SPAIN: Moorish Granada and Lorca

I always stand up for people I deem unjustly accused or insulted. John Heelan thinks
the bourgeois of Granada, the target of Lorca's scathing remark, unworthy of my
quixotic defense: "Prior to confirming your preference, it is perhaps worth
reconsidering the context of Lorca's statement about the 1930s Granadine middleclass being the worst bourgeoisie in Spain", otherwise you might be unwittingly
allying yourself with strongly right-wing, RC-dominated, homophobic and philistine
community composed mainly of immigrants.:-) [I have not lived in Granada, so I
cannot comment. I am surprised to hear Granada described as "mainly composed of
immigrants". RH].
The statement came in an interview with the columnist Bagara published in the
newspaper El Sol, Madrid, 10th June 1936, some two months before his death.
Bagara asked Lorca his views on the fall of Granada to the Catholic Kings in 1491.
[The army of Boabdil was defeated in 1491. The Spanish army entered Granada on
January 2, 1492. All Europe rejoiced. RH.].
Lorca replied: "It was a disastrous event, even though they say the opposite in the
schools. An admirable civilization, and a poetry, architecture and delicacy unique in
the world- all were lost, to give way to an impoverished, cowed town, a wasteland
populated by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain". [The reference to schools beings us
back to our history textbook project. The official version was that the expulsion of the
Arabs represented the final liberation of Europe from the Moorish invaders. Lorca's
describing the civilization of Granada as unique in the world is a gross exaggeration.
It is true that the city declined badly after the conquest. RH.].
Thus Lorca had angered the Granadine middle class, who formed the bulk of the
local Falange and who already were disgusted by his homosexuality and were
perhaps jealous of his success. He had alienated the Roman Catholic Church not
only by being gay (overtly in his later years and thus a threat to the still closeted
members of Granada's gay community) but also by his works, especially his poem
"Ode to the Holy Sacrament" and his plays "Blood Wedding" and "Yerma". His close
relationship with the loathed Republican government minister, Fernando de los Rios
and the Republican Prime Minister, Manuel Azaa clearly had infuriated the rightwing politicians of Granada, who had recently won the local election only to see it
annulled by the Crtes in Madrid. As Gibson points out: "In Granada in August 1936
a person with Lorca's reputation and friends could not expect to escape death"
(Gibson 1987, p.180). [I knew Fernando de los Ros when he was Minister of
Education and later Ambassador to France. A pleasant, mild person, it was he who
promoted the Moorish tradition of Granada. Since Franco, the pro-Moorish group in
Granada have disrupted the annual ceremony celebrating the Spanish conquest.
Since Franco, the Spanish government has tried to promote both cultures in
Granada, thus reviving the plan of Fernando de los Ros to tmake Granada a center
for the study of the Arab world. Azaa infuriated the Catholic Church by boasting that
Spain had ceased to be Catholic. My criticism of Azaa is that his indecisiveveness

was one cause of the Civil War. I have no opinion of the annulment of the Granada
elections. RH].
To my comment that "I can't understand why women fell for him", John replies:
"Possibly for the same reason they fall for other gay men, a mixture of potential
platonic friendship without sexual overtones or competition and an onrush of the
mothering instinct for which gay men often display a deep need?" As for my story
that a woman rebuffed by him committed suicide, John says he had not heard it. I
read it in a reliable source. I must find it.
John does not mention Granada's gypsies or the bullfights, beloved by Lorca, who
wrote a famous poem on the death of a bullfighter "at five in the afternoon". The
argument about Lorca is important as the epitome of the history of modern Spain.
Ronald Hilton - 12/22/01

Federico Garca Lorca was killed on

official orders, say 1960s police files
Newly released documents contain first admission by Franco-era officials of their
involvement in 1936 death of Spanish poet and playwright

Lorca makes a broadcast for Spanish radio station Union Radio SA, circa
1929. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty
Ashifa Kassam in Madrid
Thursday 23 April 201519.21 BSTLast modified on Friday 24 April
201500.00 BST

