Abstract
This article reappraises General Queipo de Llano's authoritarian rule in Seville during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Queipo's murderous regime has long attracted scholarly attention, but very little research has been devoted to other aspects of his administration. Perhaps one exception to this rule is that several works have attempted to enhance Queipo's reputation, portraying the general not only as a military genius, but also as an economic visionary and architect of a proto-welfare state. Building on the concept of Queipo's ‘kleptocratic state’, the present article not only refutes this myth, but also demonstrates that economic policy was crucial to (and inseparable from) the process of physical repression in Seville. The new regime was thus founded on a brutal dialectic of violence and destitution. Prioritizing the liquidation of their perceived enemies, Spain's military rebels massacred thousands in the city after the coup of July 1936. The economic chaos wrought by the mass-killings soon compelled the insurgents to adopt a series of mitigating measures, but the murderous project was not abandoned. Indeed, as the article demonstrates, even ostensibly humanitarian measures must be regarded as part of a broader punitive, restrictive and ideological rebel ethos.
In the early hours of 3 November 2022, under cover of darkness and without prior notice, the body of General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, alongside those of his wife Genoveva Martí, and fellow Francoist general Francisco Bohórquez Vecina, were exhumed from the Roman Catholic Basilica de la Macarena in Seville. Flanked by plain-clothes police officers, this historical event was witnessed by just a handful of close relatives and passers-by. The funerary vehicles used to transport the remains to a local crematorium delayed their arrival until the last moment, while the authorities went to great lengths to ensure that the media would not capture images of the exhumation procedure. Their hope was to avoid potential clashes and a media spectacle such as that which had surrounded the exhumation of General Franco from the Valley of the Fallen in 2019. 1
By 2022, Queipo had been the most prominent Francoist figure still resting in a place open to the public. The secrecy and urgency of his exhumation highlight the pivotal role that both the general and the city of Seville play in Spain's ongoing ‘memory wars’ over the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Franco (1939–75). 2 At a local level, for example, the official custodians of Queipo's grave, the Brotherhood of La Macarena, openly admitted that they had ignored the Law of Historical and Democratic Memory that the regional government of Andalucía had introduced in 2017. The Brotherhood's confidence in its legal impunity perhaps stemmed from the widely acknowledged rumour that the centre-left president of the Junta de Andalucía had feared the influence of Seville's most eminent religious society. 3 Indeed, it was not until the passage of a national Democratic Memory Law on 19 October 2022 that the exhumation of Queipo de Llano could proceed. The new law explicitly prohibited the graves of prominent Francoists from acting as places that could become sites of ‘commemoration of the human rights abuses committed during the civil war and the dictatorship’. 4 It quickly became clear the removal of Queipo from the Basilica was the priority at a national level. Less than a week after the law was passed, on 24 October, the Spanish government notified the Brotherhood of its decision to exhume the general. Tellingly, they stressed to the Brotherhood that Queipo's grave ‘has been the object of a broad social debate, echoed in many national and international media outlets and publications’. 5
The exhumation decision prompted political intervention at the highest levels. For his part, the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez explained that ‘a democracy does not pay homage to dictators and their henchmen’. By contrast, the leader of Spain's principal right-wing opposition party, the Partido Popular, declared that ‘politics should leave the dead in peace’. 6 Meanwhile, Seville's MP for the far-right Vox party went still further. Calling upon decades of Francoist mythology surrounding Seville and Queipo de Llano, he conceded that the general's repression had been ‘very harsh’, but only ‘in answer to previous left-wing violence’. The exhumation, he claimed, amounted to ‘vengeance against Queipo for having played a decisive role in the course of the civil war’ by capturing Seville ‘with a handful of men’. He went on to praise the general's public work programme and ‘charity’. 7
If Queipo and his memory continue to stir such interest and emotion in Spanish society and politics over 70 years after his death, it is fair to say that the general, as well as the city of Seville, continue to feature prominently in academic studies of the Spanish Civil War. There are many reasons for this interest. Seville was an early and lasting bastion of support for the democratic Spanish Second Republic (1931–9), but following the success of the military coup in the city in July 1936, became the largest rebel-held city for most of the civil war. Unlike most areas of rebel Spain, Queipo also enjoyed a large degree of administrative authority in the city – and indeed throughout the south – which he used to enforce policies elaborated by the local social and economic elites. 8 Perhaps most important of all, Seville has long drawn attention from historians owing to its status as one of the bloodiest sites of Francoist repression during the civil war, while Queipo himself continues to fascinate historians as one of the most notorious and unashamed exponents of lethal violence against opponents. 9 Mass shootings, incarceration, rape and torture ensured that the transition from democracy to dictatorship was anything but peaceful in Queipo's Seville. 10 Given the significance of both the city and the general, it is not surprising that there have been several studies of the coup in Seville and early attempts at administering the city. 11 To date, however, there have been no academic works focusing primarily on economic policies in wartime Seville, which the present article will address. As can be seen in the declaration of Seville's Vox MP, readings of Queipo's supposedly ‘successful’ economic management of the city continue to play a key role in neo-Francoist narratives within Spain's memory wars. 12
Praise for Queipo's economic record has not been confined to the fringes of far-right politicians and commentators. One historian has rather generously opined that Queipo ‘created an efficacious counterrevolutionary model in Andalusia’ and that he was ‘in some ways […] a victim of his own success’. So successful was Queipo's ‘financial model’, in fact, that it subsequently ‘spread throughout the rebel zone’. 13 Many miracles have been attributed to the rebels, but transforming a general famed for being obtuse into a professor of economics is not one of them. Even Queipo's official biographers, who were commissioned by the Franco regime to write a de facto hagiography of the general in 1957, had no choice but to acknowledge Queipo's lack of intelligence, not least because it was so widely known. 14 Certainly, most of the economic legislation bearing Queipo's signature was not conceived by the general himself, but rather by his administration, which was staffed by Seville's oligarchy. Queipo's most competent bureaucrat, Joaquín Benjumea Burín, would go on to serve the Franco dictatorship in several ministerial posts between 1939 and 1951, and then as governor of the Bank of Spain until his death in 1963. A fellow oligarch, Luis Alarcón de la Lastra, was appointed Minister of Industry and Commerce between 1939 and 1940. 15 Nonetheless, during the civil war, and acting as absolute ruler of Seville, Queipo de Llano both endorsed and enforced a series of policies devised by this elite. The Seville establishment subsequently displayed their gratitude towards Queipo by cultivating the legend that he was nothing less than a financial prodigy. 16 In short, Queipo enjoyed significant autonomy in Seville and came to rule the city almost as a personal fiefdom. The economic policies imposed in Seville, while for the most part not conceived by the general, were planned and deliberate, rather than accidental, and they were never the result of ‘chaos’ or ‘compromises’ between competing rebel factions.
