2023-04-22 04:09:56
Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera come back to the present. More than eight decades after he was shot in the Alicante prison, and as many years since his corpse traveled through half of Spain to rest in the Valley of the Fallen, the founder of the Spanish Falange (FE) has jumped to the media after that it be confirmed that, next Monday, his remains will be exhumed and deposited in the San Isidro cemetery at the request of the family. All this, in the heat of the new Law of Democratic Memory. In this way, he will join Francisco Franco, also exhumed in 2019.
They were decades that both rested in Cuelgamuros. And that, despite the fact that they were not tolerated. Because yes, dear reader, no matter how much it has been repeated ad nauseam, the Generalissimo and ‘El ausente’ felt an animosity that Ramón Serrano Súñer corroborated in his memoirs: «Regarding José Antonio himself, it will not be a great surprise to say that Franco did not he had sympathy. There was reciprocity in it, since José Antonio did not feel respect for Franco either, and more than once I, as a friend of both, felt mortified by the nature of his criticism. Franco was mortified by the cult of José Antonio, the aura of his intelligence and his courage ».
Encounter
The first meeting between the one and the other happened in the middle of a climate of tricolor tension. At the end of 1935 the Republic was eaten by corruption. On September 5, the scandal of the blackmail it, the acceptance by the Government of bribes in exchange for introducing in our country a brand new gambling game. And this was followed by ‘Nombela case‘, the fraudulent payment of compensation to the businessman Antonio Tayá for having withdrawn the transport concession to the colonies of Equatorial Guinea. This long string of infamy cost Alejandro Lerroux his job and an endless list of radical ministers.
The fall of the government and the proposal for new elections did not calm the waters; rather it fueled them. The Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights and the Army began to flirt with a coup. And one of the first to receive the call was the then Chief of Staff Francisco Franco. Very Galician, as it was throughout his life, the general responded with evasions and half measures. In the end, the only thing he heeded to say was that he did not advise a movement of such dimensions, since the military would not support it and it would be true suicide. In addition, the seriousness of the situation did not seem to justify that. ‘Miss Canarias’ at its best.
This is how everything was going when Primo de Rivera requested an interview with Franco to orchestrate a possible alliance. The first had barely 32 years behind him, he was a leader recognized for his political and street brawling, and he had carved out a niche for himself in the newspapers due to his ways of communicating. As if that weren’t enough, he was tall and handsome; a full-fledged media figure. The second, as José María Zavala explains so well in ‘Franco frankly’, was a forty-year-old “unprepossessing, short” and with a characteristic high-pitched voice that had earned him the nickname ‘Cerillito’ at the academy. The contrast was evident.
Jsé Antonio Primo de Rivera, at a meeting of the Spanish Falange in the Madrid cinema during 1935.
In the words of Zavala, both met in the house that Serrano Súñer’s father had on Ayala street in Madrid, one of the most central in the capital. Normal. On the one hand, he had been a friend of the Franco family for years; on the other, he also maintained a close relationship with José Antonio Primo de Rivera. An example of this is that he had married Carmen Polo’s little sister in February 1931, and José Antonio had been his witness at the wedding. For this reason, precisely, he knew that what the Falange leader was going to ask of Ferrol was not going to materialize: a preventive surgical intervention that would lead to an oligarchic national government. Everything, yes, to avoid drifting towards the Civil War.
That meeting was doomed. According to what Serrano Súñer wrote in his personal diaries, the one and the other left there thinking that their partner was unpresentable. «It was a heavy interview and for me uncomfortable. Franco was evasive, rambling and still cautious,” he explained. He also stressed that “José Antonio was very disappointed and, as soon as the door of the apartment closed after Franco’s departure, he burst into sarcasm.” The criticism was so harsh that the mutual friend felt inconvenienced by it. But not even with those did José Antonio bite his tongue: «My father, with all his defects, with his political disorientation, was something else. He had humanity, decision and nobility. But these people…».
