of the Juntas. When a number of captains taking a course at the staff college (Escuela Superior de Guerra) refused to join the Juntas de Defensa, they were subjected to an honour court and eventually expelled from the college, with the support of the Minister of War.38
This led to the fall of Sánchez de Toca’s government on 9 December 1919. He was replaced by another Conservative follower of Maura, Manuel Allendesalazar, who was close to La Cierva. He appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona the dour Francisco Maestre Laborde-Bois, Conde de Salvatierra, who had earned a reputation as a brutal Civil Governor of Seville. The outgoing Civil Governor, Julio Amado, bumped into Seguí and other CNT moderates who were returning from a congress in Madrid. ‘Be very careful,’ he warned them, ‘those gentlemen want blood and I wasn’t willing to spill it.’39 With the industrialists’ lock-out still in force, Salvatierra’s repressive policies saw an intensification of street violence. Debilitated by the lock-out and the months without pay, their families and they themselves hungry, unable to pay their rent, the anarcho-syndicalists were weary. This situation discredited the moderate union leaders and ensured the rise of the action groups. The most determined of their leaders was Ramon Archs i Serra, Secretary of the metalworkers’ union. On 4 January 1920, there was a failed assassination attempt on Salvador Seguí. On the following day, the President of the Federació Patronal, Félix Graupera, was wounded. The Conde de Salvatierra had over a hundred union leaders arrested and closed a large number of workers’ centres and the syndicalists’ newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. On 23 January, Salvatierra decreed the closing of all CRT–CNT unions. Without consulting the government, Milans del Bosch backed him by establishing martial law. He then demanded that the Somatén be given full military authority. A reluctant Allendesalazar agreed under pressure from garrisons from all over Spain as well as from the Somatén.40
In February, the publication of correspondence revealing his nefarious activities in previous years saw the dismissal of Milans del Bosch. There were rumours that he was preparing a coup, but he had insufficient ambition. Significantly, he was ‘rewarded’ by the King with the highly prestigious post of head of the royal household. He was replaced briefly as Captain General of Catalonia by the eighty-two-year-old hard-liner General Valeriano Weyler.41
Eduardo Dato took power on 5 May 1920 and Koenig was expelled from Spain. After the repressive interval of Allendesalazar, Dato returned to the moderate policies of Sánchez de Toca. He appointed the moderate Francisco Bergamín as Minister of the Interior and the equally reasonable Federico Carlos Bas as Civil Governor of Barcelona. Bas noted that the majority of assassination attempts were directed against workers. In consequence, he was convinced that it was the vindictive approach of the Federació Patronal that kept terrorism alive. He began to release prisoners and lifted press censorship. The industrialists’ opposition ensured that he was in post for barely six months. Thus Dato’s moderation was to little or no avail. On 4 August, the Conde de Salvatierra, the ex-Civil Governor of Barcelona, was murdered in Valencia while returning from the port in a horse-drawn carriage.42 Dato was forced to replace Bergamín with the hard-line Conde Gabino Bugallal. Tension was rising in Barcelona where a major strike in the metallurgical industries broke out in mid-October. Just as Seguí was bringing the strike to an end, virtually on the employers’ terms, on 31 October, Jaume Pujol, the President of the federation of the employers in the electricity sector, was murdered.