As will be seen throughout this article, economic policy in Queipo's Seville was in fact a further powerful arm of repression and ideological pacification. To be sure, economic policy would be driven in no small part by the need to support the rebel war effort in the early months of the civil war. To this end, a ‘kleptocratic state’ was established in the city, which relied upon mass expropriations, forced ‘donations’ and a terrorized workforce. 17 Unfortunately for the military rebels, the combined effect of their physical elimination of thousands of breadwinners and their acquisitive rapacity quickly threatened the economic collapse of Seville. Rebel administration in the city thus came to operate within a dialectic of violence and destitution. This dialectic was based on the foundational thesis of violence (both physical and economic), whose magnitude generated an antithesis of mass destitution. In other words, the rebels expected and even welcomed poverty as a means of scourging their adversaries, but they did not foresee the concomitant economic disintegration of Seville. The interplay between both culminated in a synthesis in the form of a new type of charity: one which was aimed at the management of misery, but which would also serve both to punish surviving enemies by means of exclusion, while simultaneously disciplining the ‘deserving poor’ by coercing them into accepting a new social order. This remained an imperfect synthesis, however. Ultimately, when competing aims were in contradiction, the insurgents always prioritized persecution over economic stability. The ideological premise of ‘cleansing’ Spain was invariably regarded as more important that the ensuing chaos that it provoked.
The rebels’ regeneration of ‘Red Seville’ claimed around 3500 lives during the 3-year rule of Queipo de Llano. 18 In the same period, the general's economic innovations would leave many thousands more ‘in a condition of absolute misery; misery that no one is sufficiently audacious to attempt to alleviate, for fear of being branded with Marxist sympathies’, as observed by the general's former chief of propaganda. 19 The human cost of Queipo's economic policies has drawn little attention from historians, while his imposition of drastic measures and quasi-command economy has even been praised for its success in sustaining the insurgent war effort. Unquestionably, the myriad economic measures introduced by Queipo had the goal of supplying finance and goods to prosecute the war and to support the home front. Furthermore, well-publicized economic decrees were also seen as a crucial part of the propaganda battle for hearts-and-minds in Spain, and to showcase the efficacy of the city's new rulers to the outside world.
In the first days of the rebellion, physical and economic violence went hand-in-hand as the Army of Africa unleashed a wave of carnage, rape and looting in Seville. Their grisly work was continued by the fascist Falange party after 23 July. 20 Notwithstanding the myth of Queipo's miraculous capture of the city with the help of a few brave men against the mass hordes of Seville's communists, the outcome of the coup was in fact not in any doubt. 21 Accordingly, the terror unleashed should not be seen as a desperate and chaotic attempt to secure victory in the city. Instead, it should be understood as an early and premeditated means of punishing the ‘enemy within’, restoring a social order threatened by the recent experience of the Second Republic, and rewarding those in support of the insurrection. Serious fighting ended in Seville within days of the initial mutiny and the city therefore ceased to be on the ‘front line’ for the duration of the Spanish Civil War. This did nothing to alter the new daily rhythm of mass arrests and executions, however. Alongside the physical purge, Queipo would soon announce measures to formalize the economic offensive against the ‘reds’. 22 Their suffering would be exacerbated by the fact that in parallel with the dictates of the collective rebel military leadership of the Junta Técnica del Estado, Queipo possessed a degree of administrative independence that enabled him to implement his own state-building strategy in the territories under his command. 23
On 18 August 1936, Queipo de Llano ordered the seizure of property of Republican government supporters and ‘all those who affirm in their social or political propaganda the destruction of Spain as a nation’. 24 Two weeks later, on 2 September, the chronological scope of potential crimes was expanded retroactively, to cover actions stretching as far back as 1932. These decrees were complemented by a third confiscatory edict issued on 11 September, the same day the entire province of Seville was officially declared ‘liberated’. 25 On 5 November, yet another bando (decree) stated that all targeted individuals were ‘guilty of marxist or rebel activities’. 26 The wording of each of these announcements was left intentionally vague so as to ensure that all Republicans could potentially fall prey to its clauses, though by implication most victims of expropriation belonged to the middle classes, who had property to lose. Consequently, in the province of Seville, 1071 expedientes de incautación de bienes (proceedings for the confiscation of property) would be opened between 18 August 1936 and 13 February 1939. This figure merely represents the tip of the iceberg. There were many more unrecorded victims of plunder. 27
