within the anarchist movement about the need to respond to the repression with ‘the big one’. The original intention had been to kill Conde Bugallal but it was too difficult. The murder was carried out by three militants. A fourth member of their group, who was never identified, dropped out. The car in which Dato was travelling was riddled with bullets from a motorcycle and sidecar ridden by Ramon Casanellas. The notion that a motorbike and sidecar would be the best way to catch Dato unawares came from Casanellas. The gunmen were Pedro Matheu in the sidecar and Luis Nicolau riding pillion.61
This act of revenge for the activities of Martínez Anido and Arlegui was planned by Ramon Archs who, at the behest of Casanellas, also secured the motorbike and sidecar. Archs had previously suffered several arrests and severe beatings by the police. He had an additional motive. When he was only seven years old, his father, Manuel Ars i Solanellas, was one of those executed, in May 1898, in Montjuïc, as a consequence of the failed assassination attempt on the Captain General of Barcelona, Arsenio Martínez Campos, in September 1893 by Paulí Pallàs. Ramon Archs, as Secretary of the CNT metalworkers’ union in Barcelona and head of the CNT self-defence groups, had become an active militant in the war against the bosses, the police and the Sindicatos Libres. Ironically, he had come into contact with leaders of the Sindicatos Libres because his mother worked as a cook in the home of Martínez Anido. In late May 1921, Archs and Pere Vandellós were captured. Both were tortured before being shot. Some days later, the disfigured body of Archs was found dumped in the street, riddled with bullets, savagely stabbed and his genitals cut off. It was claimed that Miguel Arlegui boasted of having amused himself sticking a dagger into Archs’s testicles. Of the three known perpetrators, Matheu was arrested on 13 March and Nicolau was detained in Berlin some months later. Both escaped the death penalty as a result of the deal brokered by the German authorities in return for the extradition of Nicolau. Ramon Casanellas, the speed-merchant who had insisted that a motorbike with sidecar be used, subsequently fled to the USSR and joined the Red Army, where he became an airman. He returned to Spain in 1931 to organize the Catalan Communist Party and in 1933 he died in a motorbike accident en route to a Partido Comunista de España (PCE) Congress in Madrid.62
Significantly, it was only during the period from late 1920 to October 1922, when Martínez Anido was Civil Governor, that the Sindicatos Libres took off as a meaningful trade union organization. This was possible after he had smashed the CNT with brutal violence. Martínez Anido authorized mass arrests, the torture of prisoners and Arlegui’s use of the ley de fugas. He put the Sindicatos Libres under his protection. Their ranks provided many hitmen, Seguí and Layret being among their victims.63 After the prohibition of the CNT and the arrest of many militants and the deportation to the south of others, many anarcho-syndicalists, bereft of an organization, began to seep into the Sindicatos Libres. By October 1921, there were 100,000 members of the Sindicatos Libres and, by the following July, 175,000. Only then did they begin to organize real strikes. However, the Libres never seriously challenged the CNT as defenders of working-class interests. That was hardly surprising given their central role in Martínez Anido’s terror campaign. One of its leaders described them as the Governor’s ‘shock troops’, ‘ready to risk all’ to prevent him leaving Barcelona. In the words of the well-informed journalist Francisco Madrid, ‘they had at their right hand the personal power of General Martínez Anido’.64
Their pistol-toting leaders used a rhetoric of violence. The head of the Libres, the Catalan Carlist Ramón Sales Amenós, was short, fat and well known in the brothels of the barrio chino. Despite his unprepossessing appearance, he was an effectively aggressive orator. His deputy, the fanatical ex-Jesuit Juan Laguía Lliteras, was eventually expelled from the Sindicatos Libres in 1925 because of his uncontrollable aggression which had seen him, three years earlier, physically assault Indalecio Prieto in the Cortes. Like Sales, Laguía was a close crony of Martínez Anido. Moreover, the General was honorary President of one of the most numerous of the Libres’ component unions, the cooks and waiters. With his approval, individual union gunmen were protected by the police, who often handed over CNT pistoleros to the Libres for quick disposal.65 The ‘pacification’ masterminded by Martínez Anido was working. So many CNT militants were in prison that the union could barely function. Key leaders were being targeted and assassinated. However, the boasts of Martínez Anido that he could do as he liked without supervision from the government were causing increasing disquiet in Madrid. He was rightly suspected of collusion in the murder of Layret and had refused to do anything to prevent the mistreatment in custody of Vandellós. The influence of the Libres peaked in the summer of 1922 when Martínez Anido was eventually dismissed after being involved in a Libre plot to murder the CNT leader Ángel Pestaña and to mount a fake assassination attempt against himself. With the CNT legalized and the new Civil Governor cracking down on Libre gunmen, the masses left the Libres and the fighting started again.66
The ongoing unrest in Barcelona underlined the extent to which the Restoration political system was no longer an adequate mechanism for defending the economic interests of the ruling classes. In the background, the King, increasingly sympathetic to the hints of military right-wingers, was making ever more hostile comments about the constitutional system. On a visit to Cordoba in May 1921, he dined in the Casino de la Amistad with a group of local latifundistas. In his speech, he revealed his impatience with a parliamentary system in which his task was limited to signing projected laws that never reached the statute book:
the King is not an absolute monarch and all that he can do is put his signature to projects so that they can go to parliament but he can do nothing to get them approved. I am very happy not to have responsibilities. If I cannot have the responsibilities that were long ago taken from the crown and given to parliament, then I prefer to offer my life to the country. But it is very hard to stand idly by while what is in everyone’s interest cannot progress because of the plotting and pettiness of politics. My government presents a project, it is opposed and the government falls. Its members then become the opposition to their own project. How could they want to help those who killed them! … Some will say that I am exceeding my constitutional duties but I have been a constitutional King for nineteen years and I have risked my life too many times for anyone to catch me out in a constitutional fault … I think that the provinces should start a movement of support for your King and the beneficial projects so that Parliament will remember that it is subject to the orders of the people … Then the King’s signature will be an executive order and a guarantee that projects beneficial for Spain will go forward.
To cover up this faux pas, Juan de la Cierva, who was with him, rapidly scribbled an anodyne version of the speech and persuaded the accompanying press corps to use his text. However, the local press in Cordoba reproduced Alfonso’s actual words. In his memoirs, La Cierva excused what the King had said by claiming that he had just got carried away by the enthusiasm of his audience. Of course, the King was right – the parliamentary system was utterly inefficient – but his words were totally inappropriate for a constitutional monarch. He was widely applauded on the right and thus encouraged the drift to dictatorship.67
Severiano Martinez Anido, the brutal civil governor of Barcelona.
6
From Colonial Disaster to Dictatorship, 1921–1923
Already weakened by disorder in Barcelona, the credibility of the establishment was rocked by the overwhelming defeat of Spanish forces by Moroccan tribesmen at Annual in June 1921. Hostilities had broken out in 1919 after a lengthy period of inaction occasionally interrupted by skirmishes. Peace had been maintained largely by a culture of bribing tribal chieftains which fostered venality and complacence among the Spanish officer corps. While there was no fighting, there was gambling, recourse to prostitutes and dubious moneymaking schemes. These ranged from selling equipment to the tribesmen, via charging the government for the wages of fictitious native mercenaries, to conspiring with local tradesmen to cheat on materials used for road-building projects.1 When systematic local resistance by the indigenous population began, the Spanish occupying forces were as poorly armed and trained