Kitabı oku: «The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain», sayfa 13

There has been considerable debate about the accuracy of Gil Robles’s figures. The most exhaustive recent study, by Eduardo González Calleja, reached the figure of 351 dead. Significantly, the highest figures – sixty-seven for Madrid, and Seville with thirty-four – were reached in cities where Falangist gunmen were at their most active. The next highest are Santander with twenty-three and Málaga with twenty. Other southern provinces produced substantial numbers, such as Granada with fourteen, Murcia with thirteen, Córdoba with eleven, Cáceres with ten and Huelva with eight. Other highly conflictive provinces produced surprisingly low figures, such as Jaén with one, Badajoz and Cádiz each with four and Almería with three. However, focus on numbers of fatal victims, important though it is, misses the wider issue of the daily violence of grinding poverty and social abuse. Another study, by Rafael Cruz, claims that 43 per cent of all deaths were caused by the forces of order. They were the result of overreaction in repressing pacific demonstrations, the victims of which were almost exclusively of the left. Those same forces of order were to support the military uprising despite the fact that the highest number of deaths was in March and that thereafter the level of fatalities gradually diminished.¹⁰⁹

Disorder was frequent but sporadic and hardly universal. A picture of total anarchy was being painted in the press and the speeches of Gil Robles and others by simply grouping together as ‘social disorders’ all brawls, fights and strikes, however insignificant. Incidents were magnified and statistics inflated. In Madrid, the American Ambassador Claude Bowers was told tales of uncontrolled mobs butchering monarchists and feeding their bodies to pigs.¹¹⁰ Fear of violence and disorder was generated by what was read about other places. Some of those who expressed their disgust at the breakdown of law and order also spoke of their relief that, thankfully, it had not reached their own towns.¹¹¹

The statistics are meaningless without their social context. For instance, in Torrevieja (Alicante) in early March, it was reported that ‘extremists’ had burned down a hermitage, a hotel, the club of the Radical Party and the municipal registry. What happened was that shots were fired from the hotel balcony on a peaceful demonstration complete with brass band that was passing and one of the demonstrators was wounded. This provoked the attack on the hotel and the other crimes. Among those arrested and accused of responsibility for the shooting were the owner of the hotel, the parish priest and two of his brothers and a teacher from the town’s Catholic school.¹¹²

As late as 1 July, Mola complained that ‘there have been efforts to provoke violence between right and left that we could use as an excuse to proceed but so far – despite the help of some political elements – it has not fully materialized because there are still idiots who believe in coexistence with representatives of the masses who dominate the Popular Front’.¹¹³ The perfect conditions for a coup may not have been achieved to Mola’s satisfaction, but the violence of right-wing gunmen, incendiary speeches by Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles and the gloss put on events by the rightist media had gone a long way towards pushing the middle classes into the arms of the military conspirators.

Gil Robles’s public pronouncements should be seen in the light of his clandestine support of the military conspiracy, which he described as ‘a legitimate resistance movement against the anarchy which threatened the very life of the country’. At the end of May, he advised the American journalist Edward Knoblaugh to take his holidays in early July so as to be back in time to cover the military coup.¹¹⁴ On 27 February 1942, he sent from Lisbon a signed declaration to the Francoist authorities about his role in the coup, stating that he had ‘co-operated with advice, with moral stimulus, with secret orders for collaboration, and even with economic assistance, taken in appreciable quantities from the party’s electoral funds’. This last was a reference to 500,000 pesetas which he gave to Mola, confident that its original donors would have approved of his action. Part of the money was used to pay the Falangists and Carlist Requetés who joined the military rebels in Pamplona on 19 July.¹¹⁵ Gil Robles also tried to help Mola in negotiating the terms of the Carlist role in the uprising. In early July, he accompanied the owner of ABC, Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, to Saint Jean de Luz, in a vain attempt to persuade the Carlist leader, Manuel Fal Conde, to drop his demand for the rebels to carry the monarchist flag and adopt the monarchist anthem.¹¹⁶