By the time of the first decree authorizing forced expropriations, Queipo had already pioneered an ostensibly voluntary and ‘patriotic’ means of raising money for the rebel war effort. As early as 20 July, the general had opened a public subscription to subsidize the rebel army. Within 72 hours, Queipo could boast that the insurgents had already amassed around one million pesetas from the scheme. 28 Subscriptions certainly complemented official plunder, but they were anything but voluntary. Certainly, the economic stakes were very high for the rebels, particularly before the large-scale and sustained support of Italy, Germany and Portugal tipped the scales of the conflict in their favour. But there were also several pressing ideological agendas at play in Seville, and these always took precedence over the economic health of Queipo's fiefdom. Political opponents had to be chastized and rehabilitated, and both home and international audiences had to be made aware of the degree of ‘spontaneous’ and ‘popular’ support for the crusade to ‘save’ Spain. Therefore, and just to be certain, the rebels made no secret to the population of Seville of the compulsory nature of fundraising campaigns. On the occasion of the inauguration of a collection to celebrate the first anniversary of Queipo's rule, for example, the local press published the following warning: ‘[h]e who does not contribute to the homage for the liberator of Andalusia, is no Spaniard, nor is he worthy to live in the territory pacified by the glorious General’. 29 Beyond the city of Seville, each town and village was assigned a specific monetary target which it had to honour. This anniversary campaign collected over three million pesetas. 30 So seriously did the insurgent authorities regard the various fundraising initiatives, that even minor transgressions could turn into a life-and-death matter. In March 1938 in the town of Umbrete, for example, when a man named José Madrigal García refused to attend a ceremony where Queipo de Llano handed charity to the local poor, he was incarcerated for 2 years and, as a result of ill treatment, died only months after his release. 31 Rebel sympathizers tended to gloss over such incidents and the multiple well-publicized threats, preferring instead to focus on the fact that: ‘newspapers in Seville publish daily columns of donations. […] These […] show clearly how many working-class people are supporting Franco’. 32
Subscriptions and donations thus served a dual ideological purpose. On the one hand, they acted as yet another means of humiliating Seville's working-class and enforcing their submission. On the other hand, they promoted the fiction of a united home front in which all segments of the population supported the war effort, including, most notably, the rebels’ traditional enemies, the proletariat. If a coup supported by a minority could be made legitimate by an ‘armed plebiscite’ (military victory), so the imposition of a dictatorship could also be justified by an ‘economic plebiscite’, which took the form of mass adherence to ‘voluntary’ donations. 33 Queipo himself took the lead here by routinely presenting working-class ‘donations’ as ‘evidence’ of the spontaneous conversion of the masses to the rebel cause. For example, on 23 September 1936, he publicly rejoiced at a contribution handed to him by a group of workers: ‘I say again that this re-awakening of the worker heralds the rapid resurgence of Spain’. 34
In truth, in a bitter irony, sevillanos were being forced to endure the humiliation of funding the same army that had purged their city. However, the insurgents would soon face their own irony in Seville as Queipo's new regime was forced to deal with the consequences of its policies. Tens of thousands in the city were now unable to feed themselves. The social and economic collapse of Seville could potentially compromise the entire military campaign. As rebel Spain's largest city, throughout the summer and autumn of 1936 Seville served as the hub of the Army of Africa (the elite corps of the insurrectionary army), provided both goods and men for the war effort, was the financial and administrative centre of a vast region stretching from Badajoz to Granada, and possessed the only large-scale munitions factory and military airfield in insurgent territory. 35 More immediately, Seville's imminent economic ruin became apparent at the moment when the rebel military machine most needed supply to continue its march on Madrid. Queipo's city thus presented a clear and immediate paradox for the broader process of state-building in the rebel zone, which simultaneously demanded untrammelled physical and economic repression alongside a highly mobilized and productive war economy. If the total economic collapse was to be avoided, the rebels would be obliged to offer some form of aid to the families of those they had massacred and pillaged. The paradox was resolved in Seville by the early realization that relief itself could be used as a further arm of repression.
Even before the rebels controlled the city, Seville had long been one of the poorest cities in Spain. In 1935, around 70 per cent of sevillanos were categorized as working-class (50 per cent of whom were day-labourers), lived in overcrowded and insalubrious houses where malnutrition was endemic, and lacked access both to basic healthcare and education.
36
Given this background, it is hardly surprising that the mass slaughter or ‘reds’ in the weeks after the military coup of July 1936 – primarily men, and often the main or sole source of income in the household – triggered a humanitarian crisis. In private, the insurgents already acknowledged their responsibility in the sudden rise in the number of orphaned children in Seville. On 20 August, mayor Ramón de Carranza informed the Town Hall that: Due to recent events, the San Julián neighbourhood, last stronghold of the Marxist hordes, has suffered the consequences of the [extremist] obsessions of its residents, leaving numerous children, innocent beings who are alien to this conflict, in the most extreme form of abandonment.
