The story of Spain’s forgotten soviet: we will neither forgive nor forget

50 years ago today, Spanish police massacred workers who had gathered for a mass meeting inside the church of San Francisco de Asís in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the Basque Country. 

[For more on the heroic struggles during Spain’s ‘democratic transition’, order your copy of Spain’s Revolution Against Franco: The Great Betrayal by Alan Woods from Wellred Books]

To commemorate this event, which represented a high-water mark of the revolution that followed the death of Franco, the Spanish dictator, we publish the following excerpt from Spain’s Revolution Against Franco: The Great Betrayal by Alan Woods, published in 2019. 

Alan Woods not only lived through those events, he was active as a revolutionary Marxist in the underground at that time and was intimately familiar with the struggles of the working class across the Spanish state.

The Great Betrayal is not only a Marxist analysis, but a striking account of the brutality, the betrayals, and the revolutionary heroism in this often forgotten period of history, based upon the firsthand accounts of numerous people who lived through those events, including Alan Woods himself.

Order your copy today from Wellred Books.

At the time, the workers of Vitoria-Gasteiz were at the cutting edge of the revolution against the Francoist dictatorship that began with Franco’s death in 1976. From the beginning of that year, the city had been paralysed by strikes in all the major factories. To coordinate their struggle, mass assemblies of workers elected representative committees in each factory. A central strike committee was formed. Terrified local bosses spoke of a “small-scale Soviet”.

On 3 March, a general strike was called. It was near unanimous. The city came to a halt, and – against the attacks of the police on picketers – makeshift barricades were set up. 

In the midst of this revolutionary atmosphere, a mass meeting was organised in the church of San Francisco de Asís. Over 5,000 local workers attended, and 10,000 gathered to listen outside. But the church was surrounded by armed Spanish police. Having allowed the church to fill with workers and their families, the police then unleashed tear gas, smoke bombs, and gunfire on the crowds.

Five workers were killed, and hundreds more were injured. Hundreds of thousands attended the funeral march of the martyrs and a general strike erupted in the Basque Country. The Spanish state was on the threshold of proletarian revolution. 

Only the scandalous betrayal by the leaders of the Communist and Socialist parties could save capitalism by shipwrecking the movement.

“A small-scale Soviet”

The next day [2 March, 1976] I awoke to find myself in what was, in effect, an occupied city. At the urgent request of local bosses, armed police had been drafted in from other provinces to intimidate and oppress the workers. Minister of the Presidency and Second Deputy Minister, Alfonso Osorio, admitted: “We have already been informed by businessmen, that a small-scale soviet is being created there, and that we must act harshly”. It was like an occupied city. It was an unforgettable experience.

The local “businessmen” were not wrong in their description of a “small-scale soviet”. The packed assembly could have been a meeting of a local soviet in the early months of 1917. I was particularly impressed by the strict discipline and the orderly nature of the proceedings. The character of the people in general was quite unlike what I was accustomed to in the quieter, more reserved character of the people in Britain. Assemblies in Spain were often quite noisy and boisterous affairs, in which everyone demands to be heard and discipline can very quickly evaporate. Even in small gatherings, it was common to find everybody speaking at the same time. But this was different.

Although there were a very large number present (the church could hold several thousands and was full to capacity) and the great majority had no experience of organised debates, the meeting took place in absolute silence. You could literally have heard a pin drop as people strained to listen to what was being said. The mood was electric.

I cannot now remember the content of the speeches from the platform, but I remember being struck by the very advanced level of revolutionary consciousness. Of course, these were the most advanced elements, and some at least, had one way or another passed through the school of Marxism. But the speeches from the floor, spoken by ordinary working-class men and women, were every bit as impressive.

I cursed myself that I had not come prepared with a notebook. I managed to find a small bit of paper (an envelope, I think) on which I scribbled some notes. I still have that piece of paper, so crumpled that it is hard to read some words. It was so small that I had to write minuscule letters. These notes, hastily jotted down, are all that is left to me of that remarkable gathering. Fragmentary as they are, they still convey something of the fighting spirit of the ordinary working-class people who had at last found their voice and were determined to make it heard:

“This is a fight between class enemies: a war in which some go to the front and fall wounded. Others step forward and ask to be the relief force. Others go home and say ‘we are with you’, but do not come to the mass meetings. And there are others who sell themselves to the enemy, and who are the scabs.

“In these fifty days of struggle we are not the same people. Perhaps we entered with the idea that the capitalists gave us bad wages because they didn’t realise how badly we lived – but in negotiation they saw we were firm and [we saw that] they were deaf [to our demands], because these were negotiations between enemies. The bosses have the police and army to defend their interests. We have our class – the workers. The government is the government of the capitalists (applause).”

The spirit of the many women present was particularly striking. I noted: “Women to leave factories and march [to the centre] to close down shops.” A housewife expressed her absolute determination to see the strike through to the end: “If at the end of the month I have nothing left, and if it means that my children must eat potatoes, I’ll say to them: eat your potatoes.”

Another man steps forward: 

“This is a challenge, an affront to us all! They want to deny us the right to work. Where is our strength, where is our power? It is in our unity in struggle, in our mass meetings, in our union. These are the lessons we must tell to the working class.”

Another said: 

“In defending the sacked and imprisoned we are defending ourselves. The press is not our press. It is the capitalist press who deceive us and lie to us.”

This meeting set the tone for the massive and combative movement the next day.

