new town councils, shut down trade union offices and take truckloads of prisoners back to Seville for execution.63
On 27 July, Carranza’s column reached one such town, Rociana in Huelva, where the left had taken over in response to news of the military coup. There had been no casualties but a ritual destruction of the symbols of right-wing power, the premises of the landowners’ association and two clubs, one used by the local Falange. Twenty-five sheep belonging to a wealthy local landowner were stolen. The parish church and rectory had been set alight, but the parish priest, the sixty-year-old Eduardo Martínez Laorden, his niece and her daughter who lived with him had been saved by local Socialists and given refuge in the house of the Mayor. On 28 July, Father Martínez Laorden made a speech from the balcony of the town hall: ‘You all no doubt believe that, because I am a priest, I have come with words of forgiveness and repentance. Not at all! War against all of them until the last trace has been eliminated.’ A large number of men and women were arrested. The women had their heads shaved and one, known as La Maestra Herrera, was dragged around the town by a donkey, before being murdered. Over the next three months, sixty were shot. In January 1937, Father Martínez Laorden made an official complaint that the repression had been too lenient.64
When Gonzalo de Aguilera shot six labourers in Salamanca, he perceived himself to be taking retaliatory measures in advance. Many landowners did the same by joining or financing mixed columns like that of Carranza. They also played an active role in selecting victims to be executed in captured villages. In a report to Lisbon, in early August, the Portuguese Consul in Seville praised these columns. Like the Italian Consul, he had been given gory accounts of unspeakable outrages allegedly committed against women and children by armed leftist desperadoes. Accordingly, he reported with satisfaction that, ‘in punishing these monstrosities, a harsh summary military justice is applied. In these towns, not a single one of the Communist rebels is left alive, because they are all shot in the town square.’65 In fact, these shootings reflected no justice, military or otherwise, but rather the determination of the landowners to put the clock back. Thus, when labourers were shot, they were made to dig their own graves first, and Falangist señoritos shouted at them, ‘Didn’t you ask for land? Now you’re going to have some, and for ever!’66
The atrocities carried out by the various columns were regarded with relish by Queipo de Llano. In a broadcast on 23 July, he declared, ‘We are determined to apply the law without flinching. Morón, Utrera, Puente Genil, Castro del Río, start digging graves. I authorize you to kill like a dog anyone who dares oppose you and I say that, if you act in this way, you will be free of all blame.’ In part of the speech that the censorship felt was too explicit to be printed, Queipo de Llano said, ‘Our brave Legionarios and Regulares have shown the red cowards what it means to be a man. And incidentally the wives of the reds too. These Communist and anarchist women, after all, have made themselves fair game by their doctrine of free love. And now they have at least made the acquaintance of real men, not wimpish militiamen. Kicking their legs about and squealing won’t save them.’67
Queipo de Llano’s speeches were larded with sexual references. On 26 July, he declared: ‘Sevillanos! I don’t have to urge you on because I know your bravery. I tell you to kill like a dog any queer or pervert who criticizes this glorious national movement.’68 Arthur Koestler interviewed Queipo de Llano at the beginning of September 1936: ‘For some ten minutes he described in a steady flood of words, which now and then became extremely racy, how the Marxists slit open the stomachs of pregnant women and speared the foetuses; how they had tied two eight-year-old girls on to their father’s knees, violated them, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. This went on and on, unceasingly, one story following another – a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology.’ Koestler commented on the broadcasts: ‘General Queipo de Llano describes scenes of rape with a coarse relish that is an indirect incitement to a repetition of such scenes.’69 Queipo’s comments can be contrasted with an incident in Castilleja del Campo when a truckload of prisoners was brought for execution from the mining town of Aznalcóllar, which had been occupied on 17 August by Carranza’s column. Among them were two women tied together, a mother and her daughter who was in the final stages of pregnancy and gave birth as she was shot. The executioners killed the baby with their rifle butts.70