37
Examples of this social schizophrenia are legion. The most illustrative occurred on 15 August, the day that the Republican tricolour was replaced by the monarchist bicolour in rebel-held territory. As the largest city in rebel Spain, Seville was selected to host a ceremony presided over by generals Franco, Queipo de Llano and Millán-Astray. To Franco's and Millán-Astray's amusement, Queipo de Llano exposed his intellectual shortcomings by embarking on a bizarre dissertation concerning the colour of the new flag, stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Imperial Rome. He eventually concluded his speech by exhorting the crowd to: ‘give her [the new flag] your life and your gold, without hesitation’. 38 At the same time as Queipo demanded gold from sevillanos, the Falange distributed the equivalent of two-thousand pesetas in food among the urban poor in Triana and San Julián, two areas that had been particularly ravaged by the Army of Africa in late July, with some help from the fascist party. Some took offence that a movement so heavily implicated in the repression should now be exploiting mass indigence to proselytize the local poor. The following day (16 August), the cadavers of two Falangists were discovered in Triana. The rebels responded with predictable ferocity. First, they arbitrarily detained 70 men from the neighbourhood, before executing them on 18 August. 39 The social schizophrenia would continue thereafter in Queipo's Seville, as the insurgent administration veered between its desire to ‘cleanse’ its enemies, and its realistic concerns about the disintegration of the home front. There can be no doubt, however, that the former always took priority over the latter. By the end of August, 774 people had already been murdered in Seville, and worse was to follow. 40
As the number of destitute residents exploded in Seville, the insurgent leadership realized that it would have to establish a hierarchy of priorities – and values. Preference would have to be given to either repression or charity. The former signified the eradication of Republicanism and the ushering of the ‘new’ Spain, whereas the latter represented a Christian virtue and a wartime necessity. As early as 31 July, Queipo de Llano had conceded that famine was rife in Seville and proposed to create cocinas económicas (soup kitchens) to feed the unemployed. 41 On 1 August, the general optimistically announced that he expected the cocinas to open within 24 hours, but the following day saw no new soup kitchens opened in the city. 42 Instead, the rebel leadership held an emergency meeting at the Town Hall of Seville, where they agreed to form the Junta de auxilios alimenticios a los necesitados. 43 It would take another 2 weeks before the Junta was actually set-up. In a region where a fundraising campaign or mass execution could be carried out within hours of planning it, the slow progress of Queipo's administration on social welfare measures can only be interpreted as deliberate. To add insult to injury, having taken weeks to begin to address the social and economic misery occasioned by mass executions and theft, the man chosen to lead the new Junta was the Marqués de Soto Hermoso, Ramón de Carranza. As well as being the mayor of Seville appointed by Queipo and a prominent member of the local landed gentry, the Marqués had headed a military column that had laid waste to the working-class districts of the city in the early days of the coup. 44 Carranza not only lacked technical expertize, but had also never shown the slightest interest in the plight of the local poor, something which he demonstrated on a regular basis by neglecting his duties as mayor, preferring instead to serve as a member of the ‘Column of Death’, that is, the rebel army advancing from Seville to Madrid, and leaving a trail of destruction along the route. 45
The Junta was eventually institutionalized via Bando n° 12 of 17 August. 46 Its objective was clear – to provide charity meals for the unemployed – as was the source of funding: donations and a tax imposed on all sevillanos. This implied that the state not only possessed the ability to monitor every financial transaction in a city of around a quarter of a million residents, but had also terrorized the impoverished population into contributing to another major fundraising campaign. Class divisions were also reaffirmed. Big businesses were allowed to pay a sum in advance based on an estimate, which allowed them to save money. The draconian eligibility conditions for relief were equally telling. Only males, aged between 18 and 60, registered as active jobseekers and in possession of a positive reference from their parish priest, could apply. 47 In a city starkly divided between clericalism and anticlericalism, such prerequisites meant that Republicans were either immediately disqualified or, at best, could recant and rely on the caritas of the local clergy. Is worth recalling that in January 1931 the trade union for unemployed workers had rejected a proposal for the establishment of cocinas in Seville because, in their words, ‘unemployment embodies the class struggle and is never healed by popular subscriptions or alms, both of which are degrading for workers’. 48 Conversely, the Right had long become aware of the proselytizing potential of this enterprise. In 1934, a coalition of reactionary politicians, the economic elites and the Catholic Church opened four cocinas in Seville to feed unemployed workers on the condition that they obtain a permit issued by a committee formed by conservatives, including the parish priest. 49 The underlying ethos of Queipo's relief measures was thus not merely a return to earlier forms of paternalistic, Christian and conditional charity, but also a deliberate and stark demonstration that principles of social emancipation had been definitively eliminated and replaced by the discretionary goodwill of those in power. In short, it represented, and indeed was meant to convey, the destruction of an entire worldview for a working-class that had rejected such principles even before the establishment of the Second Republic. What is more, the masses would now be compelled to play a key role in ‘charity’ events and initiatives. If the poor had largely been passive recipients of elite munificence in the past, in Queipo's Seville they would be obliged to set the example, often being the first expected to contribute to public subscriptions. In so contributing, and through attendance at charity spectacles, they could publicly apostatize their earlier political beliefs in a symbolically charged fusion of charity and penitence; a ritual of self-abasement that ultimately served to reaffirm class hierarchies.
