| 1923 Spanish coup d'état by Primo de Rivera | |
| Location: | Spain |
| Also Known As: | Coup d'état by Primo de Rivera |
| Type: | Coup d'état |
| Motive: | Problems in the Rif War, tensions with the Spanish labor movement, crisis of the political system, among others |
| Participants: | Miguel Primo de Rivera and most of the Army, with the support of King Alfonso XIII |
| Outcome: | Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera |
| Blank Label: | Ideologies |
| Blank Data: | Authoritarianism, conservatism, Spanish nationalism, militarism |
| Blank1 Label: | Former government |
| Blank1 Data: | Manuel García Prieto |
| Blank2 Label: | Entering government |
| Blank2 Data: | Military Directory |
The coup d'état of Primo de Rivera took place in Spain between September 13 and 15, 1923 and was led by the then Captain General of Catalonia Miguel Primo de Rivera. It resulted in the establishment of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, mainly because King Alfonso XIII did not oppose the coup and appointed the rebel general as head of the Government at the head of a Militar Directory.
Historian Francisco Alía Miranda has pointed out that "the coup d'état of General Miguel Primo de Rivera [was] atypical for its simplicity. To triumph he only needed the backing of a few prestigious military officers and to publish a manifesto in the press addressed To the country and the Army. The Restoration regime collapsed in a few hours. [...] He did not need more backing from chiefs in command of the troops, for that the shadow of Alfonso XIII was already behind him".
Javier Moreno Luzón pointed out that Alfonso XIII "knew that handing over power to the military entailed a crucial political turnaround. The most important in Spain since the end of 1874, when had facilitated the return of the Bourbon dynasty and the opening of a different stage, the Restoration. To validate that act of force questioned the moderating functions assigned to the monarch by the constitutional texts of 1876... Moreover, now the Government was not taken over by a caudillo at the service of a specific party, but by the army as a corporation. All of which would bring unforeseeable consequences".
According to the Israeli historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, "it is in Catalonia where the immediate origins of Primo de Rivera's coup must be sought. It was there that the bourgeoisie created the hysterical atmosphere that surrounded Primo de Rivera with the halo of "savior" and placed his rebellion, as a contemporary observer noted, in the general context of the anti-Bolshevik reaction that had also reached other European countries. Cambó, authentic representative of the Catalan high bourgeoisie, "the theoretician of the Spanish dictatorship", as Maurín called him, crudely exposed the yearning and responsibility of his class for the dictatorship: [...] "A society in which the demagogic [syndicalist] avalanche puts ideals and interests in grave danger will resign itself to everything as long as it feels protected..." [...] This does not mean, however, that there was a real danger of social revolution on the eve of Primo de Rivera's coup".
Since the "disaster of 1898", there was a growing intervention of the Army in Spanish political life, presenting itself as the interpreter of the "popular will" and the defender of the "national interest, above partial interests and partisan politics". Two key moments of this praetorianism were the Cu-Cut! events of 1905 —the assault by officers of the Barcelona garrison on the editorial office and workshops of this Catalan nationalist satirical publication, and also those of the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya, in response to a satirical cartoon about the military— which led to the Law of Jurisdictions of 1906, and, above all, the Spanish crisis of 1917, in which the self-declared Juntas de Defensa, made up exclusively of military personnel, took on a special role.
As José Luis Gómez-Navarro has pointed out, "among Spanish chiefs and officers, since the beginning of the 20th century, but increasingly after the First World War, an anti-parliamentarism and a rejection of politics had spread.... The Spanish army consolidated the defense of values consubstantial to military professionalism but whose weight increased in the face of the crisis: order, hierarchy, discipline and authority; to which was added its growing role as defenders of the foundations of the social order and of the moderating institution that guaranteed the continuity of the social and political system: the monarchy".
See also: Bolshevik triennium. In the years following the crisis of 1917, a serious social crisis broke out in Catalonia and in the Andalusian countryside. "An authentic "social war", with anarchist attacks and attacks by gunmen in the pay of employers, was declared in Catalonia and three years of mobilizations of day laborers in the countryside to whom the echoes of the Russian revolution in Andalusia had reached". Although the two great Spanish workers' organizations, CNT and PSOE-UGT did not join the communist movement, the October Revolution "acted in Spain as an unstoppable mobilizing myth that shocked for years the working class, dragged its leaders and dazzled the masses they tried to frame".