3 March as I Saw it

The following day, I wrote a first-hand report of the events that was published in the Militant under the title ‘Eye Witness Account From Vitoria’:

“The day of Wednesday 3 March has entered history as a new page of the Spanish workers’ struggle, written in blood. At the end of the first day of a general strike that paralysed the city of Vitoria, regional capital of the Basque province of Álava, two people lay dead, cut down by the bullets of the police. Another two have died of their wounds since.

“The actions of this day will echo through the years to the credit of the heroic workers of Spain and the eternal infamy of the corrupt clique of gangsters around Juan Carlos and all their miserable crowd of big business backers nationally and internationally.

“The morning of the third began with clashes between the armed police and pickets outside factories, as one plant after another joined the rolling wave of strikes launched as an impressive day of struggle around the demand to re-admit the workers sacked or arrested during the two-month-long general strike in the big factories in Vitoria.

“At nine in the morning, large groups of housewives concentrated at various points in the city with empty shopping bags. Their mission – to ensure the shutdown of every shop and bar in the city. Within a few hours, the centre looked like a ghost town so far as these establishments were concerned. Ninety percent of the shops and bars were closed and shuttered. Throughout the strike, and above all on this day, the working-class women of Vitoria displayed an energy and a militant élan still greater than their husbands.

“At one point, a young girl was attacked by an angry shopkeeper, who beat her and seized her identity card, threatening to denounce her to the police. Within minutes, a crowd of women gathered and let him know in no uncertain terms that if he did ‘we’ll come into your shop after you.’ With shopkeepers like that around (a small minority by the way), no wonder one or two windows found themselves in pieces by the end of the day.

“About 10.00 am, large groups of workers began to wind their way from the factories on the outskirts towards the town centre. With a calm dignity and iron discipline, these workers’ contingents marched past groups of armed police, at this stage merely watching apprehensively from a distance.

“In one place a group of about a thousand workers stretched across the main street, chanting always the same thing: ‘Re-admit the sacked workers!’ ‘We are workers, come and join us.’ And so they did. Within minutes, groups of mainly young workers run along the pavement to join the ranks. Their numbers swell: 1,500, 2,000. The traffic is absolutely blocked for about a mile. Motorists get out and watch, some sullenly, many with a wry grin.

“Everybody is waiting for one thing. The sound of a police siren. But where are they? Five minutes pass. Then ten, fifteen, twenty. When will it end? But the police are scattered throughout the city, dashing from one point to another. As one fire is stamped out, another flares up somewhere else. The ‘forces of order’ are fighting something intangible, an amorphous mass that takes on shape to harass and confound them only to disappear the moment when confronted with truncheon and gas.

“Suddenly, the ominous wail of sirens is heard. The monster human roadblock disappears at a steady trot round a dozen street corners. As the tail evaporates, up tear three police land-rovers and a bus, the grey one with steel bars in the window and blue lights flashing. Out jump the riot-police, steel helmeted and jackbooted, searching for their prey.

“The grises are angry. They lash out with their truncheons at passing cars that fail to drive fast enough. Tearing down likely-looking side-streets, the representatives of police batter at the doors of blocks of flats fruitlessly. No one will open to them. They return to their vans, red-faced and cursing. As the day wears on, their tempers and nerves are gradually frayed by this constant harassment by an unseen enemy.

“The ‘enemy’s’ morale rises with each encounter with the hated ‘monopolists of violence’. Their tactics become bolder. And now for the first time, the barricades begin to make their appearance. Who thought of it first? Those young lads pushing a couple of parked cars into the road to block the police van’s exit? Who knows? But now the idea catches the imagination of the masses. Every available object is requisitioned for the task: parked cars, bricks from building sites, concrete slabs, metal drums, lamp posts, anything to hand. The demonstrators set to it with a will.

“Within hours, the city is covered with barricades of this improvised character. Their purpose? To choke the city’s arteries, to block the traffic, to stop the buses. In all of this they succeed brilliantly. By afternoon, Vitoria is at a standstill. No sooner do the police succeed in removing one, then two others take its place. In the end, they give up the attempt as hopeless.

“The strikers had not seen the barricades as a means of fighting, but as a way of stopping the traffic. But in the measure that the police tire of removing barricades, they become a ‘permanent fixture’. Gaining confidence all the while, the workers cease to run away at the first sight of the police. Now they stand by the barricades sitting and chatting, or building them up. They take pride in their creations, working away to fill in gaps and remove imperfections – almost like a work of art. No one will shift them now.

“Police vans drive past the vicinity, pretending not to notice. Unfortunate motorists, whose vehicles have been ‘requisitioned’ by the army of labour, remonstrate with the workers, but receive a polite but firm reply. The car is no longer theirs. It is the barricades.

“The courage of the strikers rises with their self-confidence. They are an authority now on par with, or greater than, the powers that be. They have the government and the town hall. But the streets are ours.”

All day long, the battle raged on, with police chasing demonstrators through the streets and alleys of the old town. In the morning, the police had opened fire on workers, injuring many, though there were no fatalities – yet. This is how I related the events in my report:

“The day has already brought its casualties, though mercifully few. A girl is brought into a block of flats with a cut on the head. The ever-present women utter angry comments: ‘What kind of people are they? They beat us down when we go on the streets to fight for a bit of bread. That’s all we’re fighting for, for a bit of bread.’”