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Playwright and poet Federico Garca Lorca was arrested and killed on the
orders of rightwing military authorities in Granada, according to newly
released documents that shed light on the death of one of the highestprofile victims of the Spanish civil war.
The documents, written in 1965 at the Granada police headquarters and
obtained by the Guardian, are the first ever admission by Franco-era

officials of their involvement in the death in 1936 of the author of Blood

Wedding and the House of Bernarda Alba.
The circumstances surrounding Garca Lorcas death and the whereabouts
of his remains continue to be one of the great mysteries of Spains recent
history. Until now, it was thought that the Granada-born poet was executed
by a rightwing firing squad along with three others.
The documents published on Thursday relate to an inquiry into Garca
Lorcas death by French author Marcelle Auclair in the 1960s. Her request
for information bounced between several government ministers, as they
debated whether to respond. Granada police were then asked to write the
report, some 29 years after the death of Garca Lorca.
The resulting documents suggest Garca Lorca was persecuted for his
beliefs, describing him as a socialist and a freemason, about whom
rumours swirled of homosexual and abnormal practices. After police
carried out two searches on his home in Granada, he fled to a friends house
out of fear.
In August 1936, just one month after the civil war broke out, officers
surrounded the house where Garca Lorca was hiding, while his friends
tried to intervene on his behalf.
Garca Lorca was arrested and taken by car to an area close to the place
known as Fuente Grande, along with one other detainee, said the
documents. He was then executed immediately after having confessed, and
was buried in that location, in a very shallow grave, in a ravine. No details
were given as to the content of his confession.
Since 2009, several high-profile attempts have been made to locate the
gravewhere Garca Lorca is thought to lie. So far archaeologists have had
little success.

Lorca mystery may soon be

solved but much of Spains past
remains buried

Read more
The documents are a marked departure from the public stance taken by
authorities under Franco towards Garca Lorcas death. General Franco
once said the allegations of his regimes involvement in the poets death
were being used as propaganda. The writer died while mixing with the
rebels, these are natural accidents of war, said Franco.
On Thursday, Garca Lorca biographer Ian Gibson pointed to the official
nature of the documents to underline their significance. Up until Francos
death, Lorcas murder remained a problem for the regime, he told El Pas.
But these documents leave little speculation about the dictatorships level of
involvement, he said. It demonstrates that it was not a street killing, that
he was taken out by the civil government to be murdered, he said. They
themselves say it.

Final hours of Spanish poet Federico

Garca Lorca revealed
Historian claims to know who made up Franco's execution squad and where they
buried the poet during Spain's civil war

The celebrated writer Federico Garca Lorca was executed by a

fascist firing squad in Granada during Spains civil war in August 1936.
Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features Sipa Press / Rex Features/Sipa
Press / Rex Features
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Saturday 25 June 201121.19 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 3 June
201420.21 BST

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One of the great mysteries of Spain's recent history may have been solved
by a local historian from the southern city of Granada, who claims to have

found the real grave of the executed playwright and poet Federico Garca
Lorca.
Miguel Caballero Prez spent three years sifting through police and military
archives to piece together the last 13 hours of the life of the author of Blood
Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, who was shot by a
right-wing firing squad early in the Spanish civil war.
He now claims to have identified the half-dozen career policemen and
volunteers who formed the firing squad that shot Lorca and three other
prisoners, as well as the burial site. And he blames Lorca's death on the
long-running political and business rivalry between some of Granada's
wealthiest families including his father's own Garca clan.
"I decided to research archive material rather than gather more oral
testimony because that is where the existing confusion comes from with
so many supposed witnesses inventing things," explained Caballero, who
has published his results in a Spanish book called The Last 13 Hours of
Garca Lorca.
Caballero said his original intention had been to verify information
gathered in the 1960s by a Spanish journalist, Eduardo Molina Fajardo,
who was also a member of the far-right Falange organisation that
supported the dictator GeneralFrancisco Franco.
"Because of his own political stance, Molina Fajardo had access to people
who were happy to tell him the truth," said Caballero. "The archives bear
out most of what he said, so it is reasonable to suppose he was also right
about the place Lorca was buried."
That spot was said to be a trench dug by someone seeking water in an area
of open countryside near a farm called Cortijo de Gazpacho, between the
villages of Viznar and Alfacar. The zone is only half a kilometre from the
spot identified by historian Ian Gibson in 1971 which was controversially
dug up in 2009, but where no bones were found.
"The new place makes sense because it is far enough from the villages to be
out of eyesight and earshot, but you can also get there by car as they
would have needed headlights to shoot people at night," said Caballero.
Caballero took a water diviner to the area, who employed the same divining

