Excerpts from ANARCHISTS IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION by José Pierats #4

At times in public, at times underground, the anarchist workers' movement has been in existence in Spain since the founding of the Spanish section of the First International in 1869. It began as the Spanish Regional Federation, outlawed from 1872 to 1874 but continuing underground until the dissolution of the International. It became known, in turn, as the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (1881-1889), the Pact for Union and Solidarity (1889-1896), Worker Solidarity (1904-1909), and since 1910 as the National Confederation of Labour, CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo).

At the turn of the century the movement declined, both because it was forced to go underground and because it was divided internally. At this time the more authoritarian members, influenced by the doctrines of Karl Marx and his representative in Spain, the Frenchman Paul Lafargue, split off from the movement. Also, there was heavy repression, the bloodiest of which was the persecution in 1882 of an alleged organization of evildoers called "The Black Hand".

In response to government repression, some of the followers of the International formed secret societies. In Andalusia members of one such group swore to avenge assassinated or imprisoned members, and to aid their families where necessary. One member, jealous of another's love affair, informed on the group. When the informer was killed, local landowners and the police seized on the incident to fabricate a bizarre plot. On a wall in the village of Villamartín the print of a hand appeared in paint; this was the famous "black hand". Likewise the police "discovered," this time under a pile of stones on a mountain, the macabre rules of a secret society "founded for the robbery and murder of decent people". Two sinister figures, the head of the Civil Guard of Jerez, Tomás Pérez Monforte, and his aide Oliver, directed the repression that followed. All unsolved murders, thefts, or fires were included in the case. Numerous prisoners were severely tortured to force confessions of pre-selected crimes. The reactionaries sought to discredit the anarchist movement and deprive it of its leaders. Three members of the District Commission, Juan Ruiz, Pedro Corbacho, and Francisco Corbacho, along with Cristábal Fernández, Manuel Gago, Gregorio Shnchez, and Juan Galftn, were condemned and executed. Le6n Ortega avoided the scaffold by going mad in jail. Eleven other men were condemned to life imprisonment and several of them died in jail before amnesty was declared twenty years later, after an international campaign.

From 1880 until the turn of the century a kind of renaissance took place in anarchist intellectual circles: the founding of the satirical periodical La Tramontana by José Llunas (Barcelona, 1881); the First Socialist Literary Competition, organized by the Centre of the Friends of Reus, Tarragona, in 1885; the founding of the review Acracia (Barcelona, 1886); the publication of the newspaper El Productor (Barcelona, 1887); and the Second Socialist Literary Competition (Barcelona, 1889). The best Spanish anarchist writers, most notably Ricardo Mella, took part in these competitions.