Besides using hunger as an instrument for social control, the other major obsession of the Junta was to offer succour to as few people as possible so as to punish perceived ideological enemies. To that end, it threatened that any claim for relief that did not meet the Junta's definition of ‘deserving poor’ would be ‘vigorously punished’. 50 On another occasion, the Junta threatened that all offenders would be denounced to Queipo de Llano, who reminded the local population ‘you already know that he who warns you is not joking, and he who warns you from Seville keeps his promises’. The general elaborated on his threat after being told that some ‘scum’ were throwing food into the Guadalquivir river as a gesture of protest: ‘I have given the severest orders to the effect that those committing these depravities shall follow the same route as the food.' 51
Charity was a necessity and, at best, an opportunity, but never a priority for the rebels. Despite the attendant risks attached to any collapse of the economy in rebel Spain's largest city, the half-hearted and conditional measures for relief in Seville demonstrated a broader truth. The Junta's philosophy, therefore, represented a synthesis that solved a contradiction that was consuming Seville (repression and its corollary, economic meltdown), but it was a fusion which also placed charity at the service of repression, and was even funded by it (‘voluntary’ donations). Unsurprisingly, the situation of the local poor remained dire. Every day, large groups of starving sevillanos congregated in front of military buildings to collect scraps of food. The head of the Municipal Guard wrote to the Junta asking for it to release a statement ordering the crowds to leave once all food had been distributed so as to avoid a public scandal. 52 On 8 September, the newspaper ABC reported that the Junta was feeding around 12,000 people daily; however, by the end of the month, the number had risen to 14,000. 53 The Junta’s leadership was troubled by the ‘unrelenting rise in the number of petitions for aid’, whereas the main charity organization in Seville, the Asociación Sevillana de Caridad, revealed that it was supporting 47,784 people, that is, an astonishing 21 per cent of the population of the city. 54 Economic cataclysm notwithstanding, the mass murder of Republicans in the city continued at a relentless rate. More people were executed by Queipo's forces in September than in the previous 6 weeks. The total number of victims had now ascended to 1559 in a city that had not been near the front line of fighting for weeks. 55 In October, a further 651 people were executed, while the number of recipients of charity rose still further to 16,000. 56 The figure for those claiming food aid for survival would peak at 17,000 in November, but it still fell short of demand. Queipo himself admitted this in one of his many indiscretions. On 3 November, the general estimated that some 3000 ‘poor souls’ were in dire need of support, but that there was a shortage of both staff and funds to expand the Junta's range of operations. 57 A few days later, however, the rebels did manage to gather sufficient resources to engineer yet another massive fundraising campaign, the Aguinaldo del Soldado. 58 November saw another 414 sevillanos assassinated, bringing the total to 2624. 59 By now, the correlation between the demand for charity and the number of executions was unambiguous. December 1936 saw the rate of executions in Seville fall to less than 10 per day for the first time since the coup of July. There followed a considerable reduction in the number of meals being handed out by the authorities, now standing at 15,000 daily. 60 Nonetheless, the Town Hall noted a new surge in the number of mendicants in the city and announced that ‘[t]he Municipal Guard will detain without hesitation all street beggars’. The local authorities may have boasted of the ‘thousands’ of meals being distributed daily by the cocinas, but the reality was that it did not meet requirements. 61 Economic crisis notwithstanding, the insurgents never contemplated putting an end to the purge in Seville until it came to a satisfactory conclusion. This was their priority.
The link between repression and indigence was manifest. The available statistical data confirms that both elements ‘fed’ one another in a dialectical relationship of violence and destitution. The killing of ‘reds’ caused mass penury and the need for aid, which was then used as an instrument to segregate enemies and discipline the poor through their acceptance of a system that replaced social solidarity with (conditional) charity. Furthermore, the Junta's obsession with turning a profit and strictly limiting aid further increased the suffering of the local population. The internal correspondence of the organization reveals that its leadership was constantly, and falsely, claiming that the Junta was at risk of financial ruin. By the end of November, the Junta had collected around one million pesetas and already accrued a surplus of 265,000 pesetas; a respectable sum for what was, in theory, a non-profit organization.
62
The Junta was proving equally successful in attaining its other key objectives: to domesticate the masses, coordinate a large surveillance apparatus, and force the local population to subsidize its projects. A further ideological bonus for the rebels was that charity could be used as an opportunity to indoctrinate the children of the defeated. This policy was pursued in such blatant fashion that it did not pass unnoticed by foreign eyewitnesses. Florence Farmborough, an international propaganda agent for the insurgent cause courtesy of her role as an English-speaking radio broadcaster for Radio Nacional, remarked upon visiting a soup kitchen in Seville: These children of humble origin, ignorant and accustomed to the harsh blows of an unkind world, must first be won! Many of them have the seeds of hatred of class within their young hearts, seeds sown by the hands of their own parents; and it is this hereditary malice that the workers have to disperse.
