Land and Liberty

During the Second Republic there were a series of rural and urban strikes organized by leftwing organizations, especially the unions. The organizers commonly sought to involve as many people as possible, looking for solidarity and, on occasion, confrontations with the forces of order.

Most of these revolutionary strikes were called by groups belonging to the CNT-FAI. They included tactics such as boycotting factories, destroying things belonging to them, and pressuring workers who did not join the strike. And while anarchists were not the only ones to call such actions, it was they who took te most active part in the most transgressive and violence prone mobilizations and protests. Revolutionary strikes like those in May and December 1933 and armed insurrections like the one in January 1933 featured armed violence by CNT-FAI groups and some components of the Libertarian Youth (JJ.LL.).

It is also important to note that the violent - and on occasion disproportionate - response of the police, as well as the use of the so-called “Escape Law” which the police invoked to shoot people who were allegedly trying to escape arrest, generated greater violence. The repression against people who took part in the demonstrations Castilblanco (Badajoz) in 1931 or Casas Viejas (Cádiz) in 1933, and the government support for it, provoked indignation and led to further demonstrations.

Sometimes, as in agricultural strikes which took place after days of conflict between labourers and employers over wages or the failure to apply the law, movements that began with cutting roads or communications, burning fields or the destruction of agricultural machinery rapidly escalated into violent confrontations between strikers and Civil Guards, in which most of the casualties were among the former. The communist uprising at Villa de Don Fadrique (Toledo) in 1932, which was a response to the Civil Guard’s repression of a strike, or the general strike called by the Socialist National Federation of the Workers of the Land in June 1934 in which thirteen people were killed and two hundred wounded, are examples of this. 

ACS