The Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (, FTRE) was a Spanish anarchist organization founded in the Barcelona Workers' Congress of 1881 by the initiative of a group of Catalan anarcho-syndicalists headed Josep Llunas i Pujals, Rafael Farga Pellicer and Antoni Pellicer, after the dissolution of the Spanish Regional Federation of the International Workingmen's Association founded in the Barcelona Workers' Congress of 1870. It only had seven years of life since it was dissolved in 1888. Its failure, in which the episode of La Mano Negra was key, opened a new stage in the history of anarchism in Spain dominated by propaganda of the deed.
History
The dissolution of the FRE and the birth of the FTRE
The ideological and strategic differences that arose within the Spanish Regional Federation led to its dissolution in 1881 as soon as the possibility of acting legally again was glimpsed. The initiative came from the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist group led by Josep Llunas i Pujals, Rafael Farga Pellicer, Antoni Pellicer i Paraire and Eudald Canivell i Masbernat who, tried taking advantage of the opportunity offered by the new liberal government chaired by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta that had promised the recognition of freedom of association —which would put an end to the period of secrecy—, they proposed to change the policy of the Federal Commission, which "had moved away from the idea of large labor movements, in favor of secret groups, supporters of direct action."
For this purpose, they convened an Extraordinary Regional Conference that was held from February 6 to 9, 1881 in Gràcia which was attended by one delegate per "region" and during which the dismissal of the Commission —integrated by Anselmo Lorenzo, José García Viñas, Trinidad Soriano, Nacher, and González Morago -, was dismissed and replaced by a new one made up of the Catalan leaders, plus the Mallorcan bricklayer Francisco Tomás Oliver. "The history of the Spanish Regional Federation of the AIT ended here, to give way to the reconstruction of a powerful union movement, something that the same men of the Alliance did, the anarcho-syndicalists from Barcelona, ex-officio workers, imposed themselves on the insurrectionary anarchists who were not very inclined to public union action." Almost simultaneously with the celebration of the Extraordinary Conference, the liberal government of Práxedes Mateo Sagasta approved freedom of association.
On July 10, some fifty workers 'societies in Catalonia - which had held a previous assembly in March - made public a manifesto, probably written by Farga Pellicer, in which they called a workers' congress of the Spanish Region in Barcelona for the end of September. Soon the "collectivist workers" from twenty-two towns in the rest of Spain joined the proposal.
The Congress, which was held between September 24 and 25, 1881 at the Teatro Circo de Barcelona on Montserrat Street, the same place where the Barcelona Workers' Congress of 1870 had been held, agreed to found the new Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region conforming to legality by suppressing the word "international", one of the reasons that had motivated the prohibition of its predecessor the FRE-AIT. In the "Manifesto to the workers of the Spanish Region" approved in Congress reaffirmed antipoliticism and anarcho-collectivism:
The Federal Commission was established on October 7 with the Barcelona internationalist group that had taken the initiative to end the FRE - Josep Llunas i Pujals, Rafael Farga Pellicer and Antoni Pellicer i Paraire - with Francisco Tomás Oliver.
One year after its founding, the FTRE already had about 60,000 members, which, as Clara Lida has highlighted, is still surprising since after almost ten years of persecution and in hiding the Spanish anarchist movement, far from disappearing, had resurfaced with such force, going from 30,000 affiliates in 1873 to 60,000 in 1882. Lida also stressed that the "profile" of the new FTRE was very different from that of the eight-year-old FRE-AIT before. "Unlike in 1873, when the manufacturing, industrial and urban areas of Barcelona, Valencia (including Alicante) and Madrid predominated, the profile of the new militants in 1882 was strongly Andalusian, with great weight from the agrarian organizations that for a decade they had united in the Union of Rural Workers (UTC), specifically aimed at organizing the agricultural proletariat within the Spanish Federation."
The Seville Congress of September 1882: anarcho-collectivism vs. anarcho-communism; legalism vs. illegalism Between September 24 and 26, 1882, the 2nd FTRE Congress was held in Seville, in which the anarcho-collectivist and the "legalists" clashed for the first time, led by the Catalan Josep Llunas - who was elected a member of the Federal Commission— and the Galician Ricardo Mella, and the anarcho-communists and insurrectionalists, led by the Andalusian Miguel Rubio. The debate focused on maintaining the Federation in legality. "While some, especially the Catalan trade unionists, wanted a public movement that would structure a workers' movement as massive as possible and legal, others, especially in Andalusia, wanted it to maintain its secret and revolutionary character, and was willing to practice propaganda of the deed. The conflict in the Andalusian countryside would put the tensions and differences between the two models to the test."
