Anti-Francoism

Opposition to Francoism, anti-Francoism and at that time simply opposition, is the denomination given to the group of political and social movements that opposed Franco's regime or dictatorship from the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939) until the first democratic elections (1977), a year and a half after his death (1975).

Resistance in the insurgent region (1936–1939)

Before the end of the Spanish Civil War, it can be observed that there were signs of opposition in the Francoist zone, controlled by the nascent Franco regime: in December 1936 the attempt by Manuel Fal Conde, leader of Traditionalist Communion, to create a Royal Military Academy of Requetés that was not under the control of the Army resulted in his immediate departure from the country amidst accusations of treason. On April 16, 1937, violent incidents took place in Salamanca between members of different factions within the ''Falange Española y de las JONS'' (the faction of the triumvirate between Agustín Aznar, José Moreno and Sancho Dávila against the faction of Manuel Hedilla), as a result there were two fatalities and on April 25 of the same year Manuel Hedilla, leader until that moment of the '' FE y de las JONS'', was accused of having conspired against Franco and was condemned to two death sentences. These first frictions within the ranks of the rebels would be stopped by the Unification Decree of 1937, which led to the creation of the ''FET y de las JONS'', conceived as the political branch of the so-called ''Movimiento Nacional''.

Opposition to Francoism in 1939 and 1945

Beginnings of the opposition in the interior of Spain

In the interior of Spain the first two organizations of the defeated side to reorganize were the CNT and the PCE, even though the conditions in which they did so were harsh: "an environment marked by hunger and disease, with thousands of people in prison or awaiting execution, while others made the traces of their Republican past disappear to avoid arrest and where the majority of the population depended for their subsistence on the straperlo, thus increasing their vulnerability towards the pressures of the state". Therefore, in both cases the clandestine activity was focused on helping their imprisoned militants and their families, providing them with money and seeking ways to free them or reduce their sentences, and giving shelter to those persecuted by the police.

However, the first unitary organization of the opposition to Francoism, the Spanish Democratic Alliance (ADE), was promoted by a group of exiled Republicans and its board of directors, constituted in the summer of 1940, was based in London. However, "the ADE was little more than a front for the activities of the British secret information services and their Spanish collaborators in the interior". It had a short life because the Francoist police managed to infiltrate the organization and arrested some 200 people in Valencia, Madrid and other cities —ten were sentenced to death of which three were shot in Paterna in November—. After the invasion of France, the network of ADE agents, which operated from the Midi, was dismantled, and the British government ceased to support it so it disappeared at the end of 1940.

As for the anarchists, the first interior committee was formed by Esteban Pallarols, who had managed to escape from the Albatera camp, and who was in charge of creating a clandestine network to move to France the prisoners he managed to get out of the concentration camps by means of false documents. Pallarols was arrested by the police and condemned to death, being shot on July 18, 1943. He was replaced by Manuel López López, but he resigned soon after due to tuberculosis he had contracted during his stay in the Albatera camp, and was replaced by Celedonio Pérez Bernardo. He was also arrested, tried in September 1942 and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was replaced by Manuel Amil Barcia, but he, stalked by the police, had to leave Madrid to take refuge in Andalusia, so the functions of the national committee were taken over by the Madrid organization headed by Eusebio Azañedo, who contacted the CNT of Valencia, which had been reorganized, and the CNT of Catalonia, whose situation was rather unclear due to the existence of two regional committees. As a result of the denunciation of a confidant, Acebedo was arrested in Madrid in the summer of 1943, so Amil returned to the capital to take charge again of the general secretariat of the national committee.