technique using a twig that was common in Lorca's time. He detected a

possible underwater stream. "It is reasonable, then, to suppose that
someone might have dug a trench here looking for streams just below the
surface," said Caballero.
An archaeologist, Javier Navarro, has identified a dip in the ground that
could indicate a grave. "It is by no means unreasonable to think there is a
grave there," said Navarro, who has found half a dozen civil war mass
graves in other parts ofSpain. "It would be very easy to find out. You only
have to scrape away about 40cm of topsoil for an experienced archaeologist
to say if the earth has been dug up before."
The half dozen men who formed the firing squad shot hundreds of
suspected leftwingers in the summer of 1936, with Lorca just one of them.
They were given a bonus of 500 pesetas and promoted as a reward for
carrying out the dirty work of the nationalist forces of the future dictator,
Franco. "I call them the 'executioners' rather than the 'murderers' because,
while some were volunteers, others were career policemen who risked being
shot themselves if they refused," said Caballero. One was said to have
complained that the job "was driving him mad". Some of the squad
probably did not even know who Lorca was. "These were not the sort of
people who read poetry. Lorca's work was largely read by the elites," he
said. "They would have been more interested in the two anarchists shot
with him, who had a reputation for being very dangerous." But both the
firing squad commander, a stern 53-year-old policeman called Mariano
Ajenjo, and a volunteer member called Antonio Benavides who was a
relative of the first wife of Lorca's father would have known who he was.
"I gave that fat-head a shot in the head," Benavides reportedly boasted
later.
The rightwing Roldn family, political rivals of Lorca's father, had
persuaded the city's pro-Franco authorities to arrest and shoot the poet. A
member of the Roldn clan, Benavides, formed part of the firing squad. One
of his cousins was the model for a rogue character in The House of
Bernardo Alba, finished a few months earlier, in which Lorca deliberately
took aim at the rival Alba family. "They were angry with the father and took
their revenge on the son," said Caballero.

Apart from Benavides, none of the firing squad seemed proud of what they
had done. "They didn't speak to their families about all this. They are
remembered as loving grandfathers who were silent about the civil war,"
said Caballero.

The Death of Federico Garcia Lorca (Time for

Spain to Face History)
Gregory McNamee - August 18, 2009

Sevilla to wound!Crdoba to die in!

On August 18, 1936, a 38-year-old Spanish poet named Federico Garca Lorca was
taken from a jail cell in the city of Granada, escorted to a courtyard in the hills outside
the city, and executed, along with a teacher and two anarchist bullfighters who had
fought in the citys defense against Francisco Francos rebellion.
His killers were Fascist militiamen whose leaders had long before targeted the poet for
murder, for it was clear where his
sympathies lay; he once said, after all,
I will always be on the side of those
who have nothing and who are not
even allowed to enjoy the nothing they
have in peace.
His killers, however, apparently
believed that he was being killed
simply because he was homosexual,
and one later bragged of having fired
two bullets into the poet for being
queer.
Garca Lorca was only beginning to
attain widespread fame outside Spain
at the time of his death, although he
had been well known within the

