Opposition to Francoism, anti-Francoism and at that time simply opposition, is the denomination given to the group of political and social movements that opposed Franco's regime or dictatorship from the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939) until the first democratic elections (1977), a year and a half after his death (1975).
Resistance in the insurgent region (1936–1939) Before the end of the Spanish Civil War, it can be observed that there were signs of opposition in the Francoist zone, controlled by the nascent Franco regime: in December 1936 the attempt by Manuel Fal Conde, leader of Traditionalist Communion, to create a Royal Military Academy of Requetés that was not under the control of the Army resulted in his immediate departure from the country amidst accusations of treason. On April 16, 1937, violent incidents took place in Salamanca between members of different factions within the Falange Española y de las JONS (the faction of the triumvirate between Agustín Aznar, José Moreno and Sancho Dávila against the faction of Manuel Hedilla), as a result there were two fatalities and on April 25 of the same year Manuel Hedilla, leader until that moment of the FE y de las JONS, was accused of having conspired against Franco and was condemned to two death sentences. These first frictions within the ranks of the rebels would be stopped by the Unification Decree of 1937, which led to the creation of the FET y de las JONS, conceived as the political branch of the so-called Movimiento Nacional.
Opposition to Francoism in 1939 and 1945
Beginnings of the opposition in the interior of Spain In the interior of Spain the first two organizations of the defeated side to reorganize were the CNT and the PCE, even though the conditions in which they did so were harsh: "an environment marked by hunger and disease, with thousands of people in prison or awaiting execution, while others made the traces of their Republican past disappear to avoid arrest and where the majority of the population depended for their subsistence on the straperlo, thus increasing their vulnerability towards the pressures of the state". Therefore, in both cases the clandestine activity was focused on helping their imprisoned militants and their families, providing them with money and seeking ways to free them or reduce their sentences, and giving shelter to those persecuted by the police.Heine (1983), pp. 51 – 53
However, the first unitary organization of the opposition to Francoism, the Spanish Democratic Alliance (ADE), was promoted by a group of exiled Republicans and its board of directors, constituted in the summer of 1940, was based in London. However, "the ADE was little more than a front for the activities of the British secret information services and their Spanish collaborators in the interior".Heine (1983), pp 35 – 36 It had a short life because the Francoist police managed to infiltrate the organization and arrested some 200 people in Valencia, Madrid and other cities —ten were sentenced to death of which three were shot in Paterna in November—.Heine (1983), p. 39 After the invasion of France, the network of ADE agents, which operated from the Midi, was dismantled, and the British government ceased to support it so it disappeared at the end of 1940.Heine (1983), p. 40
As for the anarchists, the first interior committee was formed by Esteban Pallarols, who had managed to escape from the Albatera camp, and who was in charge of creating a clandestine network to move to France the prisoners he managed to get out of the concentration camps by means of false documents.Heine (1983) pp. 53 – 55 Pallarols was arrested by the police and condemned to death, being shot on July 18, 1943.Heine (1983) p. 58 He was replaced by Manuel López López, but he resigned soon after due to tuberculosis he had contracted during his stay in the Albatera camp, and was replaced by Celedonio Pérez Bernardo.Heine (1983), p. 59 He was also arrested, tried in September 1942 and sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was replaced by Manuel Amil Barcia, but he, stalked by the police, had to leave Madrid to take refuge in Andalusia, so the functions of the national committee were taken over by the Madrid organization headed by Eusebio Azañedo, who contacted the CNT of Valencia, which had been reorganized, and the CNT of Catalonia, whose situation was rather unclear due to the existence of two regional committees. As a result of the denunciation of a confidant, Acebedo was arrested in Madrid in the summer of 1943, so Amil returned to the capital to take charge again of the general secretariat of the national committee.Heine (1983), pp. 237–242
As for the communists, the first organization of the party that was formed in hiding was in Madrid, where just after the end of the war a provincial committee was formed, headed by Matilde Landa and made up of several militants, some of them young members of the JSU. Some of its members were arrested by the police, who had obtained the files of the communist youth organization, being accused without any proof of having been preparing an attack against General Franco for the Victory Parade to be held on May 19, so a military court sentenced them to death and they were shot.Heine (1983), pp. 63 – 65 Others were accused of being involved in the attack against Major Isaac Gabaldón, when he was traveling in his car near Talavera de la Reina. On August 4 a first summary court-martial was held in Madrid in which 65 of the 67 accused were condemned to death, being shot the following day; 63, among them thirteen young women, some of them minors, who would be known as "Las trece rosas".Heine (1983), pp. 65 – 66 Matilde Landa was also arrested, as well as Enrique Sánchez and José Cazorla, leaders of the JSU, who had formed the first "delegation of the central committee" —the term