Throughout June and July, Gil Robles instructed provincial CEDA leaders that, on the outbreak of the rising, all party members were to join the military immediately, party organizations were to offer full collaboration, youth sections were to join the army and not form separate militias, party members were not to take part in reprisals against the left, power struggles with other rightist groups were to be avoided, and the maximum financial aid was to be given to the authorities. Only the instruction about reprisals was ignored, and CEDA members were prominent in the repression, especially in Granada and the cities of Old Castile. The first section of the CEDA to join the rising was the Derecha Regional Valenciana. Its moderate Christian Democrat leader Luis Lucia had been marginalized by the secretary general, José María Costa Serrano. When General Mola was finalizing civilian participation in June, Costa Serrano offered 1,250 men for the early moments of the rising and promised 10,000 after five hours and 50,000 after five days. Alongside local sections of the Falange, Renovación Española and the Carlists, the radical wing of the DRV was placed by Costa Serrano under the orders of the military junta. At the beginning of the war, Lucia issued a statement condemning the coup. As a right-wing politician, he went into hiding from the anarchists only to be caught and imprisoned in Barcelona. Nevertheless, in 1939 he was tried and sentenced to death by the Francoists for the alleged offence of military rebellion. His sentence was later commuted to thirty years in prison.¹¹⁷

Military intervention came to seem an ever more urgent necessity in the eyes of landowners as a result of the Socialist campaign for the recovery of common lands which enjoyed the support of the Minister of Agriculture, Mariano Ruiz-Funes.¹¹⁸ The rhetoric of the landowners, and that of their press, generated an apocalyptic sense of utter catastrophe. On 10 July, ABC lamented that 80 per cent of the land would be in the hands of municipalities and that there would be towns where private property would disappear.¹¹⁹ The younger members of landowning families joined the Falange. Anticipating the coup, many owners moved into their homes in the larger towns of the province, or to Madrid or Seville, or, in the case of the very rich, even to Biarritz or Paris, where they contributed finance and expectantly awaited news of the military plot. Behind them they left gangs of Falangists who attacked local Socialists with the protection of the Civil Guard. In Don Benito, the Civil Guard helped local Falangists when they firebombed the Casa del Pueblo.¹²⁰ The FNTT frequently complained that the victims of the Civil Guard were always workers and denounced the stockpiling of arms by the landowners. It was claimed that, in Puebla de Almoradiel in the south of Toledo, the local right had two hundred shotguns, three hundred pistols and more than fifty rifles.¹²¹ When workers tried to collect unpaid wages from the landowners, they were often confronted by the Civil Guard. Those who had made such demands were invariably among the victims of the right-wing columns that captured their towns in the early months of the Civil War.¹²²

The hatred between the landless peasants and the owners and their administrators was part of daily life in the south. One major landowner from Seville, Rafael de Medina, wrote of ‘the incomprehension of the haves and the envy of the have-nots’, of those who walked in rope sandals (alpargatas) and those who travelled by car. As he and his father drove past labourers walking along a country road, they noted their ‘grimfaced look, of such profound contempt and such outright bitterness, that it had the force of a thunderbolt’. Medina always carried a pistol at meetings to discuss working conditions with union leaders.¹²³

The hatred was explained by the Civil Governor of Seville, José María Varela Rendueles. Many of the really big owners, dukes, counts and even very rich non-aristocratic owners, lived in Paris or Biarritz or Madrid. They visited their lands occasionally to hunt and to show them off to their friends. While there, their contempt for the labourers was manifest. They, like the less grand landowners who lived on their estates, would often laughingly take advantage of the wives, sisters and daughters of their labourers. Their administrators ran the estates, hiring and firing arbitrarily, ignoring the law. After the abuses of 1933–5, the return of left-wing town councils after the February 1936 elections saw a reversal of fortunes. The prevailing spirit was one not of conciliation but of outright hatred. As Varela Rendueles put it, the landless labourers wanted to follow the example of their ‘betters’: ‘all they wanted to do was to repeat the barbaric lessons that they had been taught’.¹²⁴

A key element of the hatred between the rural poor and the rich, Varela Rendueles noted, was the way in which proletarian women were used and abused. Baldomero Díaz de Entresotos expressed the patronizing and exploitative attitude of the rural middle classes when he wrote indignantly of those who tried to break free of the prostitution into which they had been forced:

You lived off the romantic adventures of the señorito … Those señoritos, once your friends, used to live for you just as you lived for them. You think they stole municipal funds? I don’t think so but if they did the people’s money returned to the people as represented by pretty proletarian women. The señoritos were unable to stay away. At siesta time, they came to your whorehouses, sat in their shirtsleeves in the shade of trailing vines and left you banknotes on the beer crates. They livened up the tedium of your nights with wine and music. They were real democrats. Is there any greater democracy than to sleep in the arms of the daughters of the people? Generous, truly Andalusian, señoritos.¹²⁵

The perception and empathy with which Varela Rendueles interpreted rural tensions was rare. In notes for his unfinished autobiography, General Sanjurjo made the revealing comment: ‘In reality, the agrarian problem in the name of which so many mistakes are made to the detriment of landowners and against the overall economy of Spain, exists only in Madrid on the lips of demagogues who use it as a way of exciting and manipulating the rural population. The agrarian problem was an invention of people like Margarita Nelken.’¹²⁶

Mola had complained on 1 July that the planned spiral of provocation and reprisal had not persuaded public opinion to consider a military uprising legitimate. Less than two weeks later that goal was reached. On the evening of 12 July, Falangist gunmen murdered a lieutenant of the Assault Guards, José del Castillo Sáenz de Tejada.¹²⁷ This crime derived much of its catastrophic impact from the fact that, two months earlier, on 7 May, Castillo’s friend Captain Carlos Faraudo de Miches had been shot dead by a Falangist squad. On that same day, the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, showed his adjutant, Major Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros of the air force, a right-wing blacklist of fourteen members of the Unión Militar Republicana Antifascista, which had been created in late 1935 to combat the activities of the UME. Faraudo was number one, Castillo number two and Hidalgo de Cisneros fourth.¹²⁸

After Faraudo’s murder, calls for reprisals had been silenced. However, when Castillo was also assassinated, fellow Assault Guards from the Pontejos barracks just behind the Dirección General de Seguridad in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were determined on revenge. In the early hours of the following day, they set out to take revenge on a prominent right-wing politician. Failing to find Gil Robles who was holidaying in Biarritz, they kidnapped Calvo Sotelo and, shortly after he got into the truck, one of them shot him. His body was then taken to the municipal cemetery where it was discovered the next morning.¹²⁹ Republican and Socialist leaders were appalled and the authorities immediately began a thorough investigation. For the right, it was the opportunity to launch the coup for which the lengthy preparations were on the point of fruition.

At Calvo Sotelo’s burial, Antonio Goicoechea swore to ‘imitate your example, avenge your death and save Spain’. Even more bellicose was the speech made to the standing committee of the Cortes on 15 July by the Conde de Vallellano, on behalf of the Carlists and Renovación Española. Vallellano, referring rather inaccurately to ‘this unprecedented crime in our political history’, claimed that Calvo Sotelo had opposed all violence. Accusing the Popular Front deputies collectively of responsibility, he announced the monarchist abandonment of parliament. In what was to be his last parliamentary intervention, Gil Robles expressed his agreement with Vallellano and blamed both the violence of recent months and the assassination on the government. Knowing full well the objectives of the imminent military uprising, he declared that the parties of the Popular Front would be the first victims of the coming backlash.¹³⁰

PART TWO

5

Queipo’s Terror: The Purging of the South

The assassination of Calvo Sotelo seemed to confirm the direst predictions of the right-wing press, and the military conspirators pressed ahead. Yet only six weeks earlier, Mola, at his headquarters in Pamplona, had been so depressed by fear that the coup might fail and be followed by the revenge of the left-wing masses that he contemplated resigning his command and retiring to Cuba. He was assailed by doubts about the crucial participation of Spain’s Moroccan forces – the locally recruited mercenaries of the Native Regulars (Regulares Indígenas) and the two sections into which the Spanish Foreign Legion (Tercio de Extranjeros) was organized. Mola’s alarm had been triggered on 2 June 1936 when the Prime Minister and Minister of War, Santiago Casares Quiroga, removed a key conspirator, Lieutenant Colonel Heli Rolando de Tella, from command of the First Legion based in Melilla on the Mediterranean coast of Spanish Morocco. Even more worrying was the fact that, the next day, Casares Quiroga sent for Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe, who had been placed in overall charge of the uprising in the colony.¹