Imanol adds: 

“What I remember is that on 3 March we had gathered together in Arana Street, in the San José church and after breakfast, first thing in the morning, we would meet with the Representative Committees to sum up the situation, because in the local assemblies there was a lot of participation from the factories, but in a joint assembly of so many workshops, not everyone intervened and the issues remained pending the general situation. But, having finished, we found that when we arrived, the police were already there.

“When I arrived, the place was surrounded. There was no way of getting in, and I remember trying to distract the police (you don’t know what you were doing at that time because you were not thinking straight) I picked up some stones or whatever… But the stones would not have landed anywhere near the cops.”

Andoni Txasco reported that:

“We students participated in all this. There were school students, perhaps imitating the actions of the older people, or through our organisation and the communications that we had established. We held our own assemblies, where we elected our representatives and then we went to the co-ordinating committees and joined the columns of workers who came from the industrial estates.

“When the column that came from Mercedes-Benz arrived at the avenue that at that time was called Avenida del Generalísimo Franco (today it is the Avenida Gasteiz), the police opened fire with real bullets, and there were already the first cases of people wounded by bullets. One of them I remember was Lobera, who was a comrade of the Association until he died a few years ago. Lobera was wounded in the leg in the morning.”

Santiago added: 

“But there were more places where people were shot, not just on Avenida. Ormachea, for example, was a student of Jesús Obrero. And that was at five in the afternoon. Another man was shot in the throat in the morning.”

Andoni pointed out that: 

“Until then, the police had respected the churches. They had never intervened in the churches, but that day they invaded them. They entered Los Angeles and Los Desamparados. There were about thirty of us fleeing from the police. We had to take refuge in Los Desamparados and thank goodness Don Javier took us into the sacristy, otherwise, God knows what would have happened. The cops entered, armed to the teeth, but the priest got us out through the back door. Actually, he was a fascist, but he said: ‘Well, before they come in and wreck my church, I’d better let you out the back’.”

This was a warning of what was being prepared.

The massacre

Late that afternoon, more than 5,000 people attending the general assembly convoked at the Church of St Francis. The church was packed with unsuspecting men, women and children, who had no idea of what was to happen next. Santiago recalls:

“At 5.00 pm on the day of the general strike, thousands of workers with their wives and, in many cases, children, made their way to the church where the mass meeting or assembly was due to take place. Over 5,000 people were already inside the building and thousands more were heading for the meeting. In the light of experience of earlier assemblies of this sort, no violence was expected. Mothers were playing with their children outside the church.

“The ‘incident’ began when detachments of armed police began to disperse the workers heading for the meeting. The representatives of ‘public order’ had decided that the assembly would not take place. But instead of blocking the church entrance before the meeting started, they waited until many people were inside before moving in to ‘dislodge’ the occupants. No clearer proof of murderous intent could be required.”

The police were stationed behind the church, and they left room for people to enter. It later became clear that this was a deliberate tactic. The church was packed to capacity while hundreds stood outside. Tensions mounted as armed police in armoured jeeps began surrounding the church and ordered that it be cleared.

As no attempt was made to stop people from entering the church, the people took it as a sign that all was well. Why shouldn’t they? Other mass meetings had ended without incident. The day’s action had finished, so there was no reason to suspect anything.

Santiago, who was inside the church, describes what happened:

“In the afternoon, at 5 o’clock, the general assembly convened in the church of San Francisco in the neighbourhood of Zaramaga and, as usual, we came from the old part of town where we lived, together with a group of friends who had experienced the events of that morning. We entered the church a quarter of an hour before it was due to start. But the police were already surrounding the church, which was already full. There were about 4,000 people because the church was different from now. There was more space, and it was packed with people.”

The police then ordered people to leave the church, but they refused. According to the 1953 Concordat between the Vatican and Franco, the police and military required the permission of a bishop before entering a Catholic church. When the police demanded entry to clear the church, the Bishop of Gasteiz abstained, thus giving the green light for what happened next.

Santiago describes those fatal moments:

“They surrounded the church, and people inside began to get nervous. We were waiting for the representative commissions because there had been a meeting outside and then they were supposed to come to the church at 5 o’clock, and start the assembly. However, as we were surrounded, they could not enter, and they were the key point of reference for the movement.

“Then there was a general murmuring, reflecting the anxiety of the people, who were wondering what to do: ‘Do we stay, or leave?’ The people said: ‘We are not going to dissolve. We’re not going out. We’re going to wait’. That was the slogan voiced by some of the few people who had some authority: ‘Let us wait for the representative commissions.’

“I remember that suddenly you could hear a crowd of people, a tumult, and two policemen tried to enter the church. But what were two policemen doing inside the church? People started booing and shouting: ‘Out! Out!’, ‘We are staying here’. We were not going to leave the church.

“For us, it was unheard of to have armed policemen entering a sacred place, which was traditionally protected. I did not expect such a thing. Maybe in the morning there might have been some incident. But surely not now? However, my doubts were soon settled.

“Suddenly, the atmosphere was shattered by a noise like a bomb exploding. The windows were shattered and the police started throwing smoke cans into the building. They were firing rubber bullets and live rounds. The church was rapidly filled with smoke, so you could not see anything. It was impossible to breathe.

“All hell broke out inside the church. The people did whatever they could to get out. There was a stampede for the exit. Some people climbed out of the windows, others made for the door, but that was impossible. I took refuge in the sacristy that was under the altar steps. We took refuge there for a while, because in the sacristy there was still a little air. We knew that there was something bad, very bad, happening outside. But it did not enter our heads that people would be killed.