In the manifesto approved in Congress, the moderate anarcho-collectivist and legalist theses triumphed - it was proclaimed, for example, that strikes "when we cannot necessarily avoid them, we will do them regulatory and solidarity". However, "unanimity" within the FTRE was not such, as demonstrated by the fact that the illegalists shortly after the Seville Congress constituted a new federation under the name of The Disinherited. In their press organ The Social Revolution they denounced years later that the Federal Commission had not published the agreement of the London Congress of 1881 on "propaganda of the deed".
And on the other hand, it was not clear that the authorities and employers were going to tolerate the existence of an anarchist organization that advocated the social revolution. Thus, at the end of 1882, the FTRE newspaper La Revista Social reported that in some places members of the organization were not hired or forced to leave if they wanted to be hired, and many others had lost their job for that reason. The newspaper also denounced that "to the demonstrations that the workers en masse make before the municipalities asking for bread and work", especially in Andalusia that was going through a serious agrarian crisis, they responded "by arresting the most determined and sending forces of the Army to maintain order", or by sending the Civil Guard to investigate the affiliates' meetings. For this reason, the newspaper demanded that the "public powers" not resort to "reprobate and illegal means" to repress the workers - "take us to the courts of justice, and they, that they acquit us or condemn us; but do not inhibit the workers' spirits, do not outrage them, do not threaten them, do not raid their homes, do not apprehend them, do not take them to jail like common criminals."
The episode of the "Black Hand" and the crisis of the FTRE (1882-1883) At the beginning of November 1882, the chief colonel of the Civil Guard in Western Andalusia sent the government a copy of the "regulations" of a secret organization called the "Black Hand" that he had found and by which "the Socialists" in the region, which according to the report was proof that this secret organization was behind the "fires, felling of mountains and trees, injuries or murders" that were taking place in those months of agrarian crisis. Two weeks after receiving the documents, the government decided to send reinforcements to the province of Cádiz. On November 21, a group of 90 civil guards arrived in Jerez under the command of Captain José Oliver y Vidal who immediately, with the help of the head of the Jerez municipal guard, Tomás Pérez Monforte, proceeded to arrest hundreds of day laborers and affiliates of the FRTE, supposed members of the mysterious Black Hand. In a few weeks there were more than 3,000 day laborers and anarchists imprisoned — Josep Termes gives a much higher figure: 2,000 in Cádiz and 3,000 in Jerez. As Avilés Farré has pointed out, "in most cases the reason why they were detained was not for belonging to the Black Hand, but to the FTRE". The body of the FRTE La Revista Social protested the indiscriminate arrests of members of the organization.
The press, both in Cádiz and in Madrid, dealt with the matter without questioning the existence of the Black Hand and creating an atmosphere of fear based on sensational articles on the "abominable association", "abortion of dementia and crime." It focused on the three crimes of which the Black Hand was accused. On December 4, two days after the first wave of arrests ordered by Captain Oliver, a couple of innkeepers were assassinated on the road to Trebujena, near Jerez de la Frontera. Two months later, on February 4, the corpse, buried in the open field, of a young peasant named Bartolomé Gago, better known as "El Blanco de Benaocaz", who later became known to have been assassinated the same day as the innkeepers. It was known as the crime of the Parrilla. At that time, it transpired that the death of the young ranch guard named Fernando Olivera, which occurred in August 1882, had not been an accident, but had been caused by the strong blows he had received in the belly. In February 1883 the government sent a special judge to Jerez to investigate the facts. And the matter also reached the Courts where it was debated on February 28.
The government supported by the owners and by the press - although there were exceptions such as the newspaper El Liberal - identified the Black Hand with the FTRE with a dual purpose, according to Clara Lida: "firstly, to drastically stop the growing force of the International in Spain. The second objective was more local: it was about making it impossible for the farm workers to organize and preventing an agrarian strike from making it difficult to harvest the crops." The Federal Committee of the FTRE, which had already reiterated that the propaganda could not be carried out "neither because of the robbery, nor because of the kidnapping, nor because of the murder," replied that it had no connection with the Black Hand, "nor with any secret association that has for its own sake an objective to perpetrate crimes of common law, refusing all solidarity with those who have committed or may commit criminal acts." It also condemned illegalism again, thus deepening "even more the differences between the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist nucleus and the Andalusian illegalists, as well as those who were beginning to be born in and around Barcelona, especially in Gràcia, also prone to direct action".
For the crime of La Parrilla, on June 18, 1883, the Jerez court sentenced seven people to death and another eight to seventeen years and four months in prison. Two of the accused were acquitted. But the prosecutor appealed the sentence to the Supreme Court which in April 1884 sentenced all but one to capital punishment. Nine had the death sentence commuted to prison but seven were executed by garrote on June 14, 1884, in Jerez - among them the school teacher Juan Ruiz. Regarding the crime of the landlords, four people were sentenced to death, but they were not executed. For the third crime, that of Fernando Oliveira, two people were tried, and one of them was sentenced to a long prison term.