The Anarchist Of Casas Viejas

Adrian Moreno Puertas
The anarchist of Casas Viejas
The book start with a description of how the first anarchist group started in Spain during the decade of 1870s and right then start to introduce the beginning of the anarchism in Casas Viejas a Little village of Andalucía in the province of Cadiz that was know nationally many years later due to a massacre that was produce there.
Soon afterstart a very accurate description of how were the people of Casas Viejas describing almost one by one everyone relevant person there during the first third of the twentieth century including their proprieties, families, friendship, social class and ideology. The book take special attention in introduce you in the social organization of the town. The system was the follow: in the top a few peoplethat sometimes where noble and normally didn’t live frequently in the town, own a huge percentage of the land (called latifundios that were very often in southern part of Spain) that was not produced in a efficient way. This people were call by the majority of the people señoritos, in the opposite side of the social structure where the jornaleros peasant without land that work normally in thelatifudios that were own by the señoritos, the were normally hired just for harvest and spend normally half a year without working so situation of hunger for them and their family were pretty normal, these people use to be the majority of the citizens in towns as Casas Viejas and where in absolute poverty, also in the majority of the cases where illiterate. Between the two previous group was aheterogeneous middle class compose by administrators of the latifundios, little owner of land, artisans, owner of little stores, a catholic priest, Guardia civil (a Spanish police that is normally in small garrison in the countryside) and peasants that rent small amount of land to the landowner for make a little bit more of money that just work as a jornalero. Then the author start to introduce you in howthe union of the peasants (that was an anarchist organization called the CNT) was create in the town and after many social fights and suffer of their members start to gain some power achieving little progress for the workers without land.
Later on, start the description of los sucesos de Casas Viejas. In 1931 the republic is created in Spain the jornaleros gain some improve in their lifestyle,however they still being far to living well. The new regime promise a land reform that will make the peasant owners of the land that they work, this on the other hand was a very long hard process that make the anarchist to distrust the republic and start to fight against it in order to take it down and establish a real anarchist society. In the beginning of 1933 after a anarchist uprising of theindustrial workers of Barcelona and Valencia that was rapidly suppress by the government, the anarchist union of Casas Viejas, that was the same that had did the uprising on big industrial cities ( the CNT and their radical wing the FAI) were informed previously about the uprising and started to do the plans for do their part in the imminent revolution, later when start to arrive someinformation about the defeat of the uprising in Barcelona and other important industrial cities they decide to the revolution by their own for reach the libertarian communism in their village. Even when some people of the union where against a vast majority join the revolution and they start to collect all the weapon that the peasant had for hunting (that where a lot less effective that a military riffle)and they surround the garrison of the Guardia civil, and order them to surrender, when they refuse to do so, the revolutionist start to shoot them and kill two of policemen. The regional command of the government starts to suspect that something is happened in the village and send troops to reestablish control in the town. When police entered in the town most of the armed peasant start to...