The history of the Spanish peasantry, often forgotten, has been crucial in the contemporary evolution of our country. The time of the Second Republic (1931-1936) was crucial due to the way in which the conflict manifested itself and the attempt to find a solution to old problems that arose from the enormously unequal distribution of land.
One could argue that the land reform of the 1930s was a great missed opportunity. The government threatened the privileges of the landowners, but without translating its rhetoric into decisive actions. In this way he gained the animosity of the landowners without gaining the sympathies of the day laborers, who ended up disappointed and with the idea that the country's most important priority was the one that received the least attention.
A key to the failure lay in the budget shortage: the project did not have sufficient funds to pay compensation to the owners. Where to get the money when the country, immersed in the economic crisis, saw its gross domestic product decline while the deficit increased?
The left wanted reform, but it was difficult to agree on what the change should consist of. The PSOE advocated collectivizing the expropriated farms, while the day laborers preferred to be given a piece of land individually. In any case, they lacked the resources to move forward. The progressives were concerned with redistributive issues, but not so much with providing peasants with the necessary capital to proceed, with guarantees, to the exploitation of properties. In agriculture like Spain, deeply undercapitalized, this was a considerable handicap.
In the Andalusian countryside there was a brutal class struggle, without a relevant middle class existing to act as a counterweight between the possessors and the dispossessed, victims of a very inequitable distribution of the land. In the province of Seville, for example, five percent of landowners monopolized seventy percent of the agricultural wealth.
The owners despised and feared the day laborers to the point that they preferred the harvest to fail rather than give them work. “Let the Republic feed you,” they said, exasperated at the possibility of having the absolute power they traditionally enjoyed taken away from them. The new legislation, which required, for example, not to hire day laborers from other municipalities while there were unemployed people in the town itself, was a torpedo in the waterline of their social status.
With their intransigent attitude, the only thing the owners achieved was to push a desperate proletariat towards violence. Towards an outbreak of rage that could have been avoided by making concessions in time. The former mayor of Mijas, Manuel Cortés, told historian Ronald Fraser years later that the laborers did the work on their own and then forced the masters to pay them.
For many peasants, force was the only way to obtain something tangible from landowners who demonized anything leftist. For Fraser, this inability to solve the agrarian problem largely determined the failure of the bourgeoisie to consolidate the Republic.
It was difficult for the day laborers to identify with the Republic when the Assault Guard, a force that, unlike the Civil Guard, identified with the new regime, had perpetrated the Casas Viejas massacre against the peasants who had just proclaimed communism. libertarian. The agents killed all the anarchists, who had refused to surrender, and set fire to the house where they had tried to resist.
Following the ensuing uproar, a parliamentary inquiry failed to offer a convincing explanation to the public. Azaña, before having reliable data about what had happened, made the unfortunate comment that nothing had happened other than what had to happen.
The Assault Guard had to be, in theory, a republican body, but in practice it was heavily militarized. Its boss, Agustín Muñoz Grandes, would end up being one of the most representative generals of the Franco regime. It is not surprising, therefore, that public order policy, before and after 1931, presented clear elements of continuity.
Casa Viejas was a formidable scandal. From the communist ranks, Pasionaria accused the ministers of the PSOE and Manuel Azaña: “The victims of the ferocity of the guards of the Republic were workers, they were peasants, who knew nothing but hunger and deprivation.”
In part, the agrarian problem was determined by the division of the peasantry itself. The small owners did not coincide in their interests with the day laborers. Among the latter, the most radical saw everyone who owned a piece of land as a boss and, therefore, as an enemy. The moderates, on the other hand, thought that the owners of a small farm were also workers.
The fact was that ownership came with responsibilities that, at the time, could not be easily met. The farms needed investments, but it was difficult to obtain loans when the land reform generated a feeling of insecurity.
The conflict also caused uncertainty. A small owner admitted to journalist Josefina Carabias that he felt afraid, the victim of a psychological situation that was, in his opinion, more destabilizing than material need: “They (the day laborers) will be hungry, but we are afraid, which is much worse. (…). They hate us just like the grownups and, furthermore, we are closer to the day laborers. “More in danger.”
The failed redistribution of land made clear the weakness of the republican government. It is true that he had to face powerful enemies, but also that he did not know how to use social support to force a policy of modernizing changes. He neither managed to convince the Andalusian day laborers nor did he get the small landowners of Castile on his side, whom he offended, in 1932, by unnecessarily importing cereal from abroad, paid at a higher price than that of the peninsula. As Azaña pointed out, the Minister of Agriculture, Marcelino Domingo, was completely unaware of the situation in the countryside.
A micro-level analysis can help us better understand agrarian conflict. Let's go to Bogarre, a small town in Granada. In 1933, an owner, Manuel Cobo León, complained that the day laborers of this town and neighboring Moreda did not allow him to use his mower. A workers society, El Progreso, with a socialist tendency, denied that the workers had tried to prevent the operation of the apparatus. The problem was another: Cobo León owed the day laborers a good part of the salaries for the work done during the previous year, and he had not requested labor either for the reaper or for any other task on his land.
With the defeat of the Republic and the triumph of Franco's rule, the problems in the countryside continued as they were. Starting in the 1950s, mass emigration to the city became a way to escape from a situation of exploitation and a lack of future prospects.