The most important of the columns carrying out Queipo’s bidding was commanded by the stocky Major Antonio Castejón Espinosa. After taking part in the repression of Triana and La Macarena in Seville itself, and prior to setting out on the march to Madrid, Castejón made a number of rapid daily sorties to both the east and west of the city. In its war on the landless peasantry, Castejón’s column drew on the training and experience of the Legion and the Civil Guard and had the added advantage of the artillery directed by Alarcón de la Lastra. Fulfilling Queipo’s threats, to the east the column conquered Alcalá de Guadaira, Arahal, La Puebla de Cazalla, Morón de la Frontera, reaching Écija before moving south to Osuna, Estepa and La Roda, advancing as far as Puente Genil in Córdoba, seventy-five miles from Seville. To the west, at Valencina del Alcor, just outside Seville, Castejón’s forces liberated the estate of a rich retired bullfighter, Emilio Torres Reina, known as ‘Bombita’. ‘Bombita’ himself enthusiastically joined in the fighting and the subsequent ‘punishment’ of the prisoners. Castejón went as far as La Palma del Condado in Huelva, thirty-four miles from Seville. First the town was bombed, which provoked the murder of fifteen right-wing prisoners by enraged anarchists. On 26 July, La Palma was captured in a pincer action by the columns of both Castejón and Carranza, who bitterly disputed the credit of being first.71
When forces of the Legion sent by Queipo de Llano finally took Huelva itself on 29 July, they discovered that the Mayor and many of the Republican authorities had managed to flee on a steamer to Casablanca. The city fell after brief resistance in the Socialist headquarters (the Casa del Pueblo). Seventeen citizens were killed in the fighting and nearly four hundred prisoners were taken. Executions began immediately. Corpses were regularly found in the gutters. Still basking in the glory of the massacre of the miners at La Pañoleta, Major Haro Lumbreras was named both Civil and Military Governor of Huelva. Those Republican civil and military authorities who had not managed to escape – the Civil Governor and the commanders of the Civil Guard and the Carabineros – were put on trial on 2 August, charged with military rebellion. Haro testified against his immediate superior, Lieutenant Colonel Orts Flor, who had organized the miners’ column sent to Seville.
To inflate his own heroism, and inadvertently revealing his own obsessions, Haro claimed that the orders from General Pozas passed on by Orts which had instigated the expedition were to ‘blow up Seville and fuck the wives of the fascists’. Unsurprisingly, the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death. Numerous conservatives and clerics whose lives had been saved by the Civil Governor, Diego Jiménez Castellano, sent telegrams to Seville on 4 August desperately pleading for clemency. Queipo de Llano replied: ‘I regret that I cannot respond to your petition for pardon for the criminals condemned to death, because the critical situation through which Spain is passing means that justice cannot be obstructed, for the guilty must be punished and an example made of them.’ Diego Jiménez Castellano, Julio Orts Flor and Alfonso López Vicencio were shot shortly after 6.00 p.m. on 4 August.72
With Huelva itself in rebel hands, the process began, as it had in Cádiz and Seville, of columns being sent out to mop up the remainder of the province. Carranza’s column was involved in the taking of nearby towns to the south like Lepe, Isla Cristina and Ayamonte. Many of the Republicans who were arrested and taken to Huelva for trial were murdered along the way.73 In the north, the rebels already had a bridgehead in the town of Encinasola, where the rising had triumphed immediately. The right could count on support from Barrancos across the Portuguese frontier.74 With considerable bloodshed, a major role in the capture of towns and villages to the east and north of the capital was played by Luis Redondo’s column of Carlists from Seville. The mining towns of the north were centres of obdurate resistance, holding out for some weeks despite artillery bombardment. Higuera de la Sierra fell on 15 August. Zalamea la Real on the edge of the Riotinto mining district fell the next day. The capture of these villages was followed by indiscriminate shootings.75
The savagery increased