As for the communists, the first organization of the party that was formed in hiding was in Madrid, where just after the end of the war a provincial committee was formed, headed by Matilde Landa and made up of several militants, some of them young members of the JSU. Some of its members were arrested by the police, who had obtained the files of the communist youth organization, being accused without any proof of having been preparing an attack against General Franco for the Victory Parade to be held on May 19, so a military court sentenced them to death and they were shot. Others were accused of being involved in the attack against Major Isaac Gabaldón, when he was traveling in his car near Talavera de la Reina. On August 4 a first summary court-martial was held in Madrid in which 65 of the 67 accused were condemned to death, being shot the following day; 63, among them thirteen young women, some of them minors, who would be known as " ''Las trece rosas''". Matilde Landa was also arrested, as well as Enrique Sánchez and José Cazorla, leaders of the JSU, who had formed the first "delegation of the central committee" —the term used to refer to the clandestine communist leadership of the interior of Spain—, Sánchez and Cazorla were while Landa saw the sentence commuted to 30 years in prison, but in mid-1942 she could no longer withstand the psychological pressure to which she was subjected by the prison guards and the management of the Palma de Mallorca prison and committed suicide. The next attempt of the PCE to provide itself with an underground leadership was the work of Heriberto Quiñones, who escaped from the Albatera camp. Quiñones formed the Interior Committee in May 1941, which also included Luis Sendín and Julio Vázquez —the latter was arrested by the police on July 16, being replaced by Realino Fernández López ''Realinos'', of the Communist Party of Euskadi—. Around the same time, mid-May, several communist cadres sent by the PCE leadership in Mexico arrived in Lisbon to take charge of the organization of the interior. But four months later the Portuguese police arrested the "Lisbon group" and the Spanish police arrested Quiñones' committee along with two hundred more communist militants. Quiñones himself was arrested on December 30, 1941, in Madrid's Alcalá Street along with Ángel Garvín, who had taken the place of ''Realinos'' —detained earlier— in the interior leadership. All the captured interior leaders were condemned to death and shot, as well as the members of the "Lisbon group", who had been extradited to Spain, except for one of them who would die in prison in 1947. The reaction of the PCE leadership in exile to this incident was to accuse Quiñones of being a traitor who had denounced his comrades of the "Lisbon group" to the police. To this very serious accusation was added that of "Trotskyist" —the worst label a communist could receive in the times of Stalinist orthodoxy—.

After the defeat of Quiñones, Jesús Bayón, a former collaborator of his, took over the communist leadership in the interior, which also included other former "quiñonistas" who had managed to evade arrest, such as Calixto Pérez Doñoro. In June 1942, Bayón was replaced by Jesús Carreras, sent by the PCE leadership in France, whose influence was increasingly felt in the organization in the interior through the work of Jesús Monzón and his deputy Gabriel León Trilla who had rebuilt the PCE in the French Midi, then under the collaborationist regime of Vichy, and whose press organ, published clandestinely from August 1941, carried the title of ''La Reconquista de España'' (The Reconquest of Spain). Nevertheless, in February 1943, Carreras, betrayed by a police informer, was arrested in Madrid and tortured, and after him the rest of the national leadership in Madrid, including Bayón and Pérez Doñoro, and an important number of active communist militants, as well as the top brass of the JSU. For the second time in less than two years the PCE saw its internal organization dismantled.

The socialists took much longer to reorganize than the anarchists and communists. The first nucleus to be reconstituted was that of the Basque Country as a result of the clandestine work of Nicolás Redondo Blanco and Ramón Rubial. In Asturias, where repression was stronger due to the greater presence of the Guardia Civil and the Army fighting the maquis, the first provincial committee was not formed until 1944. In Madrid a third socialist nucleus was formed under the impulse of Sócrates Gómez.

Republican opposition in exile

Diego Martínez Barrio managed to gather a good part of the left-wing republicans in exile —'' Unión Republicana, Izquierda Republicana'', and '' Partido Republicano Federal''— with the creation in Mexico of the ''Acción Republicana Española'', whose first manifesto was made public on April 14, 1941, the tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, in which he ended by calling on the Western democracies to help overthrow Franco because "without a free Spain a free Europe will not be possible". The fundamental point on which the proposal of the ARE diverged from that of the socialist Indalecio Prieto, who had displaced the " ''Negrinista''" sector from the leadership of the PSOE and the UGT, was that it advocated the reconstruction of a republican government that would present itself to the allies as an alternative to Franco, while the latter advocated the holding of a referendum on the form of government to attract the support of the monarchists.