While waiting to hear Yagüe’s fate, Mola enjoyed a major stroke of luck on 3 June. The Director General of Security, José Alonso Mallol, swooped on Pamplona with a dozen police-filled trucks to search for arms. However, the plotters, warned in advance by Mola’s collaborator, the police superintendent Santiago Martín Báguenas, ensured that no evidence was found.² They were even more fortunate two weeks later when Yagüe was left in post. Having practised extraordinary brutality during the repression in Asturias in October 1934, Yagüe was bitterly hated on the left. He in turn had ample reason to resent the Republic, having been demoted in 1932 from lieutenant colonel to major by Azaña’s military reforms, which had reversed many of the rapid promotions enjoyed by the Africanistas. Humiliated by losing eighty-two places in the seniority list, he had had to wait a year before being restored to the rank of lieutenant colonel.³ Yagüe commanded the Second Legion in Ceuta on the southern side of the Straits of Gibraltar. Loudly indiscreet in his hostility to the government, he enjoyed the unquestioning loyalty of the tattooed mercenaries under his command.

Leading Socialists had repeatedly warned Casares Quiroga that it was dangerous to leave Yagüe in post. Yet, when he arrived on 12 June, he was offered a transfer either to a desirable post on the Spanish mainland or to a plum position as a military attaché in Rome. Yagüe replied curtly that he would burn his uniform rather than leave the Legion. To Mola’s relief, Casares weakly acquiesced and let him return to Morocco. After their meeting, Casares said to his adjutant, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, ‘Yagüe is a gentleman, a perfect officer, and I am sure that he would never betray the Republic. He has given me his word of honour and his promise as an officer that he will always loyally serve the Republic. And men like Yagüe keep their word.’ It was a major political error.⁴

In the event, Mola was persuaded by senior Carlists to stay aboard and, regaining his resolve, began to make every effort to ensure the rising’s success. Nevertheless, in the second week of July, during the fiesta of San Fermín, Mola was again plunged into despair by news brought to Pamplona by his younger brother Ramón. The thirty-nine-year-old Ramón, an infantry captain in Barcelona, was Emilio’s liaison with the plotters there. The Generalitat’s security services had uncovered the plans for the rising in Catalonia and a deeply pessimistic Ramón begged his brother to desist. Emilio replied that it was too late and ordered Ramón to return to Barcelona. It was a virtual death sentence. When the coup failed, as Ramón had predicted, he shot himself. This contributed to the further brutalization of Mola. In contrast, he would be unmoved by the fact that the President of the Generalitat, Lluís Companys, saved the life of his father, the eighty-three-year-old retired General of the Civil Guard Emilio Mola López.⁵

The first of Mola’s secret instructions, issued in April, echoed the practice of the Africanistas against the Rif tribesmen, calling for extreme violence to shock the left into paralysis. Throughout the army as a whole, commitment to the conspiracy was far from unanimous. If it had been, it is unlikely that there would have been a civil war. Thus, Mola’s third secret instruction ordered the immediate execution of officers who opposed, or refused to join, the coup. The fifth instruction, of 20 June, had declared that ‘the timid and the hesitant should be warned that he who is not with us is against us and will be treated as an enemy’.⁶ Thus the first victims executed by the military rebels would be fellow army officers.

On 24 June, Mola sent specific instructions to Yagüe. He urged three main principles: extreme violence, tempo and high mobility: ‘Vacillations lead only to failure.’⁷ Six days later, Yagüe received a more detailed set of twenty-five instructions about the organization of the repression. They included the following: use Moorish forces; delegate control of public order and security in the cities to the Falange; arrest all suspect authorities; eliminate all leftist elements (Communists, anarchists, trade unionists, Masons and so on); shut down all public meeting places; prohibit all demonstrations, strikes and public and private meetings.⁸ These instructions were the blueprint for the repression unleashed on Spain’s Moroccan territories on the night of 17 July. By sheer force of personality, Yagüe entirely dominated the overall commander of forces in Morocco, General Agustín Gómez Morato. Between 5 and 12 July, in the Llano Amarillo in the Ketama Valley, manoeuvres involving 20,000 troops from the Legion and the Regulares saw Yagüe’s tent become the epicentre of the African end of the conspiracy as he briefed the principal rebel officers. The manoeuvres concluded with Falangist chants.⁹

