The “Rides”

This photo shows the ditch outside the Oseiro cemetery in Artteixo (Coruña) where the body of anarcho-syndicalist leader José Villaverde Velo was buried. José Velo was murdered on 25 September 1936, without a death sentence having been pronounced against him. This practice was popularly known as a “ride”.

The violence that followed the coup of 19 July had a clear and explicit goal: seizing power. To do so required eliminating the people who held power, sometimes through prison sentences of fines, at others through murder.

The murders were carried out through two basic mechanisms that co-existed from the first moments. The first was the execution of people who had been sentenced to death by the military courts created by the rebels to give their actions a patina of legality.

The second were the murders committed outside those legal procedures. These accounted for most of the people killed during the coup, some two thirds according to most calculations. 

Those murders were carried out in two distinct ways, One the one hand there were the “sacas” [seizures], the murder of people who had been thrown into the improvised prisons created after the coup. On the other, were the murder committed in the context of – real or fictional – arrests. It is important to emphasize that both forms of violence were under the control of the rebel military authorities, and that they bore the final responsibility for organizing them and justifying them.

XBA