By shooting it is intended to end life intentionally. With judgment or without justice, "to be passed through weapons" is not to die in any way. It means not being killed when there is no more logic and reasons than the arbitrariness of making the person disappear and thus silencing his ideal. That was the intention of the coup plotters with Blas Infante at dawn on August 10, 1936, partially compensated in political terms, when the Andalusian Parliament symbolically appoints him in April 1983, father of the Andalusian homeland.
These lines evoke what happened after his arrest in Coria del Río. Approximation from a historical point of view, leaving aside unproven hypotheses, existing dramatizations or untested assumptions ... all maintained by the fact of a shooting, parallel to others, the result of a military insurrection.
There are the testimonies of those who suffered the act more closely : the statements of their relatives collected by their biographers in the existing bibliography: Enrique Iniesta, Lacomba or Ortiz de Lanzagorta. Tangentially, the works of Antonio Burgos and Manuel Barrios in their book on Queipo de Llano. To them it is possible to be added what contributed by the researcher José Díaz Arriaza in his studies on the graves of the cemetery of Seville.
A Blas Infante, essayist, notary and Andalusian politician , the insurrection of July 18, 1936 takes him to his home in Coria del Río. That same day, he tried to travel to Seville, but the passage through the Barrio de León is blocked and he returns with his own. According to the testimony collected by Antonio Burgos in 1982, he remains there until his arrest. While in Seville the regime of terror and persecution established by Queipo campa at ease, Infante will live very worried about what happened and, at the same time, among so many confusing news, perhaps trusting his innocence that they would not go for him.
THE DAY OF YOUR ARREST
Thanks to the oral and written testimonies of the family collected by the biographers cited in the early 1980s, he was able to rebuild the day of his arrest on August 2. His eldest daughters Luisa and María Ángeles tell how «men dressed as Falangists», under the command of Sergeant Crespo, arrest him at mid-morning in the only house he owned: Villa Alegría . In total, there were four. Infant, neither flees nor opposes resistance. Curiously, like Lorca, they confiscated a radio and its speaker with which they say communicates with Moscow.
First they transfer it to the City Hall of Coria and then to Seville. Apparently, they planned to apply the known leak law and kill him during the transfer. However, the efforts made by his wife María Angustias García Parias, niece of the coup governor Pedro Parias, get him to arrive alive in the capital.
After passing through the city's Agricultural Chamber (Trajano Street), converted into a Falange barracks, he was transferred to the Jáuregui cinema , used by the rebels as a prison. There, overcrowded with other detainees, he only goes out to be interrogated. In those days, his wife brings him food and clothes daily, appealing to the will of some of his guardians. So until the night of August 10 in which a bull mincer from Coria, El Almohadilla, witnessed his departure to his wife.
However, there are two oral testimonies about how he is taking her out for his murder. Those of José Leal Calderi, retaliated doctor, with whom he agrees in prison; and that of Juan Álvarez Ossorio, Infante's companion who manages to speak with the driver who takes him to the gallows. Both cited by Burgos manage to build the moments before his murder.
It is known, also by Ortiz Villalba, how he was transferred in a truck next to the mayor of Seville, Fernández de la Bandera, with Emilio Barbero Núñez, lieutenant Hispanic mayor, and the socialist deputies Manuel Barrios Jiménez and Fermín de Zayas, an official. As Infante, all Masons and in revenge for the frustrated asson of Sanjurjo of August 10, the same day and month but of 1932.
FUSAILED ON THE ROAD, AND A LETTER
Eight days after being arbitrarily stopped by the coup plotters, at dawn Blas Infante is shot at kilometer 4 of the Sevilla-Carmona highway, in those years, on the outskirts of the city. Next to the wall of the farmhouse Gota de Leche that today houses its memorial erected by the Foundation that bears his name. He was 51 years old. María Angustias' notebook and the letter addressed to her children headed with the phrase: "My children: I feel very bad, and even if it is lightly, I give you some lines of how your father was taken forever."
In these last decades diverse interpretations have arisen taken to the cinema or in documentaries, with recurrent dramatic stories for their endings. Redundan in details, some of them very rough and, from a rigorous and historical point of view, nothing significant. The data presented here are the essential ones. It is useless to know if they were one, two or three shots. If they went to the chest or back. If he survived the bullets. If you went to other people to ask for help before your death ...
All those testimonies that go down the path of the morbid without meaning have no other purpose than to induce confusion. The truth is that, unlike Lorca, we do not know the names of those who formed the firing squad, nor has anyone self-accused of the facts. Moreover, as historians we are more interested in his life and thought; as Andalusian the validity of it.
