The introduction of universal male suffrage in 1890 extended the electorate to just under four million for the elections of 1891, 1893, 1896, 1898, 1899, 1901 and 1903. By increasing the threat of the electorate using its votes in its own interests, the reform also intensified the use of electoral corruption in the interests of property.1
However, the electoral list had little to do with those whose votes were actually registered. Control of the local judiciary facilitated the removal of enemies and the addition of friends. In 1879, around 40 per cent of those who voted in Barcelona were government functionaries whose jobs depended on how they voted. In 1881, in Valencia, 75 per cent of those that voted had no right to do so. In 1884, Romero Robledo managed to reduce the potential electorate in Madrid from 33,205 to 12,250. That alcaldes were government nominees ensured that they would be willing electoral agents. Those who refused could simply be removed or forced to resign by threatening them with exorbitant fines for invented or trivial offences such as failure to respond to letters or to introduce the metric system.2
This all worked best in poor rural areas, particularly in Galicia and Andalusia, because the votes of a poverty-stricken and largely illiterate electorate could be falsified easily. Accordingly, the official turnout in rural areas was recorded as an utterly implausible 80 per cent. The cities, where it was so much more difficult for the techniques of caciquismo to be applied, recorded much lower electoral participation. As the century wore on, votes in the cities were increasingly the only ones that could be accepted as genuine. Thus, to neutralize them, the ministers of the interior of the dynastic parties had no compunction about resorting to gerrymandering, flagrantly changing electoral boundaries to swamp towns with the falsified votes of surrounding rural areas. This was possible while the Cortes was small and constituencies large. Even then, backward Galicia was over-represented in the Cortes while industrial Catalonia was dramatically under-represented. Between 1876 and 1887, there were only 210 deputies in the Cortes. After 1891, there were 348. By the turn of the century, urbanization saw an increasing influx of deputies from non-dynastic parties and even republicans.3
The quest for government jobs went on unabated. The queues of place-seekers outside his house obliged Sagasta on occasion to sleep in an hotel. Within two weeks of coming to power, he had replaced all the under-secretaries of all the ministries, virtually all the directors general in the ministries of the Navy, of Overseas Territories, of Finance and of Development, seven in the Ministry of the Interior and four in the Ministry of War, forty-seven civil governors, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and three of the eight captains general of the military regions. Sagasta’s election fixer, Venancio González, emulated Romero Robledo and arranged a substantial Liberal majority in the late-summer elections of 1881. The immediate consequence was that, at provincial and municipal level, the number of sacked bureaucrats was legion.4
Under Cánovas, gambling casinos were illegal but were allowed to function when the appropriate bribes were paid. In Madrid, for instance, each casino paid 35,000 pesetas to the Civil Governor of Madrid, the Marqués de Heredia Spínola. Theoretically, the money was for charitable purposes, but there was no auditing. Heredia’s successor, the Conde de Xiquena, tried to close the casinos, only for the owners to mount a bombing campaign in June 1881 which severely injured a number of children. It was later alleged by Xiquena that Romero Robledo had been one of the beneficiaries of the bribes paid by the gambling bosses. The accusation had to be abandoned when Cánovas threatened to bring the Cortes to its knees by leading a walkout of the Conservative Party.5
While the Liberals failed to introduce significant reform, working-class opposition to the system was growing. The Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (FTRE), the Spanish section of the International Workingmen’s Association or ‘First International’, began to organize openly. It soon had 57,000 members, concentrated mainly in Andalusia and Catalonia, but was split over the relative efficacy of strikes and terrorism. The nucleus of the Socialist movement, the Asociación del Arte de Imprimir, was gaining ground through a successful strike by typesetters in 1882.6 In January 1884, Alfonso XII had brought back Cánovas. His Minister of the Interior, Romero Robledo, presided over notoriously corrupt elections on 27 April that year and secured a Conservative majority of 295 seats against 90. Cánovas’s government faced numerous problems – military subversion, the ongoing concerns about the alleged anarchist secret society called the Mano Negra, a cholera epidemic, unrest in Cuba and the fact that the King was facing a progressively more debilitating battle with virulent tuberculosis. In fact, Alfonso did not look after himself, failing even to wear warm clothing on hunting trips in bad weather.