“Soon the smoke thinned a little and we decided to get out down an alley, running like mad. We helped some kids, little children of workers who had stayed in the sacristy, we jumped the fence and we ran towards our neighbourhood. And from outside the church, the first slogans began to be heard. People were shouting: ‘They have killed two workers’. That for me was something incredible, something unexpected and shocking.”

Andony adds: 

“There is clear proof that the police did not want a peaceful outcome that day. There are recordings of police radio conversations where one hears: ‘Surround the church’, and another one says: ‘Listen, I have to go to move a barricade,’ and the answer comes back: ‘No, don’t you move from there, because if you do, they’ll escape from the church’.

“When the grises fired numerous tear-gas canisters into the building, shattering windows, they had the clear intention of causing a panic. But the workers kept their heads. Somebody got to the microphone and issued a call for a permanent assembly. The workers stayed put, despite the constant hail of tear-gas bombs which made it difficult to breathe.

“Only when they were literally on hands and knees with faces pressed to the floor to try to avoid the gas did the situation become hopeless. The choice was to face the police or choke to death. Inside the church, a voice from a loudspeaker declared: ‘If they are going to kill us, let them do it in the open.’

“The people began to file out. It was at this point that the police opened fire, killing two workers, and wounding countless others, many seriously, of which at least two others have since died. Among these is at least one person, José Castillo, thirty-two years old, who had nothing to do with the strike. Five others were teenagers.”

Andoni says: 

“Even after the gassing, if the police had withdrawn, people would have left, half asphyxiated, but they would have left. But on the contrary, they stood by all the windows, as well as the door and as people left, they were subjected to really savage beatings. And then the shooting began, and it was totally indiscriminate.

“Two died there and then: Aznar and Pedro Mari, on the spot where the memorial stone still stands, and then Romualdo, who was taken to hospital seriously wounded, but passed away at 11 that evening. Another two died, one on 5 April and the other on 7 April. There were also a lot of people wounded.”

Those killed were: Pedro Martínez Ocio, aged twenty-seven; Francisco Aznar, aged seventeen; Romualdo Barroso, aged nineteen; José Castillo, aged forty-three; and Bienvenido Pareda, aged thirty-two. People outside the church who tried to go to their aid were beaten up. Later that evening, people rushing to the hospitals to check on injured relatives were also attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Imanol told me: 

“I remember that as I was wandering through the streets, I saw a man lying on the pavement who had been shot, and I lifted him up.

“About three weeks ago there was an assembly here, and it turns out that that man was present. He had been working in the Forjas steelworks. In the end he approached me, saying: ‘Imanol, you took me to the car. I was on the ground, you grabbed my arm and you took me to a man with a car, and you wanted me to get in. But I protested that you were going to damage the car. There were three of us injured people in the same car.’

“There were 4 or 5,000, but there were a further 10,000 people outside who could not get into the Church. When the people on the outside became aware of the situation, they started shouting at the police, throwing sticks, stones and anything that came to hand.”

In the court summaries appear a list of those who were admitted to the Santiago hospital. It amounts to sixty-eight people. Needless to say, this figure does not include all those who were injured. There were at least 150 people wounded, not only by gunshots, but also suffering from the concussion they got as a result of tremendous beatings. The number given of those wounded is undoubtedly too low, as many of the injured stayed away from the hospitals to avoid arrest and the prospect of further ill-treatment at the hands of the police. In cases where the bullet wounds did not affect vital organs, many of those people did not want to go to the hospitals, because that meant leaving your personal details, and retaliation could be swift and severe.

“A Massacre? Ok, That’s Good. Over.”

The Spanish authorities issued a communiqué claiming that police were forced to use firearms to free themselves from a hostile crowd using broken church windows and statues as missiles. Despite these official claims, there were no police injuries reported at the church.

One police inspector was injured later that night when a petrol bomb was thrown at the local police station and two others suffered minor injuries. But subsequent investigations found no trace of any offensive weapons that might have been used by the workers on 3 March. The victims were all unarmed and defenceless. Police radio communication during the course of the day was picked up and recorded the chilling conversation between police officers. This tells us all we need to know:

“Proceed with clearing the church. Over. So, we have it surrounded by personnel outside. We are going to have to use arms! Over. Get them out however you can… Send me more arms. We’ve shot more than 2,000 bullets. Over. Are there any wounded? Over. At the moment none of us are wounded. Over. Ok. That’s good. Over. There was certainly a massacre here. Over. Ok, that’s good. Over.”

When word of the killings spread, a wave of fury was unleashed by the workers, who threw up barricades and rioted well into the night. The atmosphere was such that the soldiers sent by the government to strangle the movement, as well as even many police officers, refused to even take down the barricades that they encountered.

I reported at the time: 

“The news of the shooting stunned the whole city. But instead of cowing the workers, it caused a wave of anger. Those few factories, like Michelin, which had not hitherto been involved, downed tools. Workers vented their anger by tearing down telephone boxes and lamp posts to erect barricades.

“On the following day, the workers of Pamplona nearby downed tools in a general strike. There were demonstrations in Bilbao and a general strike was called for the whole Basque country for Monday 8 March. The repercussions of the Vitoria killings have been felt throughout the country.

“At the funeral of the murdered workers, a huge demonstration took place, with no intervention on the part of the police. Estimates vary from anything upwards of 100,000. Deputations of workers from all over Spain attended this moving ceremony which was more than just a funeral. Political speeches were delivered over the graveside of these working-class martyrs. As one of the strike leaders expressed it: ‘This is not just a bereavement for the families of these men. It is a bereavement for the whole of the working class.’