The anarchists also carried out their own unification process initiated before the end of the war with the creation in France on February 26, 1939, of the Libertarian Movement, made up of the CNT, the FAI and the FIJL. But in the spring of 1942 the Libertarian Movement in exile experienced a serious crisis with the outbreak of latent tensions since the end of the war between the "collaborationists" led by Juan García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández, and the "apolitical" who supported the Paris-based national council presided over by Germinal Esgleas and Federica Montseny. At a meeting held in Mexico the former presented a document for discussion entitled "Ponencia" but were defeated, so they decided to form their own organization, a new '' CNT'', which had as its press organ the CNT newspaper, while the spokesman of the "anti-collaborationists" was '' Solidaridad Obrera''.

The Communists since the signature of the German-Soviet pact in August 1939 remained isolated from the rest of the Republican opposition forces by defending a policy based on the consideration of World War II as an "imperialist war" in which the Spanish people should not intervene. Only after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 they began to break their isolation by defending now that the world war was a war of aggression by the Nazis to "liquidate, one by one, all the free countries", among which the communists included the Soviet Union, "to achieve their yearning for hegemony in the world", as was explained in an article published in '' Nuestra Bandera'' with the significant title of "Let us make of all Spain a great front against Franco and against Hitler". Consequently, on August 1, 1941, the PCE proposed the formation of a "National Union of all Spaniards against Franco, the Italo-German invaders and the traitors" which would unite all Spaniards without distinction, so that the call was also addressed to the monarchist military and to all conservative elements who wanted to distance themselves from Franco's policies.

The first outcome of this new doctrine was the Spanish Democratic Union (UDE), formed in Mexico in February 1942 and made up of the PCE and the "'' negrinista''" sectors of the PSOE and the UGT, the Republican Left (IR), the Republican Union (UR), the Federal Republican Party (PRF) and the '' Unió de Rabassaires'' —on the other hand, the Catalan communists of the PSUC formed in May their own UDE under the name of Aliança Nacional de Catalunya (ANC)—. Yet in September 1942 the PCE took a new turn in its policy by making public a manifesto in which neither the government of Juan Negrín nor the 1931 Constitution was mentioned and instead it proposed the holding of "democratic elections" to constitute a "constituent assembly to draft the constitutional charter that would guarantee the freedom, independence and prosperity of Spain". According to Hartmut Heine, this new turn was a response to Stalin's policy of considering the Iberian Peninsula "as an indisputable part of the sphere of influence of the West or, rather, of England". Juan Negrin responded by parting with the communists, as did the republican refugees in Great Britain. Thus in February 1943 the UDE was dissolved. However, the Socialists and the "'' negrinista''" Republicans, unlike Negrin himself, did not completely sever their ties with the PCE.

On the initiative of Diego Martínez Barrio, on November 20, 1943, the '' Junta Española de Liberación'' was presented in Mexico, made up of the "prietista" socialists and the republicans of the ARE, which constituted "the first relatively broad alliance of the republican forces in exile" since the end of the civil war.Gil Pecharromán (2008), p. 64 However, the JEL did not bring together all the anti-Francoist forces in exile, since the PCE and the "'' Negrinista''" socialists and republicans had been left out of it.

For its part, the PCE promoted the '' Unión Nacional Española'', which sought to bring together all anti-Francoist forces, both republican and monarchist. The liberation of France in the summer of 1944 led the UNE to consider that the time had come to launch the invasion of Spain once the Germans had abandoned the border posts and had been replaced by members of the ''Gendarmerie Nationale''. The operation devised by Jesús Monzón and his political and military advisors consisted of a frontal attack on the border defenses of the Pyrenees to establish several bridgeheads of "liberated Spain", which was to provoke a popular insurrection throughout the country. It was codenamed Operation ''Reconquista de España'' and was to involve some 9,000 Spanish members of the French '' maquis'', integrated since May 1944 in the '' Spanish Guerrilla Grouping'' (AGE).

The operation began between October 3 and 7 with the invasion of the Roncal Valley, followed a week later by the incursion into the sector between Hendaye

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