In Andalusia between 1918 and 1920 there was an intensification of mobilizations, known as the "Bolshevik triennium". There were constant strikes by day laborers that were responded to with extraordinary harshness by the bosses and the authorities. During the strikes the day laborers occupied the farms, being violently evicted from them by the civil guard and the army. There was also sabotage and attacks.In Catalonia the conflict began in February 1919 with the strike of the Canadiense, which was the name by which the company Barcelona Traction, Light and Power, that supplied electricity to Barcelona, was known. As a result, the city was left without electricity, water and streetcars. The liberal government of the Count of Romanones opted for the path of negotiation accompanied by the approval of the "eight-hour" decree and a new social insurance system, but had to give in to pressure from the employers, who demanded an iron fist and found valuable support in the Captain General of Catalonia, Joaquín Milans del Bosch, and King Alfonso XIII. Thus it was that the Catalan workers' conflict degenerated into a "social war" whose main stage was Barcelona. The violence of the bosses' pistoleros was answered with terrorist attacks perpetrated by anarchist action groups.
The new government of the conservative Eduardo Dato appointed General Severiano Martínez Anido as civil governor, who greatly increased the harsh repressive policy applied by Milans del Bosch against the CNT. "He implemented a regime of terror that made use of free trade unionism, persecuted the leaders of the CNT and applied the law of escapes: some detainees were executed on the spot by the forces of order, under the pretext that they had tried to flee". Terrorist acts and street violence between anarchists and members of the free and parapolice forces followed one after the other between 1920 and 1923. The spiral of violence reached Dato himself, who was riddled with bullets in Madrid by three anarchists on March 8, 1921. In 1923 Salvador Seguí, a leader of the CNT who had not supported the violent way and who defended the return to the trade union way, and the archbishop of Zaragoza Juan Soldevilla were also assassinated.
The first problem that the new government formed after the assassination of Eduardo Dato, which was presided over by the also conservative Manuel Allendesalazar, had to face was the controversy raised by Alfonso XIII's speech delivered on May 23, 1921 at the Casino de la Amistad in Cordoba before the large landowners of the province and the authorities of the capital. Alfonso XIII was convinced, and he was not the only one at that time in Europe, that the parliamentary system was in decadence and was not strong enough to face the revolutionary forces driven by the "Soviet idea", which led him to a generalized criticism of the liberal institutions in Spain —parties, government and Cortes—, as could be seen in the Cordoba speech.
The king complained about the politicians whose "machinations and pettiness" prevented the approval in the Cortes of the projects that "interest everyone" and so he proposed that "the provinces" begin a "movement of support for your King and the beneficial projects and then the Parliament will remember that it is the people's mandatary, since nothing else means the vote that you give it at the ballot box. Then the King's signature will be a guarantee that the beneficial projects will become a reality." He also said "that he, inside or outside the Constitution, would have to impose himself and sacrifice himself for the good of the Motherland". Alfonso XIII was aware of what he was saying because before launching the proposal he had said: "Some will say that I am stepping out of my constitutional duties but I have been a constitutional King for nineteen years and I have risked my life many times to be caught now in a constitutional fault". The minister who accompanied him, Juan de la Cierva, tried to get the journalists to publish only the "soft summary" he had prepared, but the complete text was broadcast with posters by a film newsreel (it was the first time, and the last time, that a speech by the king was made public in this way). José Luis Gómez-Navarro has pointed out that "what is truly significant in this speech is not only the criticism of the functioning of the Restoration regime in those years but his call to the citizens to meet with their king, without mediation, outside the political parties, in order to be effective and solve the problems that Spain was facing. [Alfonso XIII had made a qualitative leap in his thinking. The crown, represented in his person, became the interpreter of the popular will, at least in crisis situations".{{Sfn|Gómez-Navarro|2003|p=342-344|ps="In this way the roles were reversed between the two bodies that shared sovereignty [King and Cortes]. Now it was the king who represented —by interpreting it— the will of the people".}}
The Congress of Deputies took up the matter four days later. The socialist Julián Besteiro affirmed that the king had had some words of "contempt" towards the Parliament and the also socialist Indalecio Prieto proclaimed shouting up to three times: "The Parliament has more dignity than the King!" (Prieto's phrase did not appear in the Diario de Sesiones but it circulated all over Madrid). On the other hand, the conservative Antonio Maura supported the monarch saying that his words had been applauded by "sensible Spain" and the Catholic newspaper El Debate published that they would be "fervently applauded" by the "people detached from politics". For his part, Alfonso XIII "for the moment, was frightened by the impact of his statements and denied any anti-parliamentary intention", although in private he confessed that he had said what he thought, with which "Don Alfonso was in tune with the critics of parliamentarism, which abounded in Spain -as in all Europe, as well as in Latin America- during those years".