“There and then, the workers pledged themselves not to betray the cause for which their comrades had given their lives. Instead of instilling fear within the hearts of the workers, these bloody assassinations have spurred them on to still-greater efforts in the cause of the working class and the socialist revolution in Spain.

“Today there is not a single worker in Vitoria who thinks he is on strike for 6,000 pesetas. It is a confrontation between the working class and the dictatorship.”

At the funerals of the victims, a homily written jointly by all of the clergy of Gasteiz accused the police of murder. It said:

“The forces used death-dealing arms in absurd abundance, in a completely irrational way, without prior warning, against a defenceless crowd, which had gone out of its way to avoid any kind of provocation… The workers’ deaths were absolutely unjustified and must therefore be considered as what they really were, homicide.”

The priests called for those responsible for the massacre to be identified and arrested. In defiance of a government decree, issued the day before, that police were authorised to raid churches to break up unauthorised meetings, the clergy reassured those present that the churches would continue to be available for workers’ assemblies.

Following the funeral mass, the coffins of the three men were carried shoulder-high and walked through the city for two hours, passing lines of heavily armed police and Guardia Civil three deep carrying rifles, pistols and submachine guns at the headquarters of the provincial government.

As the huge crowd passed by, the defiant mood of the people of Vitoria was described by London Times correspondent, Harry Debelius:

“Probably the most massive non-violent act of defiance in forty years of Spanish history took place in this Basque city today as thousands of people attending a funeral insulted armed police with silent gestures. Insulting the police has been a court martial offence, even for civilians, ever since General Franco overthrew the Second Spanish Republic. But the people of Vitoria did not seem to care today as they mourned their dead.”

Over the following days, during protests in the Basque Country and Catalonia held in solidarity with the dead of Vitoria, two more men died at the hands of Spanish police. In Basauri, an industrial suburb of Bilbao, a nineteen-year-old steel worker Vicente Antón Ferrero was shot in the head by the Guardia Civil.

In the Catalan city of Tarragona, police attacked a demonstration involving hundreds of workers chanting “Vitoria brothers, we do not forget.” Juan Gabriel Rodrigo, also aged nineteen, fell from a roof, where he had climbed to escape from the police attack, and died.

There were protests in other countries too. In Rome, workers demonstrating at the Spanish Embassy attacked it with petrol bombs and missiles. Italian police fired live ammunition at the crowd, killing fifty-three-year-old Mario Marrota, who just happened to be passing.

A Grim Aftermath

After the massacre, the management remained as stubborn as ever. They were determined not to reinstate the sacked workers, or to open the gates of the factories. Fraga Iribarne ordered Judge Juan Bautista Pardo to impose an obligatory settlement. That relieved the bosses from the painful necessity of readmitting those who had been sacked. They would say: “No, no, my hands are tied by the judge’s decision.”

Financial Times correspondent, Roger Matthews, described the tense atmosphere in Vitoria that day:

“The paramilitary Guardia Civil, armed with automatic weapons, stand in groups of thirty, guarding the main roads into the town. Convoys of riot police tour the principal streets, their Land Rovers and wire meshed buses forced to detour past some working-class areas where barricades erected last night are still standing…

“All factories in this city of 170,000 people are shut, as are all the banks and main commercial areas. Workers standing in small groups on street corners incorrectly think that there may be a dozen dead, and wild rumours of a military take-over vie with others even more alarming.”

Imanol recalls: 

“In the following days, the image that most sticks in my mind was one of dark, grayish Land Rovers with the windows down and the back door half open and driving at an intimidating speed, with the sirens blaring and men pointing their shotguns… You did not know whether you were coming or going.”

In fact, the repression continued on the next day. In those cases where people were hospitalised, the police entered their houses searching everybody and everything. And there were always threats: “Do not tell anyone about this. The bullet wounds you cannot hide, but the beating we gave you later you had better not mention”, and so on.

The medical reports were also part of the cover up because many of the doctors who were attending the wounded were military men, and they did not allow you to take any bullet away. They wanted to prevent any possibility of carrying out ballistic tests. The one exception was a person from the association who was given a bullet. Apart from this, there is no proof.

Andoni: 

“The police were thirsting for revenge. That was clear on the day of the funeral. You just have to listen to the conversations that were picked up from police radios during the funeral of the victims.

“‘How can we tolerate this? They are walking about freely, but God knows what they are up to… They are insulting us!’ And from the other end of the line, you can hear: ‘Yes, yes, yes. But stay steady – hold on.’ And there is another one who wants to charge, to attack the entire funeral procession, which shows that they were not satisfied with what they had done on 3 March, but wanted to keep lashing out, beating and crushing.

“A curfew was imposed. They would not let groups of more than two people walk on the street. But the next day we had to go to the factory in the morning. The normal thing was to hold an assembly after what had happened the previous day, and so we said: ‘Well, this is a strike and we will continue the strike for as long as it takes’.

“But to get home in the morning from the industrial estate in Amarra was a problem. Vitoria was an occupied city. It was impossible to travel around freely. In the afternoon, together with four of my friends, we approached the surrounding districts to see what the situation was. Vitoria was devastated. After finding out that workers had been killed the previous day, the people flew into a rage. Everywhere you saw furniture broken, trees felled, cars and trucks pushed across the road. There is a photo of a Gamesa truck in the Portal of Villarreal with barricades made of logs and other things.

