ReachExtra
José Beneroso Santos’ book sheds light on the meetings held in Gibraltar by some of the military officers who rebelled against the Second Spanish Republic in July 1936.
“Truth is corrupted as much by silence as with lies.” This quotation from Cicero chosen by José Beneroso Santos in the introduction to his book “Franco in Gibraltar, March 1935” is very much an expression of intent.
As he explains on the front cover of the book, which is published by Imagenta, the reader can read in its pages the product of several years of intense and laborious investigation into the “background, development and consequences of a hushed-up conspiracy”.
The book which was officially launched on the 29th January at the “José Riquelme” municipal library in La Linea is divided into four parts. The first tells of the importance of Gibraltar in the 1930s as a top-tier strategic, political, military and economic enclave. The author analyses such figures as Pablo Larios and Juan March and there are interesting reflections of the “good and bad practices” of the Gibraltarian mercantile oligarchy of the period, as well as questions on the fuel business.
Part two deals directly with the events of October 1935 as a prelude to the Spanish Civil War.
The third part is entitled “The visits to Gibraltar in the months of March and April 1935: the design of a conspiracy” and develops the findings that justify the publication of this book: the trips made to Gibraltar in the months preceding the coup d’état against the Second Spanish Republic of politicians like Mártinez Barrio and Rico Avelló and military officers such as Sanjurjo and Francisco Franco the general who would lead a forty year dictatorship and order the traumatic act that was the closure of the frontier with Gibraltar.
In part four the author deals with the situation of “Gibraltar in times of war,” with special attention given to the evacuation of a good proportion of its population during World War II, as well as the rupture with Spain which had some time before decided against the return of the monarchy.
As Beneroso Santos acknowledges in his introduction, the idea for this book begun to develop in September 2008, when during one of his many visits to the Gibraltar Government Archives to carry out research into the early days of the Spanish Civil War in the district he stumbled on a “news item” that Franco had been in Gibraltar.
“Whilst going over back issues of the Gibraltar Chronicle which had published a Spanish language edition in the second half of July 1936 to inform of what was happening on the other side of the frontier, I found a short notice on page 3 of the edition of the 9th March 1936 which very briefly reported that the previous day Franco had been in Gibraltar….”
“I had not previously been aware of that and I later realised that this was not widely known to the public. Not even Franco’s best biographers or the specialists in this area of history mention this …and if anyone ever knew about it they clearly did not think it interesting or gave it the relevance that it deserved” he says.
From that moment on begun an investigation that first found support from the Institute of Studies of the Campo de Gibraltar, and which counted on the collaboration of the journalist Belén López Collado, with whom he published an article titled “The Spanish Civil