‘Paracuellos' by Ruiz Julius

Author:Ruiz, Julius [Ruiz, Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Guerra di Spagna
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2017-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

Paracuellos at ground level

Recio Pérez and Fernández Cuesta left an antifascist Madrid that was preparing to face the worst. By 1 November, nine rebel columns to the south and west of the city were preparing to attack; if one includes Franco’s forces in the Sierra, there were 20,000 men ready to bring leftist rule in Madrid to a bloody end.229 As an editorial in La Voz put it on 3 November, this was ‘the critical moment’. Describing the horrors of rebel terror elsewhere in Spain, it reminded readers that ‘‘Franco, in his proclamations, has announced … for every fascist killed ten republicans, socialists, communists and syndicalists will be executed. It has been calculated that if Madrid is defeated, it will witness the horrific spectacle of 100,000 killings’.’230

Even if the oft-quoted threat of 100,000 executions was probably an exaggeration, there is no doubt that a Francoist occupation of the capital would have been a bloody affair. On 28 October, instructions about the victorious march into the capital was distributed among the troops. Some would be sent to liberate prisoners that ‘according to reports’ were located in the Cárcel Modelo and calle Fomento, 9 among other places. More generally, order was to be strictly maintained by immediate occupation of police stations and the disarmament and detention of Republican military and security forces; they were to be sent to concentration camps and organised into ‘teams that would collect and bury bodies, as well as clean up the city’.231 This would be followed by the implementation of ‘Franco’s justice’. Following Alberto Alcocer’s appointment as the first mayor of Francoist Madrid, the official state bulletin announced in Burgos on 5 November the creation of a legal column consisting of eight military tribunals and sixteen investigative magistrates. Led by Ángel Manzaneque y Feltrer, it awaited the fall of Madrid in Navalcarnero, some 30 kilometres from the capital.232

One of the first targets of Manzaneque y Feltrer would have been the men of the CPIP, but these antifascists were determined not to fall into his hands. Despite being occupied with the sacas from Madrid’s jails, the CPIP undertook a cleansing operation of Carabanchel Alto and Bajo in the days before the rebel attack on this working-class area in the south-west of city. Although some suspects were taken to calle Fomento 9 for ‘trial’ before execution, others were held at a youth remand centre in Carabanchel Bajo which served as the base of a Popular Front investigation brigade under José García Galvez, the local president of Unión Republicana. On the night 4–5 November, with Francoist troops 12 kilometres away in Alcorcón, at least 20 prisoners (including Julio Torres París, the municipal judge of Carabanchel Alto, and his two sons), were taken out of the centre and executed. This was followed on 6 November by the messy but brutal evacuation of civilians from the district, when retreating and demoralised Republican militiamen fired on those who questioned the order to leave for Madrid. The sound of gunfire, and the ‘resistance’ of some of the locals, led to reports that a fifth columnist ‘rising’ had actually taken place.

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