“We were surveying the scene, when we noticed a grey bus with two or three jeeps. Nothing was happening, there was no type of disturbance, there were no people on the street, other than the four of us. We saw them coming towards us and we thought: ‘We have not done anything, but this looks bad. Let’s run.’ But they had already surrounded us, and three or four other jeeps came from behind.

“They caught us, although two managed to escape and I started to run and I was afraid that they would hit me in the eyes, because I already had an injury in the left eye from school. While picking blackberries I was hit by a stone. Thanks to that, I was spared from military service. If it had not been for that, I would not have been in Vitoria at that time.

“Fearing that I would get hit by a blow, a rubber ball or something in the eye, I threw myself against the wall and covered my head. But it was no good, they started hitting me, and when I saw that they did not stop, I said: ‘Look, arrest me, do what you want, but don’t keep hitting me because I already have one eye screwed and you are going to fuck up the other one’.

“As I was telling them that, they grabbed my arms so I could not cover myself, they pulled me away from the wall and showered blows on my head, my face, and one of them took aim, and hit me in the good eye. They knocked me senseless. I did not even feel any pain. It was like an anaesthetic, something between the flow of adrenaline, nervousness and the impotence of the situation… I was left blank, while they continued screaming at me: ‘you bastard, communist, son of a bitch…’

“They tied my hands with wire, and tightened them as hard as they could. I think it was near a lamp post or telephone pole. Something about some barricade.

“They took me to a house and the first thing I said to them: ‘I don’t know if I'm bleeding. I can feel something liquid there.’ And they told me: ‘No, no, there is no blood, it must be tears.’ At the beginning I said: ‘Well, when you cover an eye tightly, your vision gets blurred and you do not see well.’ I thought it must be that. They put me up in a house, they put something cold on me. I do not know if it was water, ice or what, but I still could not see and they took me along Los Herrán street, crossing the barricades, to the hospital.

“I was there for a month and I started on my Odyssey. From there I went to Madrid, to Barcelona, until ​​I ended up at the University Clinic of Pamplona and after I do not know how many operations, they told me: ‘There is no remedy for this. The best thing is to empty the socket.’ So that is what they did. They put an inner ball, a prosthesis, and then an aesthetic prosthesis.

“I could not see anything with my left eye, and my right eye suffered from photophobia, so I had to be at home in the dark. I could not see light, or television, or anything. And after all that, I had constant pain. Particularly at the time of admission, the pain was tremendous, even with morphine. Then for some reason (a cold, I think) I got conjunctivitis and, in the end, as a result of the infection, the artificial eyeball was spontaneously ejected from the socket.

“Even now I continue with problems from time to time, requiring a change of prosthesis. Right now, I am waiting for them to operate on the eyelid, because with so much time with the prosthesis, the muscle has lost its elasticity, so they have to restore its tension, because that also creates a movement of the prosthesis that at the same time produces conjunctivitis, and so on.

“I now have two percent vision. If I look at you straight, I do not see you. They tell me that I manage very well on the street. I walk down the street, and, as I walk, the world opens up. If I catch a good angle it can be ten percent, and in others it is zero percent. But at least I am here to tell the story.

“These are the memories I have of that day.”

In Carabanchel

Then came the arrests. At the end of the strike, Imanol and other strike leaders were arrested and taken to Madrid.

Imanol: 

“We were first taken to the Puerta del Sol [it’s a reference to the DGS, the dreaded Francoite secret police], then we were sent to Carabanchel, where although there was a whole gallery of political prisoners, to our surprise, we were put in a reformatory for young kids under twenty years old. They put us there with the young people. After three days of being held incommunicado we were allowed to go out and mix with them.

“They were young kids from marginal areas of the city who, as a result of their upbringing had been turned into petty criminals, and arrested. This experience helped us to understand the common prisoners who, out of foolish prejudices, people tend to look down upon. In the reformatory, you begin to realise what kind of world these kids come from (but I am digressing).

“There were three of us there: Jesús Naves, myself and one member of the UGT, a worker from the Mercedes factory, Emilio Alonso. Anyway, there were three days when we did not have any water, and we needed water to wash ourselves. There was a well in the yard. We went there and we washed as best we could. On the third day we told an official that we did not have any water, ‘What do you mean, you have no water?’ He checked and saw that there was no water. Yet not one of the common prisoners had protested. They did not feel any need for water. That was the social stratum from which they came!

“There was a Trotskyist, a young lad from Madrid, though I do not know why he was there, and he asked us why we did not explain what happened in Vitoria. We had no problem to do this. ‘OK. I'll take charge of notifying people.’ Two days earlier they had arrested the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth. They were there also, as was a relative of Ybarra, the pacifist. And when people were told that the guys from Vitoria have no problem talking about their experience, they said: ‘Ah, fine, okay’.

“But the PCE members reacted differently. They said no, why should they? ‘And anyway, we were not there, so we do not know the facts of what occurred in Vitoria. How are we going to discuss that?’ And so on and so forth. I was amused because the Trotskyist says to them: ‘But you talk about the Russian Revolution, were you witnesses of that?’ (Laughter) They had closed minds and they did not want their prejudices called into question.”

The reason for the reluctance of the PCE leaders to discuss Vitoria is not hard to understand. At this very moment, Carrillo was doing everything in his power to enter into negotiations with elements in the government. The last thing he wanted was a general strike – a demand that the PCE had quietly dropped. They were particularly hostile to the movement in Vitoria because they did not control it. They felt threatened by the idea of the representative commissions, which flew in the face of the policy of the PCE and CCOO to work within the framework of the Vertical Union.

