Counting the Victims: The Nationalist Repression in a Small Spanish Town
Richard J. Barker
Presented at the Humanities Forum
of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
Stevens Point, Wisconsin
October 26, 2000
Since 1988 I have been doing research in Castilleja de Campo, the smallest town in the province of Seville. I am writing a history of the town from the beginning of the Republic in 1931 to the Socialist victory in 1982. Naturally, I cannot go into all of that here, so I will limit myself to what the inhabitants themselves perceive as the most dramatic event, what one man I interviewed called "the big boom," the repression. According to the census of December 31, 1935, Castilleja del Campo had a population of 744 inhabitants. Bearing in mind the size of the town and the fact that it offered no resistance when it was occupied on July 24, 1936 by Franco's forces six days after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the measures taken to subdue the population were excessive. Sixteen men were shot.
If we examine the list of men who were shot, we can draw some conclusions about the methods of the nationalist repression in rural southern Spain. The three men who were shot in Seville were in that city when the war began and were arrested there.
All the others were arrested in Castilleja del Campo or in the surrounding countryside where they were hiding. Nevertheless, except in one case, all the victims were shot outside the municipal district of Castilleja del Campo. The exception, José Pérez Rodríguez, the only one who died in the town, was a case of obstinacy. This man was married to the sister of one of my informants who told me the story. While Pérez was being held in the improvised jail in the Castilleja city hall, he told his wife, who had gone to see him, that they were not going to take him somewhere else to shoot him. They were going to have to kill him in the town. In point of fact, when they were loading the prisoners into the truck, he broke through the cordon of Falangists (fascist militiamen), and fled up the street while the Falangists fired at him. He was wounded in one of his legs but, limping, he was able to get to the outskirts of the town where one of the Falangists, who happened to be his first cousin, caught up with him and, with his rifle butt, smashed Pérez in the head.
There were several reasons for killing the victims far from the town. In the case of those who died on August 27, the reason was, in part, that the improvised jail in the city hall was full and the prisoners had to be transported to a jail in a larger town, Sanlúcar la Mayor, and from there they were taken to the place of execution, the Repudio Inn in the municipal district of Espartinas. But later victims were taken directly from Castilleja del Campo to the place where they were shot, the case of those who died the middle of September on the Highway to Umbrete, also in the municipal district of Espartinas. Except for those who died in Seville, all the victims from Castilleja del Campo are buried in the cemetery of Espartinas where there was a mass grave. There would appear to be no logical reason for taking them twenty kilometers from Castilleja. There was also a common grave in Castilleja where unknown victims from other towns are buried. In these cases, the transport of prisoners was nothing less than a kind of shell game to cover up the dimensions of the slaughter, making it difficult to count the victims. It also protected the local authorities like the mayor, the priest, and the local Falange leaders, in other words, those who drew up the lists of the men who were to be shot, allowing the local authorities to say that they were not responsible for the execution of their neighbors, that it was outside forces who were responsible. This was the lie that José Pérez Rodríguez had wanted to expose with his death in the streets of Castilleja del Campo.
Another thing we notice when we examine the list of victims is that the repression in Castilleja del Campo reflects the fact that the Spanish Civil War was essentially a conflict based on class and ideology. Eleven of the sixteen victims, almost seventy five percent, are described professionally as "campesinos," in other words, landless day laborers. These were the members of the rural proletariat that filled the ranks of the anarcho-syndicalist National Congress of Labor (CNT, Congreso Nacional del Trabajo) or the socialist union, the General Workers' Union (UGT, Union General de Trabajadores). Of the other victims, three are men with a middle class or lower middle class trade (a butcher, a mechanic, a barber), the class whose members tended to support the various republican parties. Those that remain pertain to the two liberal professions most harshly punished during the nationalist repression: education and medicine. These professions attracted people who were progressive, anti-traditional, frequently anti-clerical, but people whose humanitarianism often gave them a strong sense of solidarity with the marginalized classes.
La venta del Repudio (término municipal de Espartinas): Manuel Escobar Moreno, Ludgardo García Ramírez, Manuel Monge Romero, y quizás otros hombres de Castilleja del Campo fueron fusilados aquí en la noche del 27 de agosto de 1936.
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El ramal de la carretera de Umbrete (término municipal de Espartinas): José Fernandez Luque, Lucrecio Paz Delgado, Manuel Tebas Escobar, y quizás otros hombres de Castilleja del Campo fueron fusilados aquí en la noche del 14 de agosto de 1936.
El cementerio de Espartinas: Hombres de Castilleja del Campo están enterrados en una fosa común que está entre el panteón nuevo a la izquierda y el muro de nichos a la derecha.
|
Antonio Cruz Cruz |
Manuel Escobar Moreno |
José Fernández Luque |
Ludgardo
García Ramírez |
|
Joaquín León Trejo |
José Luis López Romero |
Enrique
Monge Escobar
|
Manuel Monge Romero |
|
Cándido
Nieves Pérez
|
Lucrecio
Paz Delgado
|
José Pérez Rodríguez |
Braulio Ramírez García |
|
José Ma. Ramírez Mauricio |
José Ramírez Rufino |
Alfredo Reinoso Monge |
Alfredo Reinoso Monge |
I was able to collect images of thirteen of the sixteen men who were shot, photographs or, in the case of José Pérez Rodríguez, the one who died in the streets of Castilleja, or José Ramírez Rufino, the republican mayor, they are a painting and a drawing based on newspaper clippings. In order to locate these images, I had to seek out the family members of these men and I realized that there was another category of victims. Eleven widows and fourteen underage orphans were left with no means of support. Although three of the executed men had small parcels of land, these were confiscated, leaving their widows and orphans without property and, like the families of the other victims, in the most abject poverty. It must be born in mind that widows' pensions were not extended to the wives of Republicans until 1977. These families had no income.
