It was before dawn on August 17, 1936 when a man, dressed in white pajamas and a jacket, got out of a car to go, forced, towards a dirt road that connects the cities of Víznar and Alfacar, on the outskirts from Granada (Spain). His eyebrows were thick and arched, and he was beginning to take the last steps of his life. He was 38 years old.
It was a dark, moonless night, and he was not alone under the Andalusian sky. Accompanying him, escorting him, were five soldiers and three other prisoners: a school teacher with white hair and a wooden leg and two anarchist bullfighters.
The headlights of the two vehicles that had brought them here illuminated the group as they made their way down an embankment toward a nearby field full of olive trees. The soldiers carried Astra 900 semi-automatic pistols and German Mauser rifles. And sure enough, the four captives knew they were going to die. The man in pajamas was the poet from Granada Federico Garcia Lorca.
A month earlier, General Francisco Franco, and other Spanish generals, had launched a coup against the still young -and controversial- Spanish democracy. A brave and ruthless career officer, with an incongruously sickening voice and his grandiose habit of riding a white horse into battle, Franco, 43, led the forces in Spanish Morocco.
The next day, coordinated revolts of military garrisons began to be orchestrated throughout the country, fueled by the support of right-wing sympathizers, members of the Civil Guard and soldiers of the fascist militia.
The objective? Eliminate the Popular Front, which consisted of a left-wing coalition that had won the general elections in February, and save their country from what they considered to be the excesses of the Second Spanish Republic, the system of government instituted in 1931 after the expulsion of the military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera.
The last days of Federico García Lorca
In Granada it soon became clear that the safety of the poet Federico García Lorca was not guaranteed. On July 20, less than a week after arriving in the city, his brother-in-law, the city’s newly elected mayor, was arrested. His tenure barely lasted ten days.
Shortly after, a group of thugs belonging to the Falange appeared at the Lorca family home and knocked the poet down the stairs. They then tied the gardener to a tree and beat him. Obviously, the poet was terrified, especially for having been one of the great defenders of the Republic. Just three months earlier, the poet had told a journalist: “As I have not worried about being born, I do not worry about dying.”
Furthermore, many envied his success, regardless of his penchant for insulting the conservative bourgeoisie of Granada. Be that as it may, it seemed that sooner or later the soldiers would return.
Due to this fear, Lorca decided the next day to hide in the house of his friend Luis Rosales, a 26-year-old poet who idolized him, despite the fact that he himself had joined the uprising. Spain in those days was that: a stormy and tremendously uncertain moment, a labyrinth full of ties and personal and ideological revenge, in which people could protect their supposed enemies or denounce their own relatives and neighbors.
And that labyrinth swallowed Lorca. Although there are different versions about who could have betrayed him, some sources say it was one of Luis Rosales’ brothers, while other researchers say that in reality everyone knew where Lorca was hiding (it was, after all, an open secret). in Granada). Word also spread of a minor and wildly vindictive politician named Ramón Ruiz Alonso, who hoped that by wiping Lorca off the map he would raise his profile in the Falange ranks.
On the afternoon of August 16, a few hours after the poet learned that his brother-in-law had been executed, Ruiz Alonso led a convoy of more than 100 soldiers to the Rosales’ house, surrounding it and pointing their guns. Trembling, Lorca finally appeared. They took him to a government building, located a few blocks from the Rosales’ house, and at nightfall they took him up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to a prison in the whitewashed town of Víznar.
his last moments
In the dark field, next to the road, the soldiers told the prisoners to stop. The truth is that the five men were not professional executioners. They had taken sides, and now accepted their duties, some, it is true, more zealously than others. One of the soldiers, for example, later boasted about shooting Lorca in his “big head.” But another of the soldiers, more nervous, exclaimed «This is not for me! This is not for me!”.
The five men raised their weapons, took aim and fired.. Lorca writhed on the ground, bleeding, until one of the soldiers delivered his finishing blow. He just stopped moving, forever. In the early days of the uprising, Federico Garcia Lorca was dead. But the Spanish Civil War was still far from over…