Although they could not openly condemn the workers of Vitoria, they did their best to prevent any information getting out and did everything in their power to prevent the movement from being generalised. This boycott extended even to the world of the political prisoners behind the walls of Carabanchel prison. To this day, Imanol cannot conceal his sense of deep bitterness at that betrayal:

“The thing that hurt me most – and it hurts me deep inside – is that somehow, I expected something more from the PCE. And when you see what they have done, you feel hurt yourself, don’t you? I don’t want to throw stones at them, but I remember that in those days they had an unofficial magazine. It was not exactly legal, but it was tolerated, and acted with relative freedom. The magazine was called Triunfo. And on 13 March – ten days after the massacre – talking about the events in Vitoria, it states that we were playing into the hands of the right, using violent methods, and so on.

“That was the same story, as I heard that day spread around in the juvenile reformatory in Carabanchel prison. But after spending three months with the young people in the reformatory, they transferred us to the political prisoner’s gallery, where the leading staff of the PCE were being held. Sánchez Montero, he was the Chief of some Party organ or other (I do not know what they called him). Someone called Santiago was their leading member in Galicia; and there was another leader from Vizcaya. But Camacho was not in the prison at that moment.

“When we arrived at that wing of the prison, there were other people from small groups, some of whom (from Guernica) were known to me, who had been arrested for some reason or other, and also some people from Lekeitio. The normal thing was to ask what had happened in Vitoria, because we used to have general meetings. The PCE people formed the majority group, but unlike the young people, they did not participate at all. In fact, they completely avoided us. It was as if the kind of egalitarian, transparent, participatory conduct that was typical of the whole of the people at that time was anathema to them. They did not participate at all.”

Who Gave the Order?

AW: “But the question is, who gave the order? I say that had to have come from above. What do you think?”

Imanol answered: “I believe that the people responsible for the massacre were the police. The policeman is in the service of the interests of the ruling class, and when they give the order, they act.”

AW: “Yes, someone gives the order, it cannot be just the police. That has to be at the highest level, I would say. El País (30 August 2016) says that: ‘The use of firearms was not so casual.’ That same morning, they were already used to repress demonstrations called by the general strike. Five days later, in another demonstration in Basauri (Vizcaya) called in solidarity with the victims of Vitoria, eighteen-year-old Vicente Antón Ferrero was shot dead by the Civil Guard.”

Imanol: “They would have known in advance what they came for, I believe, because they had come from Logroño, from Burgos, from Valladolid, from Miranda… So those bodies were not in the service of the governor here…”

Andoni then added: 

“When Martín Villa and Fraga Iribarne came here after the funerals they made it very clear that this has been an example to others. Anyone who steps out of line knows what happened in Vitoria. So, beware! Fraga Iribarne said it in so many words, and so did that sordid man Martín Villa. He said ‘those who bring people onto the street already know about the tragic consequences that such events can bring.’

“They had it planned. They knew that if this movement was not halted, it could have resulted in a total change: a revolution. So, for them it was a tremendous danger. If the movement in Vitoria were to triumph, everything would have been changed, not only at the labour level, but also at the political, social level. Everything they were planning, then this would have been derailed, and the movement would have spread everywhere.”

Santiago also reported that: 

“The primary political responsibility of that first government of the transition of Fraga, Areilza and Arias was at first a timid attempt at reform. When they said there would be no political parties, only political associations, it was a first attempt to introduce certain changes to the system, while maintaining its essentials, to preserve the power of the multinationals, the power of capital. And the movement of 3 March in Vitoria was dangerous, not only here, but throughout the Basque country, in Madrid, ​​in Catalonia, Valencia and in many other places.

“They said: We must put an end to this in the most brutal way possible, through state terrorism. And if shooting and gassing people in a church is not terrorism, God only knows what is.

“Afterwards, however, we see that there is a change. It was now clear to the system itself – to the big multinationals like Mercedes-Benz, who had a lot of information about what happened here on 3 March, that it was no longer worth their while supporting the government of Areilza, Fraga or Arias Navarro. And they saw that there was another possibility (Suárez, the King…) for a ‘democratic opening’ and that meant bringing in people who had been in the opposition: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and other parties.”

Imanol adds: 

“After 3 March, Martin Villa issued statements saying that they were not trying to shoot at specific people, but randomly. The same as the ‘collateral damage’ that occurs in wars: the purpose of those too is to scare people. And if we believe that power is insane, it is even more frightening because collateral damage is aimed at anyone who gets involved or participates. It is a way of terrifying the populace.

“So, what Martin Villa said shows that the aim of the events in Vitoria was to put the fear of God into the rest. See what happened there… All the people who took part just out of curiosity or whatever, were supposed to draw the conclusions. But I think that this tactic backfired. Instead of frightening people it created an immediate tide of sympathy…

“Before the massacre, the facts of Vitoria were not known because there were many struggles going on everywhere. Before 3 March, our struggle did not seem to stand out particularly. People were not going to be following what Vitoria was doing, how many companies were on strike, and so on. I think that went unnoticed. But after the five workers were killed, people began to sit up and pay attention. They were asking what has happened there, and why. So, instead of frightening the people, it provoked sympathy. Then they realised that there could be no future on this basis. We were adding fuel to the fire…”

The Policy of Social Anaesthesia

“Then they changed tactics and said ‘We are going to have to act smart here.’ They began to say: ‘Let’s go easy on the stick, and use more politics’. That is the meaning of social anaesthesia. This is an issue that raises people’s hackles, and I have seen it cause sharp disagreements even between people who participated in the events.

