The progressive bourgeoisie of Sóller, devastated by Francoist repression

PalmIn Mallorca, during the Civil War, one of the main targets of the insurgents was the wealthy class that had supported the Second Republic. The symbol of that repression was the mayor of Palma, Emili Darder, a doctor by training, who in 1934 had helped found the Balearic Republican Left (ERB) to counterbalance the local political bosses. On February 24, 1937, after a sham court-martial, Darder was executed by firing squad. He shared that fate with two party members: the businessman Antoni Maria Ques from Alcúdia and the former mayor of Inca, Antoni Mateu, and the Palma socialist Alexandre Jaume. Eight more ERB mayors were also murdered: Joan Mas Verd I harvest (Montuïri), Clemente Garau Juan (Porreres), Pere Llull Fullana (Algaida), Pere Josep Cànaves Sales (Pollença), Pau Crespí Villalonga (Mancor del Valle), Pedro Vallespir Amengual (Costitx), Joan Alemán Villalonga (Búger) and Joan Guasch.

One of the luckiest ERB leaders was Josep Serra Pastor from Sóller, uncle of the journalist Pere Serra Bauzá, founder of the Serra Group. Since the 19th century, thanks to trade with Catalonia and France, Sóller had enjoyed significant industrial activity—it would eventually have around twenty factories, mainly textile mills. In July 1936, it was one of the few towns in Mallorca that resisted the coup plotters. Serra, 38, had only been mayor for two months. Suddenly, he found himself cornered by the notorious "Riders of Alcalá." This was the name given to the 29 officers from Madrid who, since June, had been serving sentences in the San Carlos prison in Palma for rebelling against the Republican government. On July 18, the Day of the UprisingThey were suddenly freed by the Falange.

"I haven't done anything wrong"

On July 20, two members of the "Alcalá Horsemen" regiment arrived at Mayor Darder's house in Palma to arrest him. That same day, seven others traveled in two cars to Sóller with a specific objective: to seize control of the radiotelegraph station at the Muleta lighthouse, located in the port. A group of Civil Guard officers was defending it. They did not hesitate to open fire on the rebel officers. One of them, Lieutenant Francisco Javier Lizasoaín, was killed. The following day, all of Sóller was under the control of the insurgent forces. According to historian Antoni Quetglas, author of the book Sóller. The defeat of the progressive bourgeoisie (Ediciones Documenta Balear, 2012), in the municipality there were 170 detainees, 4 murders and 5 executions by court-martial (among them, the carabineros José Muñoz Enrile, Manuel Braulio, Antoni Vallespir Terrasa and José Gil).

On July 21, after three days of resistance, Mayor Serra was forced to hand over the position to the Falangist Jaume Casasnovas Pastor. It was the beginning of an ordeal that his grandson, 47-year-old Jaume Oliver Morell, still vividly remembers. "My maternal godmother, Bárbara Serra Noguera," he says, "was his youngest daughter. When he left the Town Hall, the military ordered his father confined to a family estate in Escorca. Then, a friend of his, the businessman Llorenç Roses Bermejo, offered him refuge in Menorca through his daughter, Pedro Oliver. He, however, refused. The man from Sóller was a suspect to the rebels. Aside from his activism, in June 1936 he had been one of the 153 Mallorcan intellectuals who signed the Response to the Catalanswhich aimed to strengthen cultural ties between the Balearic Islands and Catalonia. His father, the doctor Pere Serra Canyelles, and his two other brothers, Miquel and Pere, also participated.

