THE SPANISH COCKPIT: An Eye-Witness Account of the Political and Social Conflicts of the Spanish Civil War by Franz Borkenau

Author:Franz Borkenau [Borkenau, Franz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Christie Books
Published: 2016-03-09T03:00:00+00:00

4 September.

We drove on to Andujar, one of the largest pueblos of eastern Andalusia, where we had a long interview with the committee. This committee resembled little the institutions bearing the same name in the North of Spain. Even more than round Madrid, in Andalusia they seem to merge into the ayunlamientos as they existed before the civil war. The first sign of this queer process we met yesterday; as soon as we crossed the border from La Mancha into Andalusia, the control of the road was exercised in common by the old local police and the armed village guards. Then we saw municipal officials in their uniforms working together in the same room and on the same affairs with militia and workers in civilian clothes in the ayuntamiento in Bailén; and here in Andujar this cooperation is even more in evidence. The policemen of the pre-war days here simply stand at attention before the doors of the bureau of the administration, which is indifferently composed of members of the ayuntamiento and of the ‘committee’. In practice it seems to work out in this way: the old administration continues in office, but has been strengthened by the cooption of representatives of the UGT, the socialist and communist parties, and the Socialist Youth (there are no anarchists in Andujar, any more than in any other pueblo of the whole province of Jaen; in this respect Jaen, the easternmost part of Andalusia, differs profoundly from its western and southern districts). True, the ‘old’ municipality itself is very young in Andujar, in every sense of the word; the alcalde is a youngster of certainly not more than twenty-five, appointed after the February elections.

Thus, there was a fairly incisive change in February 1936 from the domination of the ayuntamiento by the former almighty group to the administration of a few young socialists; but there was only a very slight change between February and August, between the administration of the liberal republicans and the revolutionary period. The province of Jaen seems to have stopped at the republican stage of the history of the Spanish revolution.

Equally slight is the social change which followed in the wake of the civil war. There are a couple of soap and other factories in Andujar, but none of them has been expropriated or put under control. There were no noble landowners in the pueblo of Andujar, but five rich bourgeois owned by far the larger part of its land. They have all been killed. But what happened to the land and what will happen to it? The committee members become even more hesitant than usual when asked this question. Nobody seems to know at all. And this is not surprising, as Andujar is really unusually backward. Not even a UGT group existed before February, and the brazeros, the agricultural labourers, were completely unorganized. Naturally, now, the embryonic UGT group since founded is unable to handle such a large task as the managing of enormous estates, and this business nolens volens rests in the hands of the ayuntamiento.

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