63
Widows and orphans still alive and free have to hide their grief for fear of being killed. They begged secretly, because anyone who helped the widows or orphans of a ‘Red’ exposed him or herself to being shadowed. Only the Social Assistance which has been organised is able to allay material suffering, but even then it is by imposing moral sufferings: obliging orphans to sing the songs of the murderers of their father; to wear the uniform of those who have executed him, and to curse the dead and to blaspheme his memory.
64
The Falange derogatorily defined charity as ‘maintaining the sons of the Marxists’, a view shared by the Junta.
65
This was made patently clear in the manner in which the Junta dealt with famine in Amate, the most deprived neighbourhood in Seville. In 1930, nearly 80 per cent of the district's population was formed by day-labourers who had to endure subhuman living conditions, including lack of running water, electricity, and even a sewage system. The infant mortality rate in 1935 stood at a shocking 126/1,000, whereas the average for Seville (the city with the highest infant mortality rate in Spain) was 80/1,000.
66
A foreign observer who visited the city at the time of the Second Republic was perplexed by the squalor he encountered in Amate, especially when contrasted with the opulence found in the centre. He noted that: [T]he huts were made of sheet-metal. These great preserve-tins were just the height of a man. They were huddled close together and in winter, the warm winter of Seville, they were damp and cold. When the sun was burning overhead, they were red-hot. Fifteen thousand people lived here they told me; refugees, unemployed, some utterly destitute and others who had been evicted.
67
In October 1936, after becoming alarmed that some 2500 charity meals (for a total population of just over 6000) were being handed out daily in Amate, the Junta's leadership commissioned a study. Its conclusions spoke volumes about the mentality of Seville's establishment. The study calculated that around 5500 people lived in huts, but that only 260 were officially registered as jobseekers. Consequently, the commission determined that only around 1000 people (c. 250 jobseekers each with an assumed number of four dependants) were in need of assistance and cancelled the distribution of some 1500 meals. In the process, the Junta's leadership revealed its class prejudices by speculating that ‘there are many [residents] who either possess other means to support themselves, or do not want to work, because they have never done so.' 68 No evidence was provided to support this statement. 69 Needless to say, the Junta's leadership was fully aware that Amate was a hotbed of Republicanism. The Junta's president, Carranza, had led a military expedition that had inflicted ‘the harshest possible punishment’ on the district in late July. During that same operation, in the adjacent Nervión area, Carranza instructed the local civil guards to execute all captured workers found bearing weapons. When a corporal refused to carry out the command, Carranza also ordered his murder. The corporal was saved in extremis by another aristocratic member of the Columna Carranza, Rafael de Medina. 70 In both war and charity, the rebels took no prisoners.
Despite its ostensible remit, the Junta in fact operated as a profit-oriented enterprise. As with plunder, confiscations and the campaign for ‘donations’, the Junta ensured that the victims of rebel brutality would themselves pay for the alleviation of terror's social and economic consequences. The shame and humiliation of being simultaneously donors and recipients was a further component of the dialectic of violence and destitution. Having fulfilled its goal of preventing the home front from collapsing, the Junta was disbanded on 15 January 1937. 71 The rebels were well aware of ‘the acute problem of protecting, feeding and educating the children abandoned in the province as a whole, owing to the present circumstances’, since they continued to massacre thousands elsewhere in the province of Seville. 72 Even so, this did not constitute justifiable grounds to continue the work of the Junta. The objective was not to solve the emergency, but to keep it at a manageable level. In the city of Seville, the end of the Junta coincided with a stabilization in the number of petitions for charity meals which, in turn, was inextricably linked to the conclusion of the most lethal phase of rebel repression. A total of 3028 sevillanos had been murdered in the first 6 months of Queipo's rule. A further 92 were killed in the subsequent 6 months (to July 1937). 73 The shootings continued until the 1950s, but their rhythm decreased dramatically. After all, the reasons for carrying out the killings were no longer present. Prominent Republicans had already been exterminated and all working-class districts decimated.
As noted in the introduction, the myths created from the outset of the Spanish Civil War around the figure of General Queipo de Llano have proved remarkably enduring, even in the twenty-first century. Perhaps the most infamous legend concerns the capture of Seville in the first days of the coup, which was quickly mythologized in rebel propaganda (with no small encouragement from the general himself). 74 This tale pitted Queipo and his handful of soldaditos against legions of well-armed communists in the battle for the city, transforming the general's victory not only into a sign of his audacity, but claiming also for Queipo and the broader rebel cause the mantle of providence. However, as the months went by, the changing context of the war compelled the insurgents to devise a second myth. Rebel state-building efforts in the city had been founded upon coercion rather than consent, the rebellion had transformed into a long and bitter civil war, and Seville had (owing to its size) assumed the status of unofficial capital of rebel Spain.