See main article: Battle of Annual. The most serious problem that the Allendesalazar government had to face was the crisis caused by the disaster of Annual, which occurred two months later in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. "The unexpected offensive of the Indians [led by [[Abd el-Krim]]] concluded in a general disbandment of the Spanish Army in the direction of Melilla. The Spanish troops were dispersed in a very extensive front with a very high number of positions and with serious supply problems. The units were poorly equipped.... The collapse of the front resulted in the loss in just a few days of what had been achieved with great difficulty for years. Not only General Silvestre [commander general of Melilla and head of the Spanish forces in the eastern half of the Protectorate] died, but also 10,000 other soldiers".
The "disaster of Annual" shocked public opinion. There were demonstrations and protest strikes demanding responsibility. In the Cortes and in the press they were also demanded and King Alfonso XIII himself was accused of having encouraged Fernandez Silvestre to act as recklessly as he did. The people who stood out most in the accusations against the king were the writer Miguel de Unamuno and the socialist deputy Indalecio Prieto. The latter concluded one of his speeches in the Cortes with a phrase that caused a great scandal in the hemicycle and for which he was prosecuted: "Those fields of dominion are today fields of death: eight thousand corpses seem to gather around the steps of the throne in demand of justice". Prieto also referred to an expression attributed to Alfonso XIII that alluded to the large amount of money the Rifian rebels demanded to free the hundreds of Spanish prisoners still in their power (Prieto was again admonished by the president of the Congress of Deputies): "There are those who attribute this attitude of the Government to a very lofty phrase, according to which goose bumps are expensive". The historian Javier Moreno Luzón adds: "Such real sarcasm, about the value of the prisoners, would not be easily forgotten". For his part, Unamuno referred to an alleged telegram sent by the king to Fernandez Silvestre encouraging him to launch the offensive in which he said: "Olé los hombres!" (or "Olé tus cojones!" or "Olé los hombres, el 25 te espero!", in reference to the feast of Santiago Apostle, patron saint of Spain). The alleged telegram, if it had existed, was never found.
To face the serious political consequences of the "disaster of Annual" —the government of Allendesalazar resigned four days after the fall of Al Aaroui— the king resorted to the conservative Antonio Maura who on August 3, 1921 formed, as in 1918, a "government of concentration", which included both conservatives and liberals, and also again the Catalanist Cambó. The first measure taken by the new government was to open a file —whose instructor would be General Juan Picasso— to settle the military responsibilities of the "Annual disaster". The government also dealt with the Juntas de Defensa and in January 1922 transformed them into "informative commissions" subject to the Ministry of War after overcoming the king's resistance to sign the decree. However, Maura's government, beset by the "question of responsibilities" lasted only eight months and in March 1922 it was replaced by an exclusively conservative government presided over by José Sánchez Guerra.