Bas, who was negotiating with Seguí, was visited by the Military Governor, General Severiano Martínez Anido. In an intemperate confrontation, Martínez Anido declared that all social violence in Barcelona was the work of anarchists in the pay of Russia. He presented Bas with a list of seventy-eight anarchists, including Seguí and Pestaña, whom he demanded be shot immediately. Bas responded, ‘I am neither an executioner nor a despot,’ and presented his resignation to Bugallal. On 8 November 1920, Bas was replaced as Civil Governor by Martínez Anido, who was told by Dato: ‘act as you see fit; the Government will put no obstacles in your way’. When Seguí learned of the appointment, he declared, ‘they are going to massacre us’. Echoing the words of his predecessor Julio Amado, Bas asserted on leaving Barcelona, ‘They are throwing me out because I am not prepared to be a murdering governor.’43
The entire operation to get rid of Bas had been choreographed by a group of businessmen and army officers including Martínez Anido himself, the chief of police, Colonel Miguel Arlegui Bayonés of the Civil Guard, and Captain Lasarte. Now Civil Governor, Martínez Anido was incensed by a revealing article by Andreu Nin, an up-and-coming figure in the CNT, who had written: ‘Now we have a murderer as governor; the bosses can be pleased.’44
Despite the brief triumph of the Canadiense strike, already by the beginning of 1920 things were going badly for CNT. In addition to the various offensives being undertaken by the industrialists, the post-war economy was contracting. Wildcat strikes were hardly the best tactic to prevent lay-offs and wage-cuts. The employers’ lock-out had left 200,000 men without work. Matters were made even worse by the promotion of the vicious Martínez Anido to Civil Governor of Barcelona. Now in overall charge of public order and in a position to wage war on the CNT, Martínez Anido, assisted by Miguel Arlegui, instituted a regime of terror. The tall Arlegui, beneath whose aquiline nose grew a small moustache, was even more sadistic than Martínez Anido. He enjoyed torturing prisoners. The upper and middle classes of Barcelona were ecstatic about the pair’s appointment. On the basis of Lasarte’s card index, sixty-four trade unionists and liberals, including Pestaña, Seguí and his friend the journalist Lluís Companys, were identified and arrested. Thirty-six were sent to the prison of La Mola in Mahon, Menorca. Martínez Anido had the gall to suggest that it was for their safety. In Barcelona, prisons were overflowing with a further 1,000 less prominent militants and many had to be confined on ships in the port. There was an increase in street shootings that could not be blamed on the anarchists since most of the likely suspects were in prison. Hundreds of CNT members were deported to distant Spanish provinces, forced to make the long journeys in chains, shod only in rope sandals. They were then left without sustenance to survive as best they could but obliged to report every day to the local Civil Guard post. Two hundred militants fled Barcelona and joined the Spanish Foreign Legion to fight in Morocco. Gunmen from the recently created scab organization the Sindicatos Libres were trained in military barracks.45
Shortly after midnight on 12 September 1920, a bomb exploded in a packed workmen’s music hall, the Cabaret Pompeya in the Paralelo, killing six workers and seriously injuring eighteen more, including many moderates who opposed violence. The CNT, believing that the bomb was the work of assassins in the pay of the employers’ association, declared its readiness to help in bringing the culprits to justice. Nevertheless, the police began to round up members of the Sindicato Único. Nearly 150,000 workers attended the funeral of those killed. It was eventually revealed that the perpetrator was Inocencio Feced Calvo, a diminutive and sickly ex-anarchist from Teruel who had tuberculosis. During the lock-out, in desperate need of money to buy medicine, he had agreed to become an informer. Thereafter, he had been blackmailed into becoming an agent provocateur by the threat of being exposed to his comrades.46
Arlegui implemented the so-called ley de fugas (the shooting in the back of prisoners forced to run but, allegedly, ‘trying to escape’). This tactic enjoyed considerable approval within the army high command. General Miguel Primo de Rivera, at the time Captain General of Valencia, wrote to Eduardo Dato on 21 January 1921: ‘Social disturbers should be rounded up, then, on their way to prison, a few bullets and the problem is solved. There is no other way to deal with this matter since ordinary justice and legislation are ineffective …’47 The principal targets of the gunmen seemed to be the more moderate elements of the CRT. On 17 November, for instance, José Canela, a close friend of Seguí, was assassinated. In the three weeks after Martínez Anido took over, there were twenty-two deaths on both sides. On 30 November, the republican parliamentary deputy Francesc Layret was murdered on his way to request the release of Companys. A huge multitude followed the funeral cortège of Layret.48 It was Feced who later revealed that the assassination had been organized by Martínez Anido and Arlegui in conjunction with the leaders of the Sindicatos Libres, Ramón Sales Amenós and Juan Laguía Lliteras. The three gunmen were paid by the industrialist Maties Muntadas, who had previously financed the activities of Bravo Portillo.49 Muntadas was not the only source of finance for Martínez Anido’s