Very presumably, his body was thrown with other Democrats into the mass grave of Pico Reja in the Hispanic cemetery. Rafael, the gravedigger who took care of the grandparents' grave, communicated it to the family as a witness he was. This space where the researcher Díaz Arriaza has quantified around 1,100 bodies , most of them (900) killed during the first weeks of the rebellion. The DNA bank of relatives and the ongoing bidding of the works for this pit make November venture as the start month of the works to recover, identify and bury both innocent with the deserved dignity. Others like Queipo continue to rest "divinely" in the Valley of the Fallen of Andalusia: the Basilica de la Macarena in Seville. As long as nothing else happens, Blas Infante, like others thrown and retaliated, is an empty record in the Burial Book of the San Fernando Cemetery.
THE JUDGMENT WITHOUT JUDGMENT
A judgment without trial of the Regional Court of Political Responsibilities of May 4, 1940, that is, four years after his murder, signed by Rafael Añino, Francisco Díaz Plá and Francisco Summers, condemns his wife to a penalty of 2000 pesetas and Condemning him "in a case of political responsibility of a serious nature": "That DON BLAS INFANTE PÉREZ was part of a candidacy of revolutionary tendency in the elections of 1932; in the following years until 1936, he meant as a propagandist for the constitution of an Andalusian or Andalusian regionalist party, and according to the certification of folio 46 he died on August 10, 1936 as a result of the application of the War Band ».
The hoax about the Tablada Plot pursues him until an unpunished murder, for which the coup plotters clumsily interpret with aspiring to constitute a political party. The start of a seizure file on his home, never consummated, made, as in so many examples, fear the family stay in the street.
Infante is recognized in a plenary session of the Andalusian Parliament (Journal of Sessions, 24). Issue that is still very contradictory to the extent that it was executed -precisely- for promoting that Andalusia had its own sovereign institutions. There it is approved to include the following text as a mandatory preamble to the Statute, despite the attempts of the Andalusian nationalists (PSA) to cite it in the article : «History has recognized the figure of Blas Infante as Father of the Andalusian homeland and illustrious forerunner of the struggle for the achievement of self-government that today represents the Statute of Autonomy for Andalusia. Blas Infante, with the Liberalist Board that he created, places himself at the forefront of Andalusia, by tirelessly fighting to recover the identity of the Andalusian people; for achieving a free and solidary Andalusia within the inalienable framework of the unity of the peoples of Spain; for claiming the right of all Andalusians to autonomy and the possibility of deciding their future ».
However, unlike other examples, his sentence has not yet been declared "illegitimate, radically null and unfair." The Congress of Deputies continues to forget to restore a dignity that it granted in other cases, beyond a restorative honorability as generic and widespread as inappropriate for the symbol that Don Blas represents. It has not yet been canceled.
"Without being read, I will be despised," Infante foresaw about his thinking, as anticipated at a time when talking about self-government, federalism, multiculturalism, secularism, dignity for women, justice and free education ..., among other issues, represented everything a dare capable of costing your life.
Today Infante is a statutory and common heritage of all Andalusians and Andalusians although some assume more fully than others their doctrine, without wanting to apply it as is in the 21st century. We are facing a citizen recognition of his life and work that involves all the democratic representatives of the Andalusians in the defense of a people and their institutions. Therefore, the best of the tributes is an updated rereading of his doctrine still alive and fully in force in this 21st century. It is still a pending task to spread all its truth and project its figure and doctrine before other thinkers and state activists. Blas Infante was neither interclassist nor equidistant nor a deideologized. His whole life is a civic example in favor of a living and dependency-free Andalusia. His murder was not able to end an Andalusian Ideal that still lives and is renewed, day after day, among all Andalusians of conscience.
[The tweet about the "death by execution" of Blas Infante has been used in previous years by the Andalusian Parliament, with the PSOE on the Board].
* Manuel Hijano del Río is a historian and professor at the University of Malaga, and Manuel Ruiz Romero, also a historian, is the author of Blas Infante Pérez 1885-1936, the great biography of Infante
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Andalusia
- Congress of Deputies
- Spain
- Lion
- Seville
Crimes that changed Spain (II) Mari Luz Cortés, the cry that became multitude and rewrote the Criminal Code
Report Only three out of ten municipalities comply with the law and submit their accounts in due time
Tourism Almost 9 million tourists visited Andalusia in the second quarter of 2019