The new government dissolved the "informative commissions" in November, this time counting on the support of the king who in June had said in a meeting with the military of the Barcelona garrison: "At present it is shocking to note in our army groupings which, although motivated by a perhaps most noble desire, are frankly outside what the most elementary obedience and fundamental discipline advise. The officer cannot get involved in politics". But at the same time in that speech he had made an appeal to the unity of the army around him: "I beg you to always remember that you have no other commitment than the oath taken to your country and to your king". Another civilian measure (of submission of the military to civilian power) was the removal of General Severiano Martínez Anido from his post as civil governor in Barcelona. Alfonso XIII resigned himself to the dismissal and told Sánchez Guerra: "it is necessary to agree that you have some... like the cathedral of Toledo".After the delivery to the Ministry of War in April 1922 by General Picasso of his report on the "Annual disaster", which was devastating since in it he denounced the fraud and corruption that had taken place in the administration of the protectorate, as well as the lack of preparation and improvisation of the commanders in the conduct of military operations, without sparing the governments that had not provided the Army with the necessary material means ―based on what was related in the Expediente Picasso, the Supreme Council of War and Navy, presided over by General Francisco Aguilera, ordered the prosecution of twenty-six chiefs and officers, together with the high commissioner, General Berenguer, General Fernández Silvestre, if he was alive as his body had not been found, and General Navarro, prisoner of Abd el-Krim―, the government accepted that the Congress of Deputies should address the question of responsibilities, also the political ones, and sent it a copy of the Picasso File ―on July 21, 1922 the Commission of Responsibilities of the Congress was constituted―. Once again it was the socialist deputy Indalecio Prieto who made the strongest intervention, for which he would be prosecuted. He held responsible for what happened to "the parties that have taken turns in this period of the monarchy" for not "having known how to frame everyone, even the king, within their constitutional duties".
The debate on responsibilities brought to light the division among the conservatives —Antonio Maura proposed that the ministers involved should be tried by the Senate— and when the government crisis finally occurred in December 1922 —pressured by the liberals who demanded to return to the power they had not held exclusively since 1919— the king offered the presidency to Manuel García Prieto who formed a new one of "liberal concentration", which was to be the last constitutional government of the reign of Alfonso XIII. This government announced its intention to advance in the process of responsibilities. In July 1923, the Senate granted the supplication to be able to prosecute General Berenguer since he enjoyed parliamentary immunity as a member of that Chamber.
The government of García Prieto also considered a project of reform of the political regime which could lead to the birth of an authentic parliamentary monarchy, although in the elections held at the beginning of 1923 there was again widespread fraud and recourse to the cacique machinery to ensure a majority. However, the non-dynastic parties made progress, especially the PSOE, which obtained a resounding triumph in Madrid where it won seven seats. In the end, however, the government was unable to carry out its plans for reform and accountability because on September 13, 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera, Captain General of Catalonia, led a coup d'état in Barcelona that ended the liberal regime of the Restoration. King Alfonso XIII did not oppose the coup. The Cortes had planned to debate the report of the Commission of Responsibilities on the "Disaster of Annual" on October 2, but the coup prevented it.
On March 14, 1922 General Primo de Rivera was appointed by the new government of the conservative José Sánchez Guerra captain general of Catalonia, a decision that was well received by the Catalan bourgeoisie due to the fame that preceded him as a defender of "order". As Primo de Rivera himself later explained, it was during his posting as captain general of Valencia in 1920 that he was "terrified" by the radicalism of the working class ("of a revolutionary communist hue") and became aware of "the need to intervene in Spanish politics by procedures different from the usual ones". At that time Valencia was the second most conflictive Spanish city after Barcelona. "In the capital of the Turia, Primo applied a policy euphemistically called "mano dura" (iron fist). In practice, this meant having no qualms about faking the escape of detainees in order to murder them in cold blood", explained Alejandro Quiroga. In a letter he sent to the president of the government, Eduardo Dato justified his actions outside the law to achieve the "extirpation of terrorism and revolutionary syndicalism", since "ordinary justice and legislation" were "ineffective": "A raid, a transfer, an escape attempt and a few shots will begin to solve the problem".
