The Medina family: from landowners who collected and "cleaned reds" for Franco to commission agents with Almeida

The Medina family: from landowners who collected and "cleaned reds" for Franco to commission agents with Almeida



Francisco Franco invaded Spain and divided it in two forever, like two parallel and irreconcilable realities. A story that can be told in two photos and two protagonists. With the same name. On one side of the trenches, Rafael Medina. The officer portrayed by Robert Capa in the image known as Death of a Militiaman, perhaps the warlike icon of the 20th century. The photograph taken in the Mirror, and not in Cerro Muriano, on September 5, 1936, made the Hungarian journalist the most famous war reporter in the world. Medina was Capa's liaison and was in command of the militia squad that defended the municipality, which fell to Franco a few days after the famous photo. Medina was captured and imprisoned and shot in 1940.

On the other side of the trenches, another Rafael Medina. Neighbor of Seville, Duke of Medinaceli and Falangist. And author of a book of memoirs titled Past Time (1971), in which he discovers in its first forty pages the close contacts he maintains with other Falangists and retired and active soldiers, with whom he conspires against the Second Republic. Rafael took up arms, accompanied the military uprising and was part of one of the most disastrous organizations, the Civic Guard (directed by Commander Alfredo Erquicia), an expert unit in the repression of the rear that spread terror in the towns of Huelva and Seville during the first years of the Civil War.

Grandpa of Luis Medina, the commissioner of the Madrid City Council of masks and poor quality tests, is the protagonist of one of the most hair-raising photos of the war. Just as Robert Capa acted on the Republican front, Juan José Serrano from Avila acted in the Francoist vanguard and rearguard and at the end of the war he continued his work at ABC.

In the photo taken on August 4, 1936, a month before Capa's, Rafael Medina has been identified as the individual who wears a white jumpsuit and walks in front of the Civic Guard, in full exercise of terror in his wake by one of the towns of Huelva. He was a companion of the feared Ramón de Carranza in the repression of the towns of Aljarafe in Seville. Rafael Medina, after actively participating in the Franco uprising, became part of the column of terror that is integrated into the so-called Mounted Police. This paramilitary group went to Huelva from Seville to carry out "cleansing" tasks for the towns of the southwest from August 1936 to March 1937, when the column passed to the Falange.

The historian Paco Espinosa has studied that moment and the character in depth. He tells that that mixture of landowners, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie and aristocrats got together in the Mounted Police and marched occupying agricultural areas. "Cleaning the towns of red people," says the historian. "A long time," adds Espinosa, a researcher on repression in southwestern Spain. The official documents themselves refer to them as “clean-up operations”. They wore a khaki uniform, riding boots and a Cordovan hat. In the hat of this gloomy equestrian body could be read the "stop", a motto that said: "Stop enemy, that the heart of Jesus goes with me". They believed that this freed them from danger and legitimized them for barbarism in the towns they wanted to control.

The column that Rafael Medina formed with Ramón de Carranza was made up of the agrarian bourgeoisie, caciques who reviewed what had happened to their lands. The first thing they did was remove the authorities from the towns and place those they wanted, to regain control of the towns. “Those people were covered by African forces, legionnaires and regulars. Once they took Huelva, at the end of July 1936, they continued on their way to Ayamonte”, recalls Espinosa. Medina himself writes it in his book of memoirs, published during the dictatorship: "Those operations of conquest of peoples were, without a doubt, of great interest and were of the greatest urgency for the purpose that was pursued of liberation and domination" . Also for taking ownership of the lands of towns such as Aznalcázar, Pilas, Villamanrique, Carrión de los Céspedes and Castilleja del Campo.

The Francoist press called these "black squads" "uncontrolled groups". They participated in the first phase of the “political cleansing”. Dionisio Ridruejo, the general director of Propaganda in the Ministry of the Interior, described their actions as "informal or spontaneous repression." They were the origins of the sacks and the "walk" (or "paseíllo"). The one that has achieved the most notoriety is the black squad that assassinated Federico García Lorca. That of the Duke of Medinaceli also served him to appoint him mayor of Seville, between 1943 and 1947, and attorney of the Cortes. In Huelva, until the beginning of the military courts, in March 1937, 2,376 men and 86 women were murdered.

In a town in Huelva, the fascists one day killed all the detainees named Manuel, simply for the pleasure of creating terror, Espinosa said. Rafael Medina's column managed to destroy everything raised by the Republic by force of executions to regain control and powers. "These people have remained in their place during the dictatorship and in the Transition they lost nothing, untouchable since 1936. No one has interrupted their history to ask them for responsibilities," says Espinosa.

Paul Preston, in El holocausto español (2011), tells something more about the role of the grandfather of the commission agent who has taken advantage of the coronavirus and has lamented that the Prosecutor's Office is "on the left". According to the British Hispanist, the hatred between the landless peasants and the property managers of the farms became part of daily life in the south. He tells how a prominent landowner from Seville, Rafael Medina, wrote about “the misunderstanding of those above and the envy of those below”, the distance between those who walked in espadrilles and those who traveled by car. And he dwells on that anecdote: when Rafael and his father passed in their car in front of the day laborers, on some secondary road, they noticed "the grim look, of such deep contempt and such marked resentment that it had the force of a lightning bolt" .

Preston continues the story of the close relationship that existed between the landowners and their military rescuers. It became apparent when Queipo de Llano commissioned Rafael Medina to raise funds for the rebel cause. After many months of complaints about the ruin of agriculture, as a consequence, they criticized, of the republican reforms, Medina's efforts could be expected to fail. But no. The first day he collected a million pesetas from the olive exporters of Alcalá de Guadaira.

That same day, in Dos Hermanas, an owner asked him where the money would go. Medina said they were hoping to buy a plane, and the landowner asked how much that would cost. Medina replied that "about a million pesetas." The landowner immediately issued him a check for that amount. “In the days that followed the uprising, rural gentlemen could afford to form and finance their own militias, like the columns of Ramón de Carranza and the Mora Figueroa brothers,” writes Paul Preston.



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