The dream fulfilled of the anti-fascist soldier from Inca

PalmThe first victims of the July 1936 coup were not civilians, but military personnel who refused to support their fellow rebels. Among them were two men from Mallorca, Pau Ferrer Madariaga and Josep Rotger Canals. Information is only available about the former. Born in Inca in 1896, Ferrer entered the Salamanca Military Academy at the age of 16 and in 1916 was assigned to Melilla, which had been part of the Spanish protectorate of Morocco since 1912. In 1936, the man from Inca was commander of the Ceuta Light Infantry Battalion. He closely followed the new course that the Second Republic took in February with the victory of the Popular Front. In Madrid, tensions began to rise on July 13 with the assassination of the monarchist deputy José Calvo Sotelo. Former Minister of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), Calvo Sotelo was one of the most combative right-wing leaders against the new government of Manuel Azaña. He was assassinated in revenge for the death the day before of Lieutenant José del Castillo, a well-known socialist, at the hands of far-right gunmen. Four days later, everything exploded.

Without mercy

From Pamplona, ​​Emilio Mola would act as the 'director' of the military conspiracy. His main collaborators would be Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, stationed in Seville, José Sanjurgo, then in exile in Portugal, and Francisco Franco, who was the commander-in-chief of the Canary Islands—he had previously held that position in the Balearic Islands. Initially, the future Caudillo had shown an ambiguous attitude toward the conspirators, which earned him the nickname of Paca the big-assed oneBut he eventually joined the revolt.

July 18th was designated as the day of the national uprising. However, events unfolded rapidly in the early hours of the 17th in Melilla. At that time, Franco was in Las Palmas attending the funeral of an officer. The following day he was already flying to Tetouan on the plane. Dragon RapideThe Mallorcan financier Joan March had arranged for the convoy to be brought from Great Britain a week earlier. In Melilla, the 43-year-old general took command of the rebel army, which would later, with the help of Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist Italy, cross the Strait of Gibraltar. On the night of July 18, overwhelmed by this saber-rattling, Santiago Casares Quiroga, President of the Council of Ministers, submitted his resignation to Azaña. He was replaced by José Giral after the brief (one-day) presidency of Diego Martínez Barrio. Martínez Barrio would remain in power until September, when he handed it over to Francisco Largo Caballero.

There was no leniency shown to the soldiers who refused to support the insurrection. The exact number of murders is unknown. Those that are documented are the deaths of Pau Ferrer Madariaga and Josep Rotger Canals. Both were arrested immediately and subjected to separate courts-martial. Four months later, on December 3, they were executed by firing squad and buried in Melilla.

The impetus of the letter

Ferrer Madariaga, 40, left behind a widow, a native of Valencia and the daughter of a general. In November 1999, after six decades, his story was brought back into the public eye thanks to an article published by journalist Joan Riera in the newspaper Latest NewsThe person who read it attentively was Margalida Rosselló Pons, recently appointed as the first Green councilor of the Balearic Islands with Francesc Antich's Pact for Progress. Suddenly, it all clicked. "My mother," she says, "was named Severa Pons Ferrer. When we were little, she told my siblings and me about a young godfather who had been shot in Africa during the Civil War. She remembered a letter that she had read to her widowed aunt in the 1940s, when she was a teenager. It had been sent to her husband." The letter contained a plea: "It requested that, on the day Spain regained democracy, he be given the corresponding military honors for having died in the line of duty defending the legitimate and democratic government of the Republic. My aunt insisted that my mother see to it that this request would be fulfilled if she were unable to do so herself.

When the widow died, the goddaughter phoned one of her first cousins to ask about the famous letter. She was quite surprised. "She was told that they no longer had it and that the dead were fine where they were." In 2006, Rosellón and her siblings decided to help their mother. "We requested the documents related to Ferrer Madariaga's case from the Ministry of Defense." "I myself had to travel to Seville to consult the court-martial's verdict." Meanwhile, in 2007, the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero approved the first national Historical Memory Law. In 2011, the law was left without funding under the new conservative government of Mariano Rajoy. This negligence was criticized in 2014 by Pablo de Greiff, the United Nations Special Rapporteur. Legal expert Catalina Moragues explains: "De Greiff met in Madrid with the Minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who defended himself by saying that reconciliation required forgetting."

Given the lack of interest from the state government, the progressive autonomous communities began to design their own legal framework for memorials. In 2016, the government of Francina Armengol approved the Balearic Law on Mass Graves, which in 2018 was complemented by a specific law on historical memory. At that time, Moragues encouraged Rosselló, her friend, to contact the Directorate General of Historical Memory so that Ferrer Madariaga could be recognized as a victim of Francoism. By February 2025, a memorial stone was dedicated to him.Stolpersteine) at the entrance to the General Luque barracks in Inca. A few weeks ago, Rosselló's family saw his last wish fulfilled. "89 years later, we have succeeded in getting the Spanish government to recognize the illegality of the court-martial that condemned him to death. Last December 3rd, we held the official act of reparation in Inca. It was very moving to have our mother, who is now 97 years old, attend. She has been the driving force behind this entire long process."

Anti-Francoist Military

Also present at the event was Manuel Pardo de Donlebún Montesino, a 72-year-old retired officer from Cádiz. Since 2019, he has presided over the Association for Democratic Military Memory (AMMD). The organization was created amidst a climate of intense tension. "In July 2018," he states, "the socialist Pedro Sánchez came to power through a vote of no confidence. One of his flagship announcements was the exhumation of Franco from the well-known Valley of the Fallen [renamed the Valley of Cuelgamuros in 2022]. At that time, a group of 181 Declaration of Respect and Reparation to General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, soldier of SpainNearly a thousand military personnel joined the initiative. Immediately afterward, I and other colleagues responded by publishing the Manifesto against Francoism in the Armed ForcesWe were clear that no respect could be shown to a soldier who had rebelled against the legitimate government of the Republic and who had established an oppressive dictatorship for almost 40 years.” The dignity of the soldiers who died in defense of the Republic. Among its members are officers from the former Democratic Military Union (UMD), which was created in August 1974 to promote the democratization of the army in the face of Franco's imminent death. in the desert: “We are only about thirty members. We feel powerless and frustrated seeing the lack of respect for other people's ideas that still exists in our ranks.”

Despite the pressure, on February 24, 2019, Franco was removed from the Valley of the Fallen. The military further intensified its criticism of a government they labeled "socialist-communist with the support of ETA sympathizers and separatists." In 2020, a WhatsApp group of retired high-ranking Air Force officers called for the "purge of the reds" and spoke of "annihilating 26 million" Spaniards. "For these anti-democratic statements," laments the president of the AMMD, "no judicial or disciplinary proceedings were initiated."

Pardo believes that today Spain is the victim of a flawed Transition. "Franco died in his bed, unlike Hitler, who was defeated. The state apparatus then concluded that, since it was impossible to sustain Francoism as a form of government, they would maintain it with a parliamentary monarchy, adapted to European standards. This was to preserve the unity of the nation. At no point were Spaniards asked if they wanted a Republic."