One of the signs of his "policy of order" in Catalonia was the support he gave to the protests of the employers' organizations because of the decision of the government of José Sánchez Guerra to dismiss in October 1922 the civil governor of Barcelona, General Severiano Martínez Anido, and his deputy, General Arlegui (Superior Chief of Police), who had distinguished themselves for their benevolence towards the bosses' pistolerismo and for the application of brutal measures to try to put an end to the workers' conflicts and the anarcho-syndicalist violence that had been devastating Barcelona and its industrial area since the outbreak of the Canadian Strike of 1919. Primo de Rivera had met with Martínez Anido as soon as he arrived in Barcelona and together with him and Arlegui he had actively participated in the consolidation of "the para-police networks dedicated to the murder of anarchists" and in the promotion of the Free Unions, "this peculiar ultra-right-wing workerism that was subsidized by the Catalan businessmen", according to Alejandro Quiroga. Primo de Rivera declared that the dismissal of Martínez Anido had meant the loss of "a great collaborator".The perception of the Catalan employers' association Fomento del Trabajo Nacional that the dismissal of Martínez Anido and Arlegui had been a mistake was confirmed by the increase in anarchist pistolerismo which took place in the first months of 1923 —from a hundred attacks in 1922 to eight hundred from January to September 1923; and in Barcelona there were 34 dead and 76 wounded, most of them during the transport strike of May–June— and which was accompanied by a revitalization of workers' conflicts. Primo de Rivera was able to respond to these concerns with his defense of "law and order" in the face of the "weakness" of the new government of Manuel García Prieto, which had replaced that of Sánchez Guerra at the beginning of December 1922, which was "denounced" by the conservative press in Barcelona, including La Veu de Catalunya, the organ of Francesc Cambó's Lliga Regionalista.
Primo de Rivera's popularity among the Catalan upper and middle classes reached its zenith on the occasion of his intervention in defense of "law and order" during the general transport strike in Barcelona in May and June 1923, which Primo de Rivera described as "clearly revolutionary". There were murders of businessmen and esquiroles, perpetrated by anarchists, and of cenetistas, victims of the bosses' gunmen. The alignment of the Catalan bourgeoisie with Primo de Rivera against the civil governor Francisco Barber —they had previously achieved the dismissal of the previous civil governor Salvador Raventós— could be seen on June 6 during the funeral of the Somatén subcabo and member of the Libres José Franquesa, murdered a few hours earlier by the anarchists, when Primo was hailed as the savior of Catalonia while the civil governor was insulted and booed as "representative of the Only One". Later, recalling those events, Primo de Rivera wrote:
What to say of the state of mind of all, who alone had placed their trust in me, and urged me to do something, to proceed in whatever way I could, but in such a way as to free Catalonia from the hecatomb that threatened it so evidently?That June, Primo de Rivera, together with the civil governor of Barcelona, was called to Madrid by the president of the government García Prieto to warn him to stop undermining his policy in Catalonia. Primo de Rivera responded by demanding full powers for the declaration of a state of war to put an end to the transport strike, terrorism and "separatist" demonstrations. "In a gesture intended to be Solomonic, García Prieto thought of dismissing both representatives of state power [the civil governor and Primo de Rivera], but the king refused to sign the decree of dismissal of the captain general [but not that of Governor Barber]. Primo was welcomed in triumph upon his return to Barcelona [on June 23], and circumvented the Government's refusal to declare a state of war by ordering the closure of Solidaridad Obrera and the arrest of Ángel Pestaña and other moderate cenetista leaders", says Eduardo González Calleja. And in that way he put an end to the transport strike. According to Shlomo Ben-Ami, "the failure of Primo de Rivera's mission in Madrid meant that there was no way, except for its overthrow by force, to remove the constitutional government from its policy of class conciliation in Catalonia".
Together with the "policy of order" —which continued after his return from his trip to Madrid with a very harsh repression of the CNT trade unionists who, for their part, continued with the robberies and the planting of explosives— the other element which sealed Primo de Rivera's alliance with the Catalan bourgeoisie was the promise to protect their industry by raising tariffs on imports, precisely the opposite policy that was being applied by the government of García Prieto, which had negotiated with countries such as Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States to lower the tariffs that their products had to pay when they entered the Spanish market, with the aim of reducing domestic prices and favoring exports, especially agricultural exports. This policy had raised bitter protests from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Catalonia. Shortly after the coup, Primo de Rivera declared that the tariff reductions agreed by the García Prieto government had constituted a "criminal" decision.
