‘Las sacas’, the Real Madrid captain’s book about the brutal Francoist oppression in La Rioja

Escobal was unable to continue writing these memoirs until 1937, but even when he left Spain for the United States in 1940, he did not dare to take the manuscript with him. Fearing that the Francoist authorities might find him at a border control, he decided to leave him in Spain under the care of a trusted person who managed to send him to New York a few years later. Although it is estimated that around 1948 the author had already finished his text. take them offIt wouldn’t be until twenty years later that the book will be published with the title of the first English edition. Death Row: Spain 1936 (Death Row: Spain 1936). Again, We would still have to wait until 1974 for the Spanish version to come out. this was in the beginning, and while the dictator was still alive, he lurked around Spain.

“To know take them off Since the Spanish edition came to us in the mid-70s of the last century. This bookThe title was always veiled out of sight, passed from hand to hand among all those who rejected Francoism. and at the same time we wanted to know what happened in the war. In this case, in our own city,” he explains. Jesus Vincent AguirreAn expert on the figure of Patricio Escobal, whose work was the starting point for his own research on Franco’s imprint in the La Rioja region, published in 2008 and titled Nothing happened here. La Rioja 1936. “Different Arturo BareaAlready a well-known writer in the 1930s and continuing to be so after his exile in England, Escobal is an engineer who has written just one really good work. But beyond his personal adventures, it is a work of great value, as it describes what prisons, marches and exits were like in a provincial, any provincial city in 1936.”

Bernabéu’s friend, sentenced to death

Born in Logroño in 1903, Patricio Pedro Escobal studied and played with the Jesuits in Madrid’s Chamartín district. Santiago Bernabeu inside real MadridHe was chosen to represent Spain in the team he captained. 1924 Paris Olympics and graduated in Engineering. However, for military rebels, all these achievements would be marred by his militancy in the Republican Left party and his membership in Freemasonry.. Although this latest accusation was never proven, as one of the Mason brothers destroyed the archives of his lodge to avoid reprisals, Manuel Azaña’s militancy in his party led to his arrest in Logroño and his imprisonment in different parts of the city, which he witnessed. Extrajudicial executions carried out every day.

“Escobal is not a print student in La Rioja. Nor was he interested in documents that did not exist at the time and which in any case could not be accessed as a prisoner. What he did was write his own story. His memoirs display an extraordinary memory and absolute honesty, but sometimes inaccurate data. For example, referring to Barranca de Lardero, he says, “four men from the group went to take away the bodies of the thousands who were already buried.” There were a hundred, which is still an important number,” explains Jesús Vicente Aguirre, noting that fourteen thousand people were not killed against Ace in Escobal, Navarra and La Rioja either. “They were not many in number, but in any case they were very large. It is obvious that it is not easy to make real accounts of the massacres that took place in the middle of the whirlwind of those dark nights. More than 3,400 people were killed in Navarra and more than 2,000 in La Rioja, some areas without fronts or trenches. Regardless, completely take them off Escobal is one of the books that best illustrates the oppression of the Francoist side during the war,” concludes Aguirre, “if the majority of Spanish society were aware of what death and murder was like in the rearguard of the Civil Army.” measures summarized in the phrase ‘justice and compensation’ would be taken.”

Forty years pass like this

In a passage in the book, Patricio Escobal speaks to a person whose relatives were executed, and reassures him that justice will be done, even if it takes forty years to do so. Nearly ninety years after the end of the Civil War, that justice has yet to come.

“I lived through the transition period and the last years of the dictatorship from the anti-Franco regime, from clandestine militancy. Although we used the street to protest, demand and flee, the street belonged to Fraga and his police. While the center and left political forces achieved democracy, the armed forces continued in the barracks with their Francoist commanders and generals. Jesús Vicente Aguirre, who has not yet dared to prosecute and pay compensation for the crimes of the Civil War, recalls, “Many of our prisoners in Franco prisons, because of the same amnesty, later infiltrated our torturers and murderers.”

“Maybe it was too daring to do that in 1982, but what about 1983? It required putting on the table all the unresolved issues of our Civil War, apart from the economic reparations, most of which began to be delivered slowly and in disjointed form with the Adolfo Suárez government. What was not done then will have to be done now. Justice would be first to create a story in which we can all find ourselves, and of course the judges and audience to accept the complaints that memorial groups present to them every time an attempt is made to exhume someone. Although the defendants cannot be prosecuted because they no longer exist, it is possible to determine what happened and to be punished accordingly. With this, we will have already received some of the necessary compensation.”