Back with the lists
The friction had just begun. The following episode occurred after the electoral rigging perpetrated by the Popular front in Cuenca during the general elections of February 1936. In the second call, which was set for the beginning of May, the Falange leader was included so that he would have parliamentary immunity and be released from jail, where he had been since he was arrested a year ago. month. What is striking is that Franco was also on the same list; apparently, with the aim that he would return from his exile in the Canary Islands and be closer to Madrid when the coup d’état was perpetrated. This cocktail was going to make sparks fly.
The hate manifested itself. Instantly, Primo de Rivera demanded his removal from the lists. And he did it without fuss: crying out to the four winds that he would leave because of the commanding general of the Canary Islands. Franco responded with his classic resentment and instantly left the group. From then on, he began to refer to José Antonio in a derogatory way when he related to his relatives, as Serrano Súñer well wrote: «I remember that one day, at the table, at lunchtime, Franco told me, very nervous : ‘You see, always around the figure of that boy as an extraordinary thing’».
Row
Not even the death of Primo de Rivera brought peace of mind to Franco. During the Civil War, he short-circuited the Falange. The man from Ferrol ordered the APIS information network, the same group that prepared the reports of the Masonic lodges, to closely follow its members in search of possible betrayals. In fact, he bragged that he was “well informed of everything that is going on in the lodges” and that he had “direct information from the Masonic lodges.” The bulk of these dossiers reached him from the forties to the sixties. At least, this is how the historian Javier Domínguez Arribas explains it in ‘The Jewish-Masonic enemy in Franco’s propaganda, 1936-1945’.
This group of spies was made up of women who, among other things, closely followed the Falangists. «The most serious accusations against the Falange were found in the documents that the APIS network attributed to the ‘sect’. In them, certain habitual political attitudes among the Falangists appeared as the result of Masonic slogans”, highlights Arribas. Some of them, apparently, as serious as making “the Freemasons join all the demonstrations that may arise and saturate them with ‘cheers and acclamations’ to the Führer and Germany.” FE was investigated for years, as was the case with everyone who declared himself a supporter of King Don Juan. In fact, APIS used to also pass on reports from ‘Juanistas’ organizations, as they called themselves.
Zavala collects these ideas in his work and points out, in turn, that one of the people most investigated by Franco and the APIS group was Pilar Primo de Rivera, the sister of José Antonio. In her reports you could read the following about her: «Going back to Pilar. Another thing that has infuriated her is that, according to her, yesterday the University Militias paraded before the Caudilo, shouting ‘Long live Spain’, and the word ‘long live’ she doesn’t swallow”.
Primo de Rivera, in 1933, when his party began to stand out due to violence in the streets
As if spying on the organization wasn’t enough, in 1937, still in the middle of the Civil War, Franco had another happy idea that ended up breaking his relations with some of its members. On April 20, he decreed that the main political organizations that fought the Republic alongside him – Falangists and Carlists – would be united in a single party called the Traditionalist Spanish Falange and the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET and JONS ). His objective was none other than to end the internal struggles that existed in these currents and, in turn, centralize power under his person.
Unification gave him headaches. Discordant voices were raised from the Falange, considering that the union of both parties would end the original essence of the party. One of the opponents to her was Manuel Hedilla, successor in practice of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Both he and the management ended up feeling outraged by Franco when he left them aside in decision making. «The immediate reaction of the management of FE […] was to send a telegram on the 22nd to the provincial chiefs in which, although they showed respect for Franco, in reality they contravened his order. The hierarchical channel of FE was reaffirmed to transmit the orders of the Generalissimo himself. This is how Joan Maria Thomas explains it in her work ‘The Big Blow. The Hedilla case, or how Franco stayed with the Falange’.
The telegram, together with the criticisms made by Hedilla against unification and his refusal to accept a lesser position offered by the man from Ferrol, were the perfect excuses for Franco. He ordered the Falange leader to be arrested and prosecuted along with 600 of his followers. Hedilla was sentenced to death accused of military rebellion, but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. At the same time, a clandestine phalanx was born, the Autonomous Falange, destined to fight against Franco.
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