At the beginning of 1923, the indignation of a large part of the Army towards the government of the liberal Manuel García Prieto was evident due to his "claudicating" policy in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. Criticism increased on January 27 when the Minister of State Santiago Alba announced that negotiations with Abd el-Krim for the release of the officers and soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Rifian rebels in the Annual disaster had been successfully completed. 326 soldiers —or 357, according to other sources—, who had been living in inhuman conditions for more than eighteen months, were to be released in exchange for the payment of four million pesetas, a significant amount of money for the time. From that moment on, Santiago Alba became the bête noire of a large part of the army.According to Julio Gil Pecharromán, "the release of the prisoners in exchange for money [was] received by many military men as a slap in the face, a proof of the liberal government's distrust of the operational capacity of the Armed Forces, especially when the left-wing press presented it as a sign of the failure of the "militarism and bureaucracy" that prevailed in the African Army". A manifesto began to circulate in the flag rooms calling for sanctions for those who violated the honor of the Army. On February 6, the captain general of Madrid, after holding a meeting with the generals and chiefs of the garrison, went to the Minister of War, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, to tell him that the Army was "depressed and humiliated by the tendentious campaigns that questioned [its] honor", although he told him that in spite of everything it would remain faithful to "the constituted Powers". That same day the captain general of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, gathered the generals of his demarcation and sent a long telegram to the minister in which he asked for punitive actions against the Rifians. For his part, the general commander of Melilla communicated to the minister that the chiefs and officers under his command, "with their souls embittered by the unjust attacks they had suffered, were contemplating the most reckless and perhaps illegal undertakings", if he did not take "energetic and immediate action, silencing the anti-Spanish and anti-patriotic press" and launching an operation against Al Hoceima. The government also received news that King Alfonso XIII sympathized with these protests. The response of Minister Alcala Zamora was to remind the military that the policy on Morocco was determined by the government, in a telegram sent to the captains general in which he ordered them to stop "any collective tendency or external acts that would cause serious damage to the interests of the country and the Army, which are identical and nothing can put them in conflict".
In this atmosphere, a conspiratorial nucleus formed by four generals emerged in Madrid, for which it received the name of the Quadrilateral. They were the generals José Cavalcanti, Federico Berenguer, Leopoldo Saro Marín and Antonio Dabán Vallejo. Their objective was to change government policy in Morocco by forming a civilian or military government which, with the support of the king, would appoint an "energetic" general to head the Protectorate. But they did not find much support among their comrades-in-arms who, although hostile to the government, were not willing to engage in a conspiracy to overthrow it.
According to Javier Moreno Luzón, around the same time, King Alfonso XIII "caressed the possibility of assuming all the power himself". The plan, which the king explained to several politicians, including the head of Government García Prieto, "consisted of waiting until May 11, when the Prince of Asturias would turn sixteen —the age for reigning as stipulated in the Constitution— and then calling a plebiscite that would give him special powers to govern without intermediaries. If that option was rejected by the Spaniards, he could abdicate to his son and preserve the throne". But the "plan" would never be carried out, although in June he commented to one of the ministers that he envisioned a military Cabinet, "free of the obstacles that for certain actions weigh on constitutional and parliamentary governments", and two months later to a British diplomat that "he knew how to stage a coup (strike a blow) that would not only surprise the socialists and revolutionaries, but also many other parties".
For their part, the generals of the Quadrilateral, not finding the support they expected, thought then that the only solution left to them was to convince a general of prestige in the Army to head the movement and the king to appoint him president of the government. The oldest and highest ranking general at the time was Valeriano Weyler, eighty-five years old, but the conspirators did not dare to sound him out because of his age and his known independence. The next in line was General Francisco Aguilera y Egea, president of the Supreme Council of War and Navy and senator for life, whom the Quadrilateral contacted, despite the fact that he had shown himself in favor of investigating the responsibilities of the generals and military chiefs for the Annual disaster. On June 5, the Captain General of Catalonia Miguel Primo de Rivera wrote him a letter in which he put himself at his disposal in "a saving and bloodless revolution" in order to "save Spain from anarchy, from the shamelessness of Africa and from separatism itself".