country for a decade, ever since the publication of his Gypsy Ballads and plays that
included Blood Wedding, all of which spoke to the innermost recesses of the Andalusian
soul through the cante jondo, the deep song. It may have been that the unreflective
Franco disliked the soul-searching capability of Garca Lorcas verse; certainly he
despised gypsies, and so philistine were his tastes and retrograde his views that
even Adolf Hitler was moved to remark of Francos rebellion, Had I known the true
state of affairs I would not have used our aircraft to return to the Spanish aristocracy
and the Catholic Church their medieval rights.
Garca Lorca, then, died in 1936, his body rudely buried where he fell. Franco would
live another 39 years, after which Spain would slowly emerge from his repressive
shadow to become one of the most liberal nations in Europe. During the nearly threequarters of a century since his death, Garca Lorca has entered the canon of world
poetry, an eternal rebuke to the enemies of liberty who killed him and to all their kind.
He has also become an odd cause of sorts, with a crusading judge named Baltasar
Garzn ordering that the body be exhumed for forensic analysis and, presumably,
reburial in a grave more suitable to an artist of such renown. There is much speculation
about the order, but it stems, it seems, in part from the judges wish to excite
discussion about the Spanish Civil War, which most people old enough to remember
firsthand seem to want to forget and which is ancient history to young Spanish people
today.
Garca Lorcas family has objected to the exhumation, as Jon Lee Anderson reports in
an admirable story for the New Yorker (June 22, 2009; abstract here). Noting that
thousands of his compatriots were executed in the hills above Granada, Laura Garca
Lorca, a niece of the poet, adds to Andersons story the comment, We feel that the
best way to remember all victims of the terrible crimes committed by Francos troops is
to preserve and protect this burial ground, where Lorca is one victim among many.
The case is slowly moving forward, with all its complications. Whether it will undo
Spains long-standing pact of silence, as it is known, with respect to the Spanish Civil
War and the Franco dictatorship remains to be seen. But many believe that, regardless
of the rightness or wrongness of disturbing the bones of the dead, it is a conversation
that is long overdue.

Process of Extermination

The Spanish Holocaust, by Paul Preston

By ADAM HOCHSCHILDMAY 11, 2012
Photo

Miners captured by General Franco's forces in 1936, before their execution in

Seville.CreditPhotograph courtesy of ICAS-SAHP, Fototeca Municipal de Sevilla,
Fondo Serrano
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In Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War,
George Orwell remarks that Francisco Francos military uprising
against Spains elected government was an attempt not so much
to impose fascism as to restore feudalism. Paul Prestons
magisterial account of the bloodshed of that era bears this out.
Fascism may belong to the 20th century, but Francos grab for
power evokes earlier times: the parading soldiers who flourished
enemy ears and noses on their bayonets, the mass public
executions carried out in bullrings or with band music and
onlookers dancing in the victims blood. One of Francos top aides
talked of democratically chosen politicians as cloven-hoofed
beasts, and anything that smacked of modernity Rotary Clubs,
Montessori schools seemed to draw the regimes violent wrath.
Echoing the Inquisition, Franco ordered particularly despised
foes put to death with the garrote, in which the executioner
tightens an iron collar around a persons neck.
Theres also something medieval in the fierce class divisions of
1930s Spain, with its great latifundistas, whose estates were
worked by landless peasants so hungry they stole acorns from
pigs troughs. Preston describes the near racist loathing
Francos officials had for the lower classes; one contemptuously
referred to unionized farmworkers as being like Rif tribesmen.
Indeed, Francos leading commanders were mostly, like
him,Africanistas, veterans of Spains bloody colonial wars in
North Africa. As a young man, the generalissimo himself led
troops on a raid that brought back the severed heads of 12
Moroccan tribesmen.
With Hitler and Mussolini supplying arms to Franco, and the
Soviet Union to the embattled Spanish Republic, the death toll of
the 1936-39 war was enormous. Some 200,000 soldiers died in
battle, and a further large but unknown number of civilians were
killed by Francos bombing of Spanish cities and of vast columns
of refugees in flight. But Prestons subject is something else: the
approximately 200,000 men and women deliberately executed
during the war, the 20,000 supporters of the Republic shot after
it ended, and the additional tens of thousands of civilians and
refugees who died in concentration camps and prisons.
An eminent and prolific British historian of modern Spain,
Preston says this was an extremely painful book to write. It is

also, unlike several of his other works, a difficult book to read.