On 17 July, at Melilla, headquarters of the Second Legion, the general in command, Manuel Romerales Quintero, having refused to join the plotters, was arrested and shot for his ‘extremist ideas’. The rebels, headed by Colonel Luis Solans-Labedán, very soon had nearly one thousand prisoners in a concentration camp. When the overall commander General Gómez Morato flew to Melilla, he was immediately arrested. In Tetuán, in the western half of the Protectorate, Colonel Eduardo Sáenz de Buruaga and Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Asensio Cabanillas detained the acting High Commissioner, Arturo Álvarez Buylla, who was shot some time later. On the night of 17–18 July, the rebels shot 225 soldiers and civilians in Morocco.¹⁰

Among the first of them was one of the most brilliant officers in the Spanish forces, Captain Virgilio Leret Ruiz, a thirty-four-year-old pilot and an aeronautical engineer of genius, the commander of the Atalayón seaplane base at Melilla. He had opposed the rebels, been detained and shot after a summary trial. His wife Carlota O’Neill, a left-wing feminist, dramatist and journalist, was arrested and separated from her daughters Carlota and Mariela. Many other wives and daughters of Republicans were seized, raped and tortured by Falangists. This was central to the reign of terror initiated by Luis Solans. In late September, a gang of Falangists came to the prison with the intention of killing all the female detainees to celebrate the rebel capture of Toledo. The director of the prison reprimanded them, saying, ‘it’s outrageous to kill them all at once. When you want to kill women, by all means come and get them, but one at a time.’ They left with several victims who were never seen again. After eighteen months in prison, Carlota O’Neill was court-martialled, accused of speaking Russian, of subversion and of responsibility for her husband’s actions on 17 July 1937. Nevertheless, she was sentenced to ‘only’ six years.¹¹

Having secured their Moroccan base, the rebels’ next objective was Cádiz, the crucial port where the African Army would disembark. At 1.00 a.m. on 18 July, the military commander of Cádiz, Brigadier General José López-Pinto, assured the Civil Governor, Mariano Zapico, of his loyalty to the Republic. Three hours later, he declared for the rebels, imposed martial law and ordered the release of Brigadier General José Enrique Varela Iglesias. Arrested by the Republican authorities on 17 July rightly suspected of military conspiracy, Varela would play a central role in the rebel cause. The civilian plotters in Cádiz were led by a prominent landowner, José de Mora-Figueroa, the Marqués de Tamarón. Mora-Figueroa was head of the Falange in Cádiz; his brother Manuel, a naval officer, led its militia. In liaison with one of the key plotters in Seville, Ramón de Carranza, a retired naval captain, who was also Marqués de Soto Hermoso, the Mora-Figueroa brothers had been busy purchasing and stockpiling weapons.

Now, López Pinto and Varela were quickly joined by Mora-Figueroa’s Falangists. The Republican authorities took refuge in the town hall and the offices of the Civil Governor. They were defended by several hundred sparsely armed civilian Republicans and about fifty Assault Guards. López Pinto and Varela had about three hundred soldiers, fifty-odd Falangists and Carlist Requetés and a dozen Civil Guards. The buildings were subjected to artillery bombardment but held out until the arrival from Ceuta, late on the night of 18 July, of the destroyer Churruca and a merchant steamer carrying a unit of Regulares.¹² Thereafter, the coup was certain of success in the city.

One after another the following morning, the town hall, the Civil Governor’s offices, the telephone exchange, the main post office and the headquarters of left-wing parties and trades unions surrendered virtually without resistance. All those within were detained and numerous members of the town council murdered without even a semblance of a trial. The Mayor, Manuel de la Pinta Leal, was not in Cádiz at the time of the coup and thus in no position to oppose it. Nevertheless, he was arrested in Córdoba in September, taken to Cádiz and shot. Over the days following the capture of Cádiz, the Civil Governor, the President of the provincial assembly (Diputación) and numerous officers who had refused to join the rebellion were accused of military rebellion. While detained, they wrote statements pointing out the absurdity of the accusations, since they were obeying the orders of the legal government and had merely defended themselves. Before any trials could take place, they and several others, including a Socialist parliamentary deputy and the town-hall lawyer, were simply taken from prison and murdered on or about 16 August, on the orders of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, rebel commander of the south.¹³