used to refer to the clandestine communist leadership of the interior of Spain—, Sánchez and Cazorla were while Landa saw the sentence commuted to 30 years in prison, but in mid-1942 she could no longer withstand the psychological pressure to which she was subjected by the prison guards and the management of the Palma de Mallorca prison and committed suicide.Heine (1983), p. 67 The next attempt of the PCE to provide itself with an underground leadership was the work of Heriberto Quiñones, who escaped from the Albatera camp.Heine (1983) pp. 62–63. "The procedure for the escape of the prisoners designated by the escape committee was both simple and ingenious. A group of prisoners in charge of setting up a few tents beyond the wired tents of Italian origin intended to house the growing prison population of the camp, began to build small hiding places in them. Prisoners who escaped from the camp at night would hide in these while the soldiers on duty scoured the whole area for them. As soon as the surveillance had been loosened, the escaped prisoners would contact the first step, which, after having provided them with falsified documentation, would pass them on to their nearest link, and this procedure was repeated until the prisoner had arrived in Pamplona. There they were usually picked up by a group of smugglers to take them to the other side of the border." Quiñones formed the Interior Committee in May 1941, which also included Luis Sendín and Julio Vázquez —the latter was arrested by the police on July 16, being replaced by Realino Fernández López Realinos, of the Communist Party of Euskadi—.Heine (1983) pp. 70–71; 74 Around the same time, mid-May, several communist cadres sent by the PCE leadership in Mexico arrived in Lisbon to take charge of the organization of the interior.Heine (1983). pp. 76–77 But four months later the Portuguese police arrested the "Lisbon group" and the Spanish police arrested Quiñones' committee along with two hundred more communist militants. Quiñones himself was arrested on December 30, 1941, in Madrid's Alcalá Street along with Ángel Garvín, who had taken the place of Realinos —detained earlier— in the interior leadership. All the captured interior leaders were condemned to death and shot, as well as the members of the "Lisbon group", who had been extradited to Spain, except for one of them who would die in prison in 1947.Heine (1983), pp. 78–80 The reaction of the PCE leadership in exile to this incident was to accuse Quiñones of being a traitor who had denounced his comrades of the "Lisbon group" to the police.Heine (1983), pp. 81–82. "Although it is impossible to completely exclude the possibility that Quiñones had opposed the arrival of the overseas cadres and the consequent handing over to them of the leadership of the clandestine organization, it is seriously doubtful that this opposition would have led to the denunciation, mainly for the simple reason that he did not have the necessary data to put the police on the trail of Diéguez and his comrades. Lobo and María del Carmen García, the two emissaries, did, on the contrary.... According to information given years later by the only survivor of the team, Eduardo Castro, to a cellmate, the PCE liaison, a Galician named Traseira, or Teseira, who acted in Lisbon under the alias of "Manuel Piñeiro", had been discovered by the Portuguese police. To save his life he had become a confidant, and in this capacity he informed the Portuguese authorities of the arrival of Diéguez and the others." To this very serious accusation was added that of "Trotskyist" —the worst label a communist could receive in the times of Stalinist orthodoxy—.Heine (1983), pp. 81; 83–84
After the defeat of Quiñones, Jesús Bayón, a former collaborator of his, took over the communist leadership in the interior, which also included other former "quiñonistas" who had managed to evade arrest, such as Calixto Pérez Doñoro. In June 1942, Bayón was replaced by Jesús Carreras, sent by the PCE leadership in France, whose influence was increasingly felt in the organization in the interior through the work of Jesús Monzón and his deputy Gabriel León Trilla who had rebuilt the PCE in the French Midi, then under the collaborationist regime of Vichy, and whose press organ, published clandestinely from August 1941, carried the title of La Reconquista de España (The Reconquest of Spain).Heine (1983), pp. 189–193 Nevertheless, in February 1943, Carreras, betrayed by a police informer, was arrested in Madrid and tortured, and after him the rest of the national leadership in Madrid, including Bayón and Pérez Doñoro, and an important number of active communist militants, as well as the top brass of the JSU.Heine (1983), pp. 197–199. "The appalling misery and the fear of repression still dominated the lives of the majority of the nation, driving not a few, for entirely materialistic reasons, to collaborate actively or passively with the repressive organs of the regime... It thus seemed inevitable that as soon as the dimensions of a clandestine organization exceeded certain limits, its activities would attract intensified police vigilance, leading sooner or later to its dismantling." For the second time in less than two years the PCE saw its internal organization dismantled.Heine (1983), pp. 199–201
The socialists took much longer to reorganize than the anarchists and communists. The first nucleus to be reconstituted was that of the Basque Country as a result of the clandestine work of Nicolás Redondo Blanco and Ramón Rubial. In Asturias, where repression was stronger due to the greater presence of the Guardia Civil and the Army fighting the maquis, the first provincial committee was not formed until 1944. In Madrid a third socialist nucleus was formed under the impulse of Sócrates Gómez.Heine (1983), pp. 242–244
Republican opposition in exile