I interviewed four of the orphans. I wanted to know how their mothers had managed to survive. Many of the widows had to move their families in with some relative. Some of them tried working in the fields, but they only earned half of the 5 pesetas, 25 céntimos a day that the men earned and it was not enough. Others entered into domestic service in the houses of well-to-do families, sometimes the same families that had some responsibility for the executions, in exchange for a place to live, meals, and not much else. The most frequent solution was what two of the orphans I interviewed called "estraperlo," or black marketeering. Their mothers would travel by train to the cities of Seville or Huelva with baskets of garbanzo beans, eggs, or other produce to sell in circumvention of the strict rationing of food that was imposed during the postwar years, popularly known in Spain as the "years of hunger." In this way they could earn five pesetas or more a day but they had to pay part of it in bribes to the Civil Guardsmen. Even paying off the authorities, for this type of contraband Otilia Escobar Muñoz's mother served three prison sentences in horrid conditions where hunger, avitaminosis and epidemics were the order of the day. The last time her mother was in jail, Otilia was eleven years old and remembers that when her mother got out, she was suffering from such severe eczema that it looked as if her mother had been cut with a knife beneath the breasts.
Two of the orphans I interviewed had been too young to know their fathers and I realized that, besides being economic victims, the death of their fathers had caused them great psychological suffering. I learned that, in addition to bringing enough extra cassettes and batteries, I also had to arrive at these interviews equipped with packets of Kleenex, because these interviews invariably involved a lot of crying. Those who lived through the repression, the war, and the postwar "years of hunger" in their infancy were more profoundly marked than those who lived through the same experiences as adolescents or adults. Their very character had been formed in an atmosphere of fear, hatred, silence and poverty. They had not known, as had their elders, the relative prosperity of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, immediately preceding the Republic, nor had they known the climate of freedom and hope brought in by the Republic. Then they had lived the greater part of their lives bombarded by the propaganda of a regime that justified its origin in a military rebellion and civil war depicted as necessary to save the country by purging it of the evil and traitorous enemies of Spain. How could these orphans defend themselves against the libel hurled at their fathers when they had never even met them? The two orphans of this age that I interviewed felt obliged at some point in the interview to cite some positive opinion they had heard about their fathers so that I would know that they had not been such bad men.
Besides the widows, economic victims, and in the final analysis, punished as a secondary effect of the punishment of the husband, there were also women who suffered the nationalist repression directly. In neighboring towns like Manzanilla, nine kilometers from Castilleja, there were even some women who were shot. This did not happen to any of the women of Castilleja but in early September, 1936, there were ten women who suffered the typical fascist humiliation: they had to ingest a large dose of the purgative castor oil, their heads were shaved and they were forced to march through the whole town to the beat of a drum while singing "Cara al sol," the hymn of the Falange. Seven of them were related to men who were shot.
The purpose of the repression in the nationalist zone was to subdue the population by means of terror. Consequently, I include as another category of victims of the repression all those men of republican ideology who had to serve in the forces of Franco. They could not cross to the other side for fear of reprisals against their families. Some were obliged to enlist in falangist militias to avoid being shot. Terror put them in the conflictive situation of risking their lives fighting against their own ideals. Seventy-nine men from Castilleja del Campo, more than ten per cent of the population, were classified in 1940 as ex-combatants in the forces of Franco. It is impossible to know how many of them favored the Republic and how many were on the right but, given the economic and ideological makeup of the town at the start of the war, it is probable that more than half were Republicans. Seven of them were brothers of men who were shot. Not only were they fighting against their own ideals, they were fighting in defense of the murderers of their brothers.
En esta foto, sacada en el lado franquista del frente de Málaga, los cuatro hombres de pie en la segunda fila son, de izquierda a derecha, Celedonio Escobar Reinoso, Modesto Escobar Moreno, Antonio García Ramírez, y Antonio Monge Pérez, todos de Castilleja del Campo. He entrevistado a Celedonio Escobar Reinoso y Antonio Monge Pérez y sé que son de izquierda. Antonio Monge Pérez es hijo de Felisa Pérez Vera, una de las mujeres humilladas en septiembre de 1936. Modesto Escobar Moreno y Antonio García Ramírez son hermanos, respectivamente, de Manuel Escobar Moreno y Ludgardo García Ramírez, fusilados el 27 de agosto de 1936.
I have a photograph, taken on the nationalist side of the Malaga front. The four men standing in the second row are, from left to right, Celedonio Escobar Reinoso, Modesto Escobar Moreno, Antonio García Ramírez, and Antonio Monge Pérez, all from Castilleja del Campo. I have interviewed Celedonio Escobar Reinoso and Antonio Monge Pérez and I know they were Republicans. Antonio Monge Pérez is the son of Felisa Pérez Vera, one of the women humiliated in September 1936. Modesto Escobar Moreno and Antonio García Ramírez are brothers, respectively, of Manuel Escobar Moreno and Ludgardo García Ramírez, shot on August 27, 1936.
The fate of Antonio García Ramírez is especially moving. After the Civil War, he was forced to enlist as a "volunteer" in the "Blue Division" that Franco sent to Hitler to fight against the Soviet Union during the Second World War. He was wounded in a leg and died when the hospital where he was being cured was destroyed by Soviet artillery. Antonio García Ramírez is a unique case in Castilleja del Campo: the only one from the town who died in combat, an incredible fact when one considers that men from Castilleja participated in such bloody combats as the second battle of Brunete and the battle of the Ebro, incredible but also significant. In a Civil War in which the enemy could be the next door neighbor or a first cousin, the trenches were perhaps less dangerous then the streets of one's hometown. Some men I interviewed spoke of experiencing more fear when at home on leave than when they were at the front.
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