The annihilation of less prominent leftists took place as follows. The rebels first closed off the narrow tongue of land that connected Cádiz to the rest of Spain. Groups of Falangists, Civil Guards and Regulares then searched and looted houses. Liberals and leftists, Freemasons and trade unionists, were arrested en masse. Some were shot directly in the street. Others were taken to Falange headquarters in the Casino where they were subjected to sadistic torture. They were forced to ingest a litre of castor oil and industrial alcohol mixed with sawdust and breadcrumbs. In acute abdominal pain, they were savagely beaten. A so-called ‘Tribunal of Blood’ was established and each day would select twenty-five of the detainees for execution. Over six hundred of those arrested in Cádiz were executed in the next five months and more than one thousand in the course of the war. A further three hundred would be executed between the end of the war and 1945. These figures do not include those who died in prison as a result of torture.¹⁴

The conquest of the remainder of the province was carried out with the enthusiastic collaboration of the local landowning class, many of whose younger elements had already joined the Falange or the Requeté. In Alcalá de los Gazules, to the east of Cádiz, local Falangists and Civil Guards took control of the town immediately, murdering the Mayor and town councillors, along with fifty others. In the surrounding villages, Popular Front Committees had been formed. They had detained those rightists known to support the coup and began to distribute grain and cattle among the families of landless labourers. The local landlords responded immediately by providing horses for a mounted squad to recover their property. Moving south-west, through Roche and Campano between Chiclana and Conil, the squad recaptured numerous estates that had been occupied by peasant families. Men, women and children were seized and taken back to Alcalá de los Gazules, many to be killed.¹⁵

After the fall of Cádiz, José Mora-Figueroa took his men to Jérez de la Frontera where the rising had triumphed immediately thanks to the decisive action of the military commander, another scion of a local landowning family, Major Salvador de Arizón Mejía, the Marqués de Casa Arizón, director of the army’s horse-breeding and training establishment. He and his brother, Captain Juan de Arizón Mejía, used the horses from their unit to ride out in columns to take control of the surrounding areas.¹⁶ Mora-Figueroa also organized mounted groups with friends and their employees, which he put at the disposal of the military authorities in Cádiz.¹⁷ The aim was not just to crush opposition to the rising but also to reverse the agrarian conquests of the previous years.

Most of the other principal towns of the province fell quickly. On 19 July, Salvador Arizón Mejía sent troops from Jérez to seize the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the north. Supporters of the Popular Front held them off until, on 21 July, a force of Regulares entered the town, killing twelve citizens including nine in one house. Executions began immediately, although a few leftists escaped in small boats. Eighty people were shot over the next five months.¹⁸ In Rota, nothing happened on 18 July. The following day, having been deceived into believing that the Civil Guard and Carabineros were loyal, the town’s anarchists, Socialists and Communists joined in declaring a general strike and establishing an anti-fascist committee. Falangists and other rightists were detained and roads into the town barricaded. When the Civil Guard declared in favour of the rebels, the anti-fascist committee surrendered without a fight. Despite the absence of left-wing violence, the Falange and the Civil Guard set about the systematic annihilation of the town’s relatively few liberals and leftists. They were tortured and forced to drink castor oil, and over sixty were shot at night, their ears cut off as trophies.¹⁹

The ambience in Jérez itself could be deduced from a broadcast on Radio Jérez on 24 July by the monarchist intellectual José María Pemán. He sang a hymn of praise to the war against what he called ‘hordes of barbarian invaders’. The implicit comparison of the working-class left with the Berber invaders of 711 was emphasized when he declared, ‘The war with its flashes of gunfire has opened our eyes. The idea of political alternation has been replaced for ever by that of extermination and expulsion, which is the only valid response against an enemy which is wreaking more destruction in Spain than any ever caused by a foreign invasion.’²⁰

An experienced Africanista, Captain Mariano Gómez de Zamalloa, arrived in Jérez from Ceuta to take overall charge of the landowners’ mounted columns.²¹ The recovery of estates in the surrounding area seized by leftists fell to the column led by the Marqués de Casa Arizón. Another column was organized by José Mora-Figueroa’s brother Manuel, with the scions of other aristocratic and landowning families and of sherry magnates, like the Duque de Medina-Sidonia and Estanislao Domecq y González. The self-styled Tercio Mora-Figueroa was made up initially of three hundred young rightists, Falangists, sons of landowners and workers from the Catholic unions.