But Aguilera was ruled out after being slapped on July 5 in the Senate president's office by former Prime Minister José Sánchez Guerra, after he accused his party colleague, fellow conservative Joaquín Sánchez de Toca, of having lied about an alleged delay in the delivery of documentation about Dámaso Berenguer in order to request to the Senate to prosecute him —and having considered Sánchez de Toca's conduct of "wickedness very much in harmony with his depraved morals", typical of "men of his ilk"—. Because of this resounding slap in the face, Sánchez Guerra was "transformed from then until the end of the Dictatorship into the symbol of the dignity of civilian power", says González Calleja.
"Aguilera's discredit was immediate. The military, who trusted him to bring the politicians to heel, did not accept that he would allow himself to be slapped with impunity by them. Sanchez Guerra added the final blow, accusing Aguilera of being a coup leader, until the general, cornered, publicly disavowed any plan of military intervention in politics. The Quadrilateral was once again without a candidate...", says historian Gabriel Cardona. Historian Javier Tusell writes: "The event, almost like an operetta, left Aguilera in evidence and demonstrated his radical lack of ability, as he dedicated himself to verbally attacking politicians, without looking for supporters in the barracks, which was where he would have to forge a coup d'état". Francisco Alía Miranda agrees with Tusell: "Aguilera fell in disgrace as a result of his poor oratory skills, his political clumsiness and his rough and coarse character". Historian Shlomo Ben-Ami adds another factor for Aguilera to be discarded: "The cold relationship that was said to exist between the king and Aguilera did not exactly consolidate the general's position as a potential leader of the future coup". Apparently the king went so far as to congratulate Sánchez Guerra on the incident. "You have just rendered me the greatest service of your life," he told him.But the Quadrilateral soon found Aguilera's replacement: General Primo de Rivera, who at that time was in Madrid called by the Government to take him away from Catalonia where he was acquiring an "intolerable tutelage" over the civilians. In the capital Primo de Rivera wrote a text criticizing the government, but he did not use it because, according to historian Javier Tusell, "this would have broken a tradition that had been maintained throughout the Restoration: the Army always put pressure on certain matters, but did not assume direct political control". During his stay in Madrid, Primo de Rivera came into personal contact with General Aguilera —with whom he had maintained a "tense epistolary relationship" since the end of May— but their relationship did not progress because the latter reproached Primo de Rivera for his identification with the bosses in the Catalan labor conflicts. He also met with the king, to whom he expressed his concern about the political situation in the country (there was even speculation about his appointment as head of Alfonso XIII's Military Household). Of much greater importance was the interview he had with the generals of the Quadrilateral, who saw in Primo de Rivera the substitute for the discredited General Aguilera to lead the "coup de force" they advocated, and of which they would give "an account to His Majesty". However, the prosecution in early July of General Cavalcanti for his actions in Morocco was a serious setback for the plans of the conspirators, as well as the appointment of Manuel Portela Valladares as the new civil governor of Barcelona, who reestablished the authority of the civil power in the Catalan capital.The fact that the chosen one was Primo de Rivera is paradoxical, as Shlomo Ben-Ami has pointed out, because Primo de Rivera had repeatedly expressed an "abandonista" position with respect to Morocco. Primo de Rivera resolved the paradox, according to Ben-Ami, thanks to "his ability to pour water on the wine of his abandonist position, once he decided to conspire, just as he did with his centralist spirit, when he sealed his alliance with Catalan autonomism... On the question of responsibilities, however, he did not need to pretend. He was as determined as the others to put an end to the vindictive campaign against his comrades-in-arms, the members of what he himself used to call the caste".
The signs of the "restlessness" of the "military family" continued. At the beginning of August, a group of generals, including Primo de Rivera, met at the Casino Militar in Madrid, to protest against the inactivity of the government in the Protectorate of Morocco and to support the offensive plan of General Severiano Martínez Anido, then commander general of Melilla. Those gathered warned the government that "the army would no longer tolerate being a toy in the hands of opportunistic politicians". "If some Africanists, among them the men of the Quadrilateral, had harbored some reservations about Primo as leader of the uprising because of his past abandonment [of the Moroccan Protectorate], the "conversion" of the Marquis of Estella to colonial interventionism in August 1923 finally dispelled the doubts," Alejandro Quiroga pointed out.