“At that moment I was in the jail of Carabanchel and, from time to time, I read some pamphlets, some written material, because we were totally isolated, and you did not know what was happening, but some reference comes, so I believed that I knew what was going on.

“The men in power thought: ‘Well let’s start here’, and the new vocabulary was something like ‘it was all very well to fight in the time of the dictatorship, there was no other way, but at this moment, now the dictator is gone, we have started laying the foundations of democracy, and in a democracy we are all in the same boat, and we have to start learning how to row together, because we have interests in common, and you have to enter into the game, participate and elect the best people.’

“So now came that moment where those party members who had joined the strike and worked to make it possible, thought: ‘What the hell! Now our time has come. Now we are going to be legalised.’ And then the joint struggle is abandoned, and the interests of each individual collective comes to the fore. Then the campaign begins. The assemblies are maintained, but they are assemblies to promote this or that group or faction that later will be legalised and will somehow be closer to this power, and even become part of that power, designing new social policies, or the new legality, which takes the place of class struggle.

“Of course, that was the kiss of death to the assemblies, those democratic forums of debate and decision-making. And after a while, we learned that the Constitution was already more or less done. On the one hand, you also learn that the state and the army – that same army that was fascist at the time of the Republic – turns out to be the axis of the new democracy, without any change. The Armed Forces were not purged, and neither were the police and judges that during forty years of dictatorship carried out summary trials, military trials and death sentences…

“The Courts change their name; the Court of Public Order became the National Court. The Constitution says that we live in a secular or non-denominational state, but the Catholic Church has as much power and wealth as ever, and with a grip on social life that is tremendous… The agrarian reform was not carried out, nor are the interests of the victims of the Civil War taken into consideration. And then came the Pacts of the Moncloa, wage moderation, restructuring of companies with European funds, staff reductions, unemployment and then privatisation, with firms sold off to the highest bidder.

“Then Ventura Mariño, our lawyer, who was a member of the PSOE of Llopis (the historicals) tells us about the huge amounts of money that Willy Brandt of the German SPD gave to the UGT and the Socialist Party. And there we were, caught in a trap…”

Santiago reported that: 

“At the funeral I saw there were many lawyers, who had been defending the victims and the relatives of the murdered workers. There were also many priests. One of the lawyers had been beaten too. Javier Calderón was a lawyer from Vitoria, who took the defence proceedings of several relatives and wounded people. And they practically had to go underground, holding meetings on the street or in the park, to prepare the defence. That was after 3 March. Javier Calderón was murdered. They planted a bomb in his car. That was probably the extreme right.

“Many of those lawyers abandoned the fight. They said: ‘Now there is going to be a new phase, in which there will be a full democracy.’ And they launched the slogan: ‘3 March must be forgiven and forgotten.’ That was the way to deactivate the movement.

“They signed up to the new order, in which they merely changed the names of the old institutions, although in reality they were still essentially the same thing.

“The armed police became the National Police, because it sounds more democratic, like in France. We will call the regions autonomous communities, while keeping the fundamentals of the state. And, of course, political and economic power remain entrenched.”

El País of 30 August 2016 concluded with the headline: ‘A Tragedy That Hastened Arias Navarro’s Suspension’.

“The individual criminal responsibilities of the events in Vitoria were never clarified. ‘The eviction order started from the Civil Government. If there were orders superior to the governor or if the way of eviction was the decision of the commanders, it is difficult to determine without the existence of conclusive evidence,’ says the historian Carlos Carnicero, who assures that there was no will to investigate what happened, because it was known what companies intervened.

“It did, however, have political consequences related to the cessation, four months later, of the President of the Government, Carlos Arias Navarro, and of the Minister of the Interior, Manuel Fraga. The King held a tense meeting with the Chief Executive about what happened.

“‘The facts of Vitoria had enough national and international publicity, which undoubtedly contributed to the decision to change the Executive in July 1976’, Carnicero maintains. It also accelerated the unity of the opposition, with the merger of the Democratic Junta and the Democratic Convergence Platform two weeks later.

“There are still suspicions that the government used the Vitoria massacre ‘as a threat against the proliferation of labour conflicts after the death of Dictator Franco,’ the specialist added.

“Paradoxically, none of the aggressors were arrested. Three union leaders were imprisoned and pardoned five months later by the already president Adolfo Suárez.”

A court case was brought in Argentina for the massacre and the judge requested the extradition of Martín Villa, but the Spanish government refused, and continues to refuse to this day. Martín Villa was given a position in the administration board of SAREB – the ‘bad bank’, which dealt with the toxic assets during the bank bailout after the 2007 crisis.

Fraga (‘the street belongs to me’) Iribarne went on to become leader of the right-wing Alianza Popular, which later morphed into the Popular Party. Now hailed as a democrat, there is a bust of him in the Senate.

Each year, on the anniversary of the massacre, thousands still gather in Vitoria to demand justice for the five who were murdered on 3 March 1976.

Forty years on, no one has been convicted of the murders.

[For more on the heroic struggles during Spain’s ‘democratic transition’, order your copy of Spain’s Revolution Against Franco: The Great Betrayal by Alan Woods from Wellred Books.]