The newcomer to Spanish history will nowhere learn the
difference between the Assault Guard and the Civil Guard, or
between a Carlist and an integrist. Chapters roll on for 40 or 50
pages without a break. A blizzard of names of thousands of
perpetrators and the towns where they carried out their tortures
and killings overwhelms the reader. The Spanish Holocaust is
not really a narrative but a comprehensive prosecutors brief.
With its immense documentation 120 pages of endnotes to
both published and unpublished material in at least five
languages, including corrections of errors in these sources it is
bound to be an essential reference for anything written on the
subject for years to come.
In quashing democracy and timid agricultural reform, and in
restoring the traditional hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church,
the army, big landowners and an authoritarian state, the Spanish
version of fascism was very much a fundamentalist movement.
And like so many political and religious fundamentalisms, it had a
particular ferocity toward women. Francos troops practiced gang
rape to frighten newly captured towns into submission, and until
media-savvy superiors silenced them, his officers even boasted
about this to American and British correspondents. Tens of
thousands of women had their heads shaved and were force-fed
castor oil (a powerful laxative), then jeered as they were paraded
through the streets soiling themselves. Many had their breasts
branded with the Falangist symbol of yoke and arrows. In Toledo,
a United Press correspondent reported, Francos soldiers shot
more than 20 pregnant women from a maternity hospital. Much
larger all-female groups were executed elsewhere. Troops
marched through one town waving rifles adorned with the
underwear of women they had raped and murdered. It is
necessary to spread terror, one of Francos senior generals
declared. We have to create the impression of mastery,
eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not
think as we do.
Although Prestons sympathies are clearly with the doomed
Republic, to his credit he is equally thorough in exposing the
killings committed under that government. Many supporters of
the Republic had their own version of class hatred, murdering
large numbers of captured army officers, other right-wingers and,
most notoriously, nearly 7,000 members of the Catholic clergy
and religious orders, who were seen as accomplices of the
reactionary landowners. Among hundreds of other atrocities on
the Republican side, Preston details the evasions of the longtime
Communist Party leader Santiago Carrillo regarding his
involvement in the massacre of more than 2,200 rightist
prisoners in Madrid; the operations of some Soviet advisers
who, supposedly on hand to aid the Republican Army, devoted
themselves to hunting down anti-Stalinists on the Spanish left;

and the harshly sadistic prisons operated by the Republics

military intelligence service. Of the 200,000 estimated civilian
wartime executions, more than 49,000 took place in Republican
territory a much smaller toll than that taken by the fascists, but
still enormous.
There were crucial differences, however. Most, though by no
means all, Republican killings were by mob violence, not
deliberate policy, in the first six months of the war, as popular
outrage welled up after air raids and news of fascist atrocities. But
sometimes effectively, sometimes not, and often at great
personal risk certain Republican officials managed to restrain
and sometimes even prosecute killers of civilians. Unlike the
tightly controlled press in Francos territory, some newspapers
condemned the killings. And the Republican government saved
many lives by evacuating from the country more than 10,000
businessmen, priests and other right-wingers thought to be at
particular risk. Nothing similar happened on the Falangist side.
Francos rule became less murderous in later times, but in the
early years he ranks morally with Hitler and Stalin. In such a
regime, I always wonder, were there any decent people who tried
to stop the slaughter? Yes, it turns out. Preston gives one brief but
haunting example. Father Fernando Huidobro Polanco was a 34year-old Jesuit who enthusiastically volunteered as a chaplain for
Francos troops. But he was dismayed to see them routinely
shooting all their prisoners. He sent protests to high-level army
officers and finally wrote to Franco himself that many are dying
who do not deserve such a fate and who could mend their ways.
To Francos adjutant, he protested in despair that we are falling
back into barbarism. . . . I do not want the new regime to be born
with blood on its hands. He was wounded but then returned to
the front, ever more vocal. In 1937, he was killed in battle,
supposedly by shrapnel from one of the Republics Soviet artillery
shells. Ten years later the Jesuits began the lengthy process to
have him canonized as a saint. But in the course of the
investigation, it came out that hed been shot in the back by a
soldier from his own unit, tired perhaps of the preaching of his
chaplain, Preston writes. When it was discovered that Huidobro
had been killed by the Francoists and not by the Reds, the Vatican
shelved his case.
THE SPANISH HOLOCAUST
Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain

By Paul Preston
Illustrated. 700 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.