Rafael Salazar Alonso

Rafael Salazar Alonso (27 December 1895 - 23 September 1936) was a Spanish lawyer, newspaper proprietor and politician who engaged in left-wing and right-wing politics. He was the mayor of Madrid and a government minister. He was executed by the Republican authorities two months after the Spanish Civil War started.

Biography He was born in Madrid on 27 December 1895. His father was a hairdresser. He was active in left-wing republican groups from a young age. He was combative and, initially, anti-Catholic. In his father's home town of Siruela, he married the daughter of a rich local landowner. They had a daughter, Carmencita. While funding himself through work, he completed a law degree at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid doing some work as a lawyer and a journalist, later joining the Partido Republicano Radical (PRR) (Radical Republican Party) of Alejandro Lerroux García. The PRR had gradually split and Lerroux's faction had increasingly aligned itself with centre-right, nationalist and religious parliamentary groups. Salazar Alonso had also become a freemason, using the name Pi y Margall. He became editor of the newspaper El Sol and at different times owner or chief of several others, including Informaciones in Madrid and Almadén published in the municipality of that name. In 1931, he was elected as a city councillor for Madrid (as part of the Conjunción Republicano-Socialista, a coalition between republican parties and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party) and was president of the provincial council.

In parliament Between 1931 and 1936, he represented Badajoz in parliament. On 11 February 1933, he helped found the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union (an earlier organisation with a similar name was created in 1925). On 23 April, during a protest by communists and socialists in Hornachos, he was acosted by the Anti-Marxist Coalition. He drove to Villafranca de los Barros to access a telephone to seek authority from the Ministro de la Gobernación, Santiago Casares Quiroga, for the Guardia Civil to open fire. Five people were killed and fourteen wounded. Forty were arrested and several beaten. During the trip to Villafranca de los Barrios, he met a new lover and confidante, Amparo Munilla, the wife of another rich landowner. He left his wife and children and, through his lover's influence, gave up freemasonry and practiced Roman Catholicism. In the elections of November 1933, he laced criticisms of his popular socialist opponent in Badajoz - the writer, translator and art expert María Teresa Lea Nelken y Mansberger, known as Margarita Nelken - with sexual insults and allegedly organised the release of a local thug from jail to deliver beatings to her and another socialist candidate, lawyer Juan Simeón Vidarte y Franco Romero and another popular candidate, physician and anarchist Dr. Pedro Vallina. In March the following year, Salazar Alonso himself became Minister of the Interior (until October). Immediately upon his tenure, he declared a state of emergency, banning the Juventudes Socialistas de España, the Communist Party of Spain and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and told the heads of security forces to be firm in their actions. He described a strike by Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) unions protesting at government's reversionary measures against agrarian reform as "revolutionary" and ordered its prohibition. Government repression followed, including the banning of unionism overseen by the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT) (land-workers' union). With the help of security forces, caciques - local land-owning political influencers - and cronies, he ejected nearly two hundred socialist mayors and their councilors on weak legal pretexts and replaced them with right-wing supporters, thus removing the last available local protection for landless peasants from actions of the caciques or the police. He declared the harvest as a national public service, strike plans made by the FNTT as revolutionary and imposed severe press censorship. In the Cortes, the actions were condemned as unconstitutional and Salazar Alonso's efforts to frustrate any compromise was highlighted; subsequently, he became a hate-figure for the left-wing and unions, but his actions were part of a deliberate provocation to stoke the anger of the left, with the support of his colleague José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones. Because of the revolutionary events of October 1934, particularly in Catalonia and Asturias, he was made mayor of Madrid on 19 October, remaining in the post for one year. In June 1935, socialist diputado Pedro Rubio Heredia, a popular activist for the peasants of Badajoz, was shot dead in a restaurant by Regino Valencia, a political fixer who worked for Salazar Alonso. Valencia was sentenced to twelve years in prison but Salazar Alonso was widely regarded as the author of the crime. He defended Valencia at his appeal in December 1935 at the Tribunal Supremo). Juan Simeón Vidarte, acting for the victim's family, caused a scene by saying Salazar Alonso should be wearing the convict's overalls, not lawyer's robes.