The first myth allowed the rebels to justify the rapid shift from democracy to autocracy by virtue of an ‘armed plebiscite’. The second legend would now complement the first and offer a post-facto justification for Queipo's rule. In this tale, the general's regime was presented as a benevolent dictatorship, which had transformed the city into an oasis of peace, social harmony and economic prosperity. 75 The legend was frequently refined or amplified, depending on the audience, and also gained international status. Eoin O’Duffy, the commander of the Irish brigade that had travelled to Spain to serve in Franco's armies, for example, maintained that thanks to Queipo's rule ‘Seville and the neighbouring towns escaped destruction and there was very little loss of life’. 76 The prominent British Hispanist Edgar Allison Peers claimed that Queipo had ‘in Andalusia […] achieved a remarkable degree of respect and popularity for his interest in the people and their problems’. 77 Ultimately, the sheer scale of death and destitution in Seville refutes the tale. Indeed, even in Franco's Spain after 1939, the myth of Queipo's benevolent rule, which had been very useful propaganda during wartime, gradually fell into disuse. 78
As we have noted, however, such narratives have seen a remarkable revival as part of the ‘memory wars’ that have erupted in Spain since the early 2000s, and accordingly they once again enjoy a degree of cultural capital. These myths are often used both to excuse and to rationalize – as a form of ‘organic justice’ – the more unpalatable aspects of Queipo's regime. The general's present-day supporters maintain that Queipo was forced to suppress working-class radicalism before establishing a proto-welfare state.
79
This is but a recycled version of the argument first put forward by Julio de Ramón-Laca in 1939, who stressed that Queipo's brutal justice was simply a reply to prior crimes, the nature of which was so heinous that it ‘called, if not for blind vengeance, then for exemplary, immediate and inexorable justice’.
80
The rebels’ definition of this concept was aptly summarized by Francoist intellectual José María Pemán, who asserted, on the first anniversary of the coup, that ‘Seville […] had to be ruled like this: with more justice, less rule of law’.
81
Justice, it seems, was not to be found in the rule of law, but rather, precisely in Queipo's violent and volatile temperament. One of the general's twenty-first century admirers, for example, narrates an episode where Queipo's caprice played midwife to his humanity. In this anecdote, the general ordered a bank manager to readmit a sacked employee or else he would have him shot in Seville's main square.
82
Ramón-Laca was even more explicit: Any psychiatrist would find the tough and complex personality of Queipo interesting in the extreme: his love of justice to the point of clouding his judgement and constantly putting his life at risk, and for whom any unfair sanction, however small – and the author of these lines is an eyewitness – would trigger a fit of rage; at the same time, his hand would not tremble when it had to sign the harshest sentence for anyone who put in danger the integrity of the motherland.
83
As for Queipo de Llano's so-called welfare state, the devil lies in the detail. The official biography of the general, co-authored by his closest collaborator, General Cuesta Monereo, dedicated a single chapter to Queipo's ‘social and economic policy’. 85 Similarly, Nicolás Salas and Ana Quevedo, the most recent guardians of the general's myth, have only devoted small sections of their lengthy biographies to Queipo's social work. 86 Queipo himself only offered seven pages on social policy in his prolix and self-congratulatory memoirs. 87 He did mention, in passing, that the Asociación Sevillana de Caridad was handing out thousands of charity meals in Seville, but only as a means to emphasize the fact that he had come up with the idea. 88 The general also boasted of taking a particular interest in the development of agriculture in southern Spain; however, he angrily rejected an offer to head the Ministry of Agriculture in Franco's government, dismissing it as a post of minor importance. 89 A common trend in all aforementioned works is that they focus on Queipo's radio chats (notorious for their demagoguery) and a number of isolated episodes, but abstain from embarking on a detailed examination of specific policies. One much-cited but under-analysed policy, is the temporary moratorium on, and in some cases cancellation of, the payment of housing rents in Seville, lauded as illustrative of the general's munificence. 90 However, Queipo also conceded in his memoirs that he was forced to exempt widows from paying rent, or else risk further aggravating the vagrancy crisis in the city. To be sure, Seville's housing crisis predated the military coup of July 1936 and Queipo was keen to blame the city's trade unions for these problems. 91 He did not mention that floods in the spring of that year had left some 10,000 residents homeless; that rents in Seville were known to be among the highest in Spain; that the concentration of property in a few hands had further aggravated these problems; nor that the trade unions and landlord associations had already reached an agreement to solve the rental price crisis a month before the military coup. 92 Above all, Queipo did not mention his own role in creating a sudden rise in the number of destitute widows and orphans in the city.