An event at the end of August rekindled the coup plot and convinced Primo de Rivera that the time had come to act. Serious incidents occurred in Malaga when the troops refused to embark for the protectorate of Morocco. The main responsible for the mutiny, Corporal Barroso, was prosecuted but the government pardoned him, which was interpreted by many military men as a proof of the doubts the government had about the future of Morocco, and for which it made the Minister of State Santiago Alba the most responsible.
According to historian Shlomo Ben-Ami, "Primo de Rivera would later say that his patriotic decision [to take power] was stimulated by the Malaga mutiny. "Barroso's acquittal made me understand the dimensions of the horrible abyss into which Spain had been thrown". The military did not see in the Malaga mutiny a simple act of insubordination, but a reflection of the collapse of the law as a deterrent and of a general atmosphere of "defeatism", cultivated by "unpatriotic separatists, communists and unionists". Thus, while the military courts were to punish the mutineers, "military justice" was also to act "against the others", i.e., the unpatriotic civilians. It was up to the army to educate the civilian community and imbue it with a "Spanish" system of values. [...] To further exasperate the military, fearful that the mutineers would "infect" other Army units, the newspaper ABC —whose hysterical campaign against the disintegration of the State helped to create the appropriate climate for the coup— published a photograph of Barroso fraternizing with two officers". Primo de Rivera "decided then to accelerate the conspiratorial activities".Between September 4 and 9 Primo de Rivera traveled to Madrid, where on the 7th he met again with the generals of the Quadrilateral, who recognized him as the head of the conspiracy —according to González Calleja, "General Saro informed the king that the Army was about to put an end to the existing state of affairs", and Don Alfonso left Madrid "cautiously on his way to his summer residence in San Sebastián"—. According to Javier Moreno Luzón, General Cavalcanti had communicated to the King at the end of August or at the beginning of September that "a military coup was necessary and a dictatorship was needed to prevent a catastrophe in Spain". Alfonso XIII only asked him to keep him informed.
During Primo de Rivera's stay in the capital, it became known that the Central General Staff of the Army, in accordance with the plan designed by Martínez Anido, had recommended to the government a landing in Al Hoceima, in the center of the Protectorate, to put an end to Abd-el-Krim's rebellion, which caused the resignation of three ministers who were opposed to the proposal. One of the politicians who replaced them was Manuel Portela Valladares, the civil governor of Barcelona, which would be a serious mistake, since Portela's transfer to Madrid facilitated the operations prior to the coup that was to have its epicenter in the Catalan capital. For their part, the military circles this time praised the government for "removing the obstacles" to the military plans and the newspaper El Ejército Español, which until then had not ceased to harass the government, welcomed the resignation of the ministers Miguel Villanueva, Joaquín Chapaprieta and Rafael Gasset Chinchilla, as a victory for "the higher interests of the country". The conservative newspaper ABC assessed the government crisis as a "depressing spectacle" which reflected the "political disorientation" characteristic of the system.
On his return from his trip to Madrid, which Shlomo Ben-Ami dates September 7, Primo de Rivera stopped in Zaragoza where he met with the military governor, General Sanjurjo, to finalize the details of the coup, to which Sanjurjo had already committed himself in a previous visit. As soon as he arrived in Barcelona he got the support of the generals with command in Catalonia, such as Barrera, López Ochoa and Mercader. However, outside his captaincy general, with the exception of Sanjurjo in Zaragoza and the generals of the Quadrilateral in Madrid, he did not get any other general to commit himself to the coup, although many agreed with the idea of establishing a military regime. On the other hand, Primo de Rivera informed the Spanish ambassadors in the main European capitals of his intentions. He also met with prominent members of the Catalan high bourgeoisie and with the president of the Commonwealth of Catalonia Josep Puig i Cadafalch to inform them of his insurrectionary plans.
Apparently the event that precipitated the coup, originally planned for September 15, were the incidents that took place in Barcelona during the commemoration of the Eleventh of September, provoked by radical Catalan nationalist youths who booed the Spanish flag and shouted "Death to Spain!" and "Long live the Rif Republic!", in support of the uprising of Abd el-Krim, in addition to uttering "Death to the oppressor State!" and "Death to the army!". Thirty people were injured and twenty-four Catalan nationalists were arrested.