Armed with such a big majority, the new cabinet’s instinctive response to most problems was reactionary. Cánovas himself was seen as intolerably arrogant. The Cuban situation was worsened by the new Minister of Overseas Territories, Manuel Aguirre de Tejada, refusing to contemplate the abolition of slavery. This was not unconnected with the interests of Romero Robledo, who was the son-in-law of the fabulously rich sugar magnate Julián de Zulueta y Amondo. Known as ‘the prince of the slavers’, the Basque Zulueta had huge plantations and three sugar mills in Cuba and others in Álava.7 That connection explains why Romero Robledo would later, in November 1891, seek to be named Minister for Overseas Territories. Shortly after the 1884 elections, a minor republican uprising at Santa Coloma de Farners near Girona was easily suppressed. However, when courts martial failed to hand out death sentences for the two leaders, a major and a captain, the government went ahead and had them shot despite widespread protests, including from the King. On 20 November 1884, a minor student demonstration in favour of a professor who had been excommunicated for making a speech in favour of the theories of Charles Darwin was repressed with some violence by the Civil Guard. On Christmas Eve, a series of earthquakes in Andalusia left thousands homeless, many of whom died from cold and others from the cholera epidemic. A visit to the affected areas left the King disgusted with what he had seen of government neglect. He also ignored the Prime Minister’s advice and visited areas affected by cholera.
Alfonso XII complained to the German envoy that Cánovas ‘knows everything, decides everything and interferes in everything, even in military matters of which he knows nothing and that he gives no consideration to the King’s views and wishes’. He believed that Cánovas was using funds that were needed to modernize the army’s weaponry in order to fortify harbours because there were more opportunities for graft in construction. On 25 November 1885, Alfonso died, aged just twenty-seven. Apparently, Cánovas had been made aware of the seriousness of the King’s condition by his doctor, who had told him that a warmer climate would probably prolong Alfonso’s life. However, he had sworn the doctor to secrecy lest news of the King’s weakness inflame the republican movement.8 His wife María Cristina became Queen Regent and some months later gave birth to a child, the future Alfonso XIII. To ensure that the system established by Cánovas would endure, the two party leaders met at the Palace of the Pardo and signed a pact that consolidated the so-called turno.
In the south, land hunger was creating an increasingly desperate desire for change, the more so as Andalusian labourers came under the influence of anarchism. This was partly the consequence of the fact that, in November 1868, Giuseppe Fanelli, an Italian disciple of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, had been sent to Spain by the First International. His oratory found fertile ground and soon inspired his own evangelists to take anarchism to village after village. Part of the message was that alcoholism, the frequenting of prostitutes and gambling were degrading. Alongside the advocacy of austerity, Fanelli also argued that justice and equality should be seized by direct action. This struck a chord among the starving day labourers or braceros and gave a new sense of hope and purpose to hitherto sporadic rural uprisings. Fanelli’s eager converts took part in outbreaks of violence, crop burnings and strikes. However, poorly organized, these revolutionary outbursts were easily crushed and alternated with periods of apathy.9
Commenting in 1910 on why revolution was slow in developing, Rafael Shaw wrote:
The patient submission of the labourer to conditions which he believes to be unalterable is partly the result of three hundred years of corrupt government, during which he has been steadily squeezed to provide money for the wars, luxuries, and amusements of the governing classes; partly of the terror of the Inquisition and the tradition of silence that it has left behind it; partly of Oriental fatalism; but is certainly not due to the animal indifference and stupidity to which his ‘betters’ attribute it. The peasant refrains from open complaint, not because he is contented and has nothing to complain of, but because long experience has taught him the uselessness and the danger of protest. He may offend his employer and lose his place, or, still worse, he may offend the Church and the Jesuits, in which case he will be a marked man, and can never hope to get permanent employment again.
Another reason for the lack of protest against the ease with which corruption dominated the political system was that, at the turn of the century, around 75 per cent of the population was illiterate. Thousands of villages had no school at all. Even in Madrid and Barcelona, there were fewer than half of the schools required by law. Where there were schools, attendance was not imposed and schoolteachers were poorly paid and often not paid at all. Rudimentary literacy skills were taught in the army.10 At first, hunger and injustice had found their champions in the banditry for which the south was notorious, but the day labourers had not been long in finding a more sophisticated form of rebellion.11 When they came, the inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were repressed violently by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.
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.