The most mentioned and eulogized social policy implemented by Queipo de Llano was the construction of houses for the working-class population of Seville. Ramón-Laca claimed that the project represented ‘Queipo's most important social policy, his crowning achievement’; whereas, Ana Quevedo has more recently defined it as ‘the starting point of a magnificent social programme, which would reach its splendorous pinnacle within two years’. 93 This splendorous idea came to Queipo in typical legendary fashion, in the form of an epiphany, in December 1936, after Colonel Francisco Bohórquez Vecina told him that he had seen a homeless family trying to shelter itself from the bitter winter cold. Bohórquez ‘meditated on the urgent need to end such misery, a consequence of the lack of human solidarity, which reached its lowest point during the Popular Front era’. 94 In reality, Bohórquez Vecina was the main juridical authority for the whole of southern Spain, and therefore one of the chief architects of repression in insurgent Seville. 95 Notwithstanding the plaudits subsequently offered to Queipo for his housing programme, entire families remained homeless months after the general had supposedly ushered in an era of unparalleled prosperity in the city. The edict announcing housing construction, issued on 14 December 1936, also served to reaffirm class structures. The new buildings were to be funded by all sevillanos, who were given two options. They could work for one day a month in the construction of the houses, or they could pay a special tax that would exempt them from labour. 96 Between 1937 and 1938, Queipo presided over numerous events to celebrate the construction process, where he loudly proclaimed his love for the workers. 97 Ultimately, Queipo's ‘crowning achievement’ was in fact rather modest in scale and failed to meet needs, but it was very telling of the general's concern for welfare. It was not until June 1938 that the first 124 houses were handed to an equal number of working-class families in the city. 98 At that time, around 90,000 sevillanos lived in overcrowded and insalubrious houses, 20,000 of whom were in slums. 99 Indifferent to all of this, Queipo continued to use symbolic gestures of charity to cement his image as a socially conscious dictator while reminding the working-class of their subaltern status in Francoist Spain. 100 In one such ceremony, he shared his notion of social justice with the assembled crowd: ‘Social equality is ludicrous. Look at Nature, to God's work, and notice that no two things are equal’. 101
The legendary aura surrounding Queipo de Llano's rule created a paradox that could not be resolved by Francoist propaganda: how to reconcile the alleged prosperity of 1936–9 with the penury of the subsequent decade? In reality, as noted above, there was no radical socio-economic discontinuity between wartime and post-war Seville, but a large degree of overlap. For the rebels, Queipo's greatest ‘achievement’ rested not on his apocryphal social work, but in the very concrete eradication of Republicanism from Seville. In fact, Queipo's concept of minimal, conditional and punitive charity continued to be implemented by the local authorities long after the general was removed from power in 1939. For instance, a number of concentration camps were set up in the province of Seville to lock up beggars. In the ‘Las Arenas’ camp alone, in the municipality of La Algaba, 50 per cent of inmates perished between 1941 and 1942. This was after the Town Hall of Seville had expelled some 10,000 vagrants from the city in 1940. 102 Most deaths were caused by poor hygiene and malnutrition, which also plagued the wider population. An outbreak of typhus in 1941 killed 134 sevillanos. To make matters worse, underfunding and general neglect meant that many health centres were de facto antechambers of death. In that same year, nearly one-third of the children at the Casa Cuna, the largest public orphanage in the city, died after contracting preventable illnesses. A similar percentage of patients perished at the San Lázaro Provincial Sanatorium within a year of entering the institution in 1947. In 1946, 10 years after Queipo's had first subjected Seville to a military dictatorship, Auxilio Social was still providing assistance to nearly 20,000 sevillanos. 103
In Seville as in the rest of Franco's Spain in the años de hambre (years of hunger) of the 1940s, economic collapse and widespread misery stimulated the development of a flourishing black market (estraperlo). Historians have recognized that the post-war hunger itself formed a means of repression and social control over the ‘vanquished’ from the civil war.
104
In Seville, the black market was controlled by the local oligarchy, ensuring that it continued to profit from the misery of the masses. The collateral effects of the economic disaster were also particularly acute in the city. Seville became one of the main centres of prostitution in the country: its 116 brothels were supplied by a human trafficking network that stretched to North Africa and preyed on poor, working-class women.
105
Meanwhile, the housing crisis persisted for decades. A report produced in 1951 but referring to 1940 (less than a year after Queipo de Llano's departure from Seville) exposed the existence of several shantytowns in the city that lacked running water, sewage, pavements and street lighting. Its conclusions reveal the fiction that was the general's welfare state: a series of buildings have been built, more or less rudimentary or variable in quality, in which the residents have lived in the worse hygienic conditions, disgusting for a capital such as ours […] they have become as a consequence veritable epicentres of infection, owing to the diseases for which the said terrible conditions laid the groundwork, with the mortality rate of these neighbourhoods consequently being much higher than all the other districts of Seville.
106
This article has traced and defined the different stages of development of repression and economic policy in Seville during the Spanish Civil War, a model that can also be applied to the rest of Queipo's ‘viceroyalty’ in southern Spain, which included 4 of Spain's 10 largest cities at the time (Seville, Málaga, Granada and Córdoba). From the outset, rebel rule in the capital of Andalucía was marked by massacres, looting, confiscations and an avalanche of ‘voluntary’ contributions. This last form of organized extortion was subsequently presented as an ‘economic plebiscite’ which legitimized the new regime. The ensuing and predictable economic ruin of the city was followed, initially, by a process of social schizophrenia whereby the rebels carried out a series of impromptu initiatives to mitigate misery while still indulging in mass murder. They soon realized that organized assistance was necessary in order to avoid the economic collapse of Seville. They also realized, however, that hunger could be used as a policy in its own right, and from this dialectic of violence and destitution emerged a peculiar form of charity: one which was based on the ostracization of adversaries and the re-education of the working class. These phases in the economic development of Queipo's Seville were not only interlinked, but also tended to overlap, thus amplifying the torment of the local population. For example, sevillanos were coerced into funding aid organizations through a series of ‘patriotic’ subscriptions, while the Falange organized events to distribute food and other goods, during the day, to the families of those it had murdered the previous night. In this violent and kleptocratic regime, the charity made necessary by rebel killings was itself a useful propaganda tool. Meanwhile, new myths were created around Queipo de Llano to complement the fable of his audacious and providential capture of the city. The general was transformed into a visionary economic administrator, as well as a benevolent and philanthropic ruler. As with Queipo's economic policies in the city, so the myth itself served a repressive purpose. It would be used to humiliate, in perpetuity, those who had suffered at the hands of the ‘viceroy’ of Seville.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. Gareth Stockey for revising the manuscript.