In September, Serra was arrested. "One of the triggers," says Oliver, "was the accusation that he had given a speech to some workers who were then working on the Gorg Blau project. They took him to a building in Palma, where, to intimidate him, they locked him in a room with a coffin and four candles and demanded that he reveal where he kept his weapons. Can Mir. And from there he was sent to the Águila concentration camp (Llucmajor)." After a few months, pulmonary emphysema forced the former mayor to be hospitalized. In 1938, a court-martial sentenced him to death for 'adherence to the rebellion'. But in November of the same year, Franco commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. It was the result of efforts made by his brother Miquel with the Burgos government and the Bishop of Vic with Cardinal Gomà. The life sentence would eventually be commuted to 30 years in prison. The ERB leader would never bow his head. "To obtain more prison privileges," the renet notes, "his father wrote him letters recommending that he sign a manifesto of support for the regime. He reminded him that he should do it for the sake of his wife and two teenage daughters. He, however, insisted that he had done nothing wrong."

The pardon of Roses and Marqués

While imprisoned, Serra learned of the deaths of Llorenç Roses and another businessman friend, Bernat Marquès Rul·lan. The son of a Mallorcan father and a Puerto Rican mother, Roses was born in 1895 in Puerto Rico, but settled in Sóller as a child. He married the sister of Mayor Darder. In 1931, with the proclamation of the Second Republic, he served as interim mayor of Sóller for a month. In 1935, he promoted the garden city of Palmanova (Calvià). With the military uprising of July 1936, Roses was arrested, as was his brother-in-law. He was executed by firing squad in the Palma cemetery on November 19, 1936. He was 41 years old and left behind a wife and eight children. Seven months later, it would be Marquès's turn, some 30 years his senior. He was a wealthy man who had made his fortune in Puerto Rico and had been president of the ERB (Basque Rural Workers' Union) in Sóller. Along with his wife and five children, he was sentenced to death. The appeals court upheld the death penalty for him, while his family members received prison sentences of between two and five years. Marqués, 68, was executed at the Illetes fort (Calvià) on June 5, 1937. One of his daughters was Jeanne Marquès Mayol. She died in 2006 at the age of 92 and was one of the last witnesses to the figure of Aurora Picornell, with whom she had been imprisoned in Can Mir.

Before being executed, both Roses and Marquès had the opportunity to say goodbye to their respective families by letter. In 2013, historian Manuel Aguilera located those letters. "Tell Father," Roses wrote to his wife, "to forgive me, and tell my children to forgive my enemies. Goodbye, my dear wife. Receive this last kiss from your husband and forgive me for all the suffering I have caused you and for what you will suffer in this world." Marquès expressed himself similarly: "I maintain our innocence and that all the accusations stem from personal vendettas and family hatred [...]. I also beg you not to hate anyone."

Tribute pending

Sierra would grieve deeply for those losses. In December 1942, he received news of the death of his eldest daughter, 19, from tuberculosis. "The prison director," he recalls, "would not allow me to attend the funeral. I was finally able to see my daughter before she was buried thanks to the complicity of a guard, who allowed me to leave at night. My wife and my other daughter, my young one, knew I had been there." Two months later, in February 1943, the man from Sóller saw his prison sentence reduced from 30 to 10 years. Finally, two months after that, he was granted parole. "Some time later, he was able to recover the pharmacy in his town, which had been confiscated. However, a few years later, he sold it. He withdrew from public life and went to live on his farm outside Sóller, where he started a farm."

Serra died in 1962, at the age of 64, from the pulmonary emphysema he had suffered from. "He was," the resident emphasizes, "a very firm and dignified person. He always said that those who once inspired fear ended up fearing the fear they instilled, because they were ashamed of their actions." Oliver laments the institutional neglect of his mentor: "In 2009, a joint tribute was held for the democratic mayors of Sóller. There has never been one focused on him, considering that he was the last Republican mayor and that he was severely persecuted because of his office." In 2015, in compliance with the Historical Memory Law, the stone cross in Muleta commemorating the coup-plotting military officer Francisco Javier Lizasoaín, who died in 1936 at the hands of the Civil Guard officers defending the radiotelegraph station, was removed. The same did not happen with the monument to the 'fallen', which architect Gabriel Alomar erected in 1939 in the town's Plaza de España. In 2016, the City Council, then controlled by MÁS and the PSOE, decided that it was enough to simply remove its fascist elements, like the Feixina monument in Palma.