The Spanish Holocaust (73 page)

On 28 February 1937, the preventive detention of released prisoners saw a major clash between Melchor Rodríguez and Cazorla. Melchor was asked by the under-secretary of Justice, Mariano Sánchez Roca, to help find his nephew, Ricardo Pintado-Fe. Melchor located the young man in a Communist
checa
where he had been held for more than two months and wrote to Cazorla to get him released. Cazorla secured his freedom, but Melchor Rodríguez gave damaging publicity to the detention rather than the release.
²⁰
In fact, Melchor Rodríguez was sacked by García Oliver on 1 March because of growing suspicions about the warmth of his relations with the many detained rightists that he had helped. He was replaced by Julián Fernández, the secretary of the CNT Federation of Madrid Unions. Fernández continued Melchor Rodríguez’s policy of preventing the abuse of prisoners, although unlike his predecessor he did not establish controversial links with them.
²¹

On 12 March, the second-in-command of the Transport Council of the Madrid Junta, a CNT militant, was murdered and three of his comrades wounded.
²²
Four days later in the small town of Villanueva de Alcardete (Toledo), Communist militiamen led by the Mayor assaulted the local CNT headquarters and killed nine men. In an astonishing turn of events, the PCE agreed to a judicial investigation. The Mayors of Villanueva and nearby Villamayor were found guilty of murders, rapes and looting committed since the summer of 1936. The Tribunal Popular of Cuenca condemned the ringleaders to death and imprisoned eight others. Throughout the spring of 1937, there were clashes in several other villages of Ciudad Real, Cuenca and Toledo. Six anarchists were killed in Torres de la Alameda near Madrid. However, the picture presented by anarchist literature of innocent victims of Communist aggression is only part of the story. There was a genuine ideological struggle between anarchists committed to collectivization and the Communist policy of supporting the smallholders in order to improve agricultural production. Some of the clashes derived from local resistance against anarchists from Madrid who requisitioned food without payment.
²³

In mid-March, there were clashes in Vinalesa, north of Valencia, between ostensible left-wingers and Assault Guards. The Ministry of the Interior denounced the infiltration of left-wing organizations by agents provocateurs and instructed all parties and unions to investigate those who had joined their ranks since 16 July 1936 and to surrender all
weapons. The Communist press also demanded strong measures against ‘those out of control’ and those who protected them, calling for the annihilation of the agents provocateurs, who were described as ‘new dynamiters’, a term deliberately meant to provoke echoes of anarchist terrorists of earlier times.
²⁴

The enmity reached such heights in mid-April that it provoked the dissolution of the Junta de Defensa. On 14 April, Cazorla announced in
Mundo Obrero
that an important spy-ring in the Republican Army had been dismantled. He revealed that one of those arrested was Alfonso López de Letona, a fifth columnist who had reached a high rank in the General Staff of the 14th Division of the Popular Army, commanded by the anarchist Cipriano Mera. López de Letona was a member of the extreme monarchist party Renovación Española, and had been private secretary of Antonio Goicoechea, its leader. He had been arrested by Salgado’s men and persuaded, either by threats or by financial inducements, to act as a double agent. However, Cazorla claimed that López de Letona had become a member of Manuel Salgado’s secret services in the Ministry of War on the basis of a recommendation by Mera’s chief of staff, Antonio Verardini Díez de Ferreti.
²⁵

There was no doubt of a connection between López de Letona and Verardini since they had collaborated in an operation mounted by the CNT to flush out fifth columnists. The December 1936 raid on the buildings under the protection of the Finnish Embassy had exposed how the right of asylum was being abused in favour of the fifth column. Accordingly, Eduardo Val and the CNT’s Defence Committee had established a fictitious Embassy of Siam, a country that had no diplomatic relations with Spain. With López de Letona as a ‘guarantee’ to his fifth-columnist contacts, the Embassy made offers of asylum that were eagerly accepted by several enemies of the Republic. Hidden listening devices picked up their conversations and thus gathered intelligence about their networks. When General Miaja learned that some of these rebel supporters had been murdered by Val’s men, in early January 1937, he ordered the operation closed down on the grounds that it was illegal and that the struggle against the fifth column should be conducted according to the law.
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In November 1939, López de Letona would be sentenced to death by the Francoists for his part in the Siam Embassy operation.
²⁷

