Journalist Luis de Sirval, then 36, traveled to Asturias to cover the October Revolution from the streets. He was shot six times in the inner courtyard of a police station in Oviedo, a brutal moment that sparked questions in Parliament and drew the concern of colleagues. One of the two officers from the Tercio who killed him would be convicted, receiving a six-month sentence, but the episode soon faded from public memory as injustice lingered in the air.
Why Sirval was killed became one of the era’s testimonies. A sharp chronicle by Ignatius Carral seeks to reconstruct the events that ended his colleague’s life. He published it a year after Sirval’s death, and Renacimiento has recently republished it as part of the Espuela de plata collection.
Viewed as a nonfiction novel, the book reads as a violent chronicle of October 1934, a masterful journalism exercise and a revealing document of the political contradictions that pulled the Republic into its final days.
In the edition’s preface, critic José Luis García Martín stresses that civil conflict arrived with a price: the death of a journalist, followed by more deaths and crimes, and the political profits sought by factions after the war. He notes that some leftist actors tried to shield themselves by exploiting the crime, while others fled scrutiny after the fall of the Republic. The text points to a period when the Republic, through its officials, faced a fascist phase that was hard to explain to future generations.
Sirval had made a name in Madrid journalism with La Libertad, where parliamentary records formed the backbone of his volume. His experiences under censorship and political pressure led him to leave the editorial desk and start the Agencia Sirval, a news agency that drew contributions from writers such as Alomar, Albornoz, Araquistain, Marcelino Domingo, and Pérez de Ayala. He then turned to direct reporting from the field, recognizing that the Asturias affair required firsthand testimony.
Sirval announced to his subscribers that the events in Asturias would be presented under a new title. He promised an impartial, vivid account of the clashes on the ground, supplementing the existing telegraphic reports with a direct impression of what had unfolded in the region, the kind of reporting that could only come from the field.
Ignacio Carral notes that readers who followed Sirval’s dispatches often found their emotions stirred by the sparse newspaper mentions of his death. The fuller truth lay in the unfolding events in Asturias, beyond the fragments that press censorship permitted. Sirval’s mission was to go to the sources, talk to witnesses, and map the course of the early revolutionary days and the brutal repression that followed. He traveled through Campomanes, Vega del Rey, Pola de Lena, and walked toward Mieres, seeking a complete picture.
In his first article for the newspaper, Sirval describes Pajares as the gateway to danger, a coastal valley where the railway and its bridges had become perilous. He explains that travel required extreme caution as stations and structures bore the scars of dynamite and sabotage. The narrative captures the sense of peril that affected every traveler who crossed this treacherous terrain.
Through conversations with Tercio soldiers, Sirval gathered accounts of repression and violence, including reports of executions carried out by a Bulgarian lieutenant in Oviedo. Those notes, tucked away in his pocket, carry particular resonance today for their connection to the murder of Aída Lafuente and the broader civilian toll of the conflict.
The edition adds a pamphlet titled We Accuse! Murder of Luis de Sirval, authored by friends and colleagues who stood beside him. The pages reproduce Sirval’s last observations and include other testimonies from Asturian comrades, including Ovidio Gondi, who shared Sirval’s final hours in captivity.
During a visit to Oviedo, Sirval stayed at Casa Flora on Fruela Street. At a dinner gathering, he argued against the atrocities attributed to miners and defended his own evidence-based account of the shootings. Authorities, hearing of these remarks, moved to confront him, eventually sealing his fate at the Santa Clara hospital and later at the police station where he was pursued and killed.
Carral expands the episode, reconstructing it with careful detail. He refrains from naming some participants and replaces certain details with carefully chosen alignments, then expands and even fictionalizes aspects of the event to portray the deadly moment more vividly. He notes Sirval’s repeated insistence that he had done nothing wrong, echoing the chilling moment when six shots were fired seconds later, a point the narrative preserves as a stark memory of the time.