Verardini was arrested in early April as a result of an operation by the Brigada Especial led by Fernando Valentí to hunt down a Falangist network founded by Félix Ciriza Zarrandicoechea. Ciriza’s principal collaborators were Falangists like himself, who had been tried by
Tribunales Populares but released for lack of proof of their guilt – a stark contrast with the ‘judicial’ situation of Republicans arrested in the rebel zone. Ciriza’s group was large and its activities included demoralization of the population, provocation of discord between left-wing parties and, above all, espionage.
²⁸
When Valentí’s men went to arrest a member of the spy-ring, called Manuela Pazos Queija, they found her in bed with Verardini, who was a notorious womanizer. Important documents belonging to secret services of the Ministry of War were discovered in her apartment, presumably brought there by Verardini, who was arrested. Cipriano Mera responded by threatening Miaja that he would bring a truckload of militiamen armed with machine-pistols and hand grenades from the front to break Verardini out of jail. Miaja prevailed on an irate Cazorla to release Verardini. In the evening edition of
CNT
on the same day, García Pradas accused Cazorla of being a fascist agent provocateur.
²⁹

At Cazorla’s behest,
CNT
was banned for two days, failing to appear on 15 and 16 April 1937. On 15 April, what would be the last-ever meeting of the Junta de Defensa was entirely concerned with this bitter conflict. It began at 7.30 p.m. and went on until 2.15 the following morning. With the abstention of the outraged anarchist councillors, the Junta gave Cazorla a vote of confidence. However, a committee of the Republican and Socialist members was nominated to investigate anarchist accusations of irregularities committed by the police and in the prisons.
³⁰

When
CNT
reappeared on 17 April, the front-page headline called for the immediate dismissal of José Cazorla and demanded that he be investigated by the Ministers of Justice and the Interior. Inside, there was a long article claiming that a majority of the Junta believed Cazorla’s note of 14 April about López de Letona and Verardini to be ‘unfounded’. With shameless hypocrisy, given the CNT’s own record in terms of extra-judicial murders, tortures and
checas
, the article denounced Cazorla’s record as Public Order Councillor: ‘For some time, murderous activities occurring in Madrid have been denounced in the CNT press. The victims of these actions were sometimes genuinely revolutionary workers, true anti-fascists, and at other times indubitably right-wing elements, against whom implacable action should be taken but always inside the law.’ The article ended by claiming that the commission of inquiry set up the previous day had found evidence of ‘criminal acts that reveal the existence in Spain of a “chequista” political terrorism against which it is necessary to react, not only from below, but also from above, from the
Government, and especially from the Ministries of the Interior and of Justice, which under no circumstances can allow murders, beatings, arbitrary arrests, and provocations lest the unity that we all need to face the enemy should be drowned in fraternal blood’.
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In the same issue, there was also a coruscating article by Melchor Rodríguez denouncing Carrillo, Serrano Poncela and Cazorla. He quoted letters and documents exchanged between Cazorla and himself,

relative to the deceptions, secret orders and codes given by this Cazorla to the agents under his command for people absolved by the Tribunales Populares apparently to be released from government prisons where they had been detained on his orders, but actually to be taken to clandestine prisons and to Communist militia units, to be used at the front building ‘fortifications’ … (in his words). I declare that I am ready to appear before any authorities or committees, with documents, to expose the sinister ‘policy’ pursued in the Public Order Council first by Santiago Carrillo and Serrano Poncela, and more recently by José Cazorla.

At his trial in 1940, Cazorla was accused of sending right-wing prisoners to the units commanded by Líster and El Campesino ostensibly to work on fortifications when, in reality, they were being sent to be executed.

Melchor Rodríguez went on to use the case of Ricardo Pintado-Fe as an illustration of what he called ‘outrages committed by the “Communist” and “Communistoid” hordes with police badges and warrant cards, under the orders of Councillor Cazorla’, and of ‘how in the “Communist” “
Checas
” converted into clandestine prisons, men and women are held kidnapped for days, weeks and months just on the basis of denunciations real or false, by dint of which all kinds of personal outrages are committed against all elemental laws, whether written or human’.
³²

The ensuing scandal saw confrontation in the cabinet between Communist and Socialist ministers. Largo Caballero, already irritated by Miaja’s popularity, silenced the clash by simply closing down the Junta de Defensa on 23 April. He did not bother to inform Miaja, who learned of the decision in the newspapers. The Junta was replaced with a new Madrid town council.
³³
Despite anarchist claims that the commission of inquiry set up on 15 April was gathering devastating evidence that Cazorla had run a network of secret prisons in which CNT militants were interrogated, often tortured and sometimes executed, its report was never completed because the dissolution of the Junta deprived it of any jurisdiction over the issues raised. On 25 April, Cazorla, on handing
power over to the new national Director General of Security, Wenceslao Carrillo, said he welcomed any investigation that might be carried out. Wenceslao, father of Santiago, praised Cazorla’s work in making the streets of Madrid safe. In an article published the following day, Cazorla himself wrote that he had remained silent only while awaiting the conclusions of the investigation and now felt free to comment. He attacked what he called ‘the verbal terrorism of those who beg in private and attack in public’ – a clear reference to Melchor Rodríguez and the Pintado-Fe case. He went on to defend his record against ‘those who having recently infiltrated the CNT–FAI use a union card to hide their murky past and to enable them to work against the interests of the anti-fascist masses’.
³⁴
Two days later, the Communist press published news that a fifth-column network had been discovered using CNT membership cards.
³⁵

An obvious conclusion to be drawn from the clashes between the Communists and the CNT is the extraordinary level of press freedom prevailing in a tense wartime situation. The denunciations in the CNT press of alleged abuses by the police and the prisons are remarkable indications of the maintenance of democratic norms. Even more so were some of the decisions of the popular tribunals. Noteworthy in this regard were the acquittals of the anarchist militiamen who shot Pablo Yagüe and of rebel supporters like Agustín Muñoz Grandes or Bobby Deglané. Even more striking were the condemnations by the tribunals of both anarchists and Communists found guilty of theft or murder. There was no equivalent in the rebel zone and even less was there anything like General Miaja’s closure of the Siam Embassy operation as illegal, the Madrid Junta’s creation of a committee to investigate anarchist allegations of police irregularities or the Republican government’s insistence that the struggle against the fifth column be conducted according to the law. For Cazorla, it was deeply frustrating, as he saw it, that so many were getting away with so much because security was so lax.

Random violence was largely under control by the end of 1936 and the new system of popular justice was working relatively well. The procedures and the ample facilities provided for the defence of those accused dramatically distinguished Republican justice from the summary trials in the rebel zone. There were increasing numbers of cases of religious personnel being absolved of accusations of disloyalty to the regime.
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Indeed, certainly before 1938, as was shown by the frequent acquittals that Cazorla tried to reverse with preventative arrests, trials often erred in their leniency. The trial of Captain Ramón Robles Pazos, on 26
January 1937 at an emergency court, and the parallel fate of his elder brother José, accused of espionage on behalf of the fifth column, are illustrative of the workings of both the Republican judiciary and the security services and their Russian advisers.

The thirty-seven-year-old Captain Robles Pazos was a reactionary Africanista officer. At the beginning of the war, he was an instructor at the Infantry Academy housed in the Alcázar of Toledo.
³⁷
He had been in Madrid when his insurrectionary comrades fortified themselves in the Alcázar. On 21 July 1936, on his way to join them, he was arrested in Getafe in the south of the capital and taken to a
checa
in the Paseo de las Delicias. He swore that he was loyal to the Republic, and, after a few hours, was released and ordered to present himself at the Ministry of War. Despite not reporting for military service, he remained free until 16 October when he was arrested by agents from Madrid’s principal police station, the Comisaría de Buenavista. Charged with breaking his oath of loyalty to the Republic, he was imprisoned in the Cárcel Modelo. Astonishingly, he escaped the evacuation and subsequent massacre of prisoners on 7, 8 and 9 November. This suggests that someone of considerable influence was looking out for him. And it was scarcely coincidental that, from the end of August, his elder brother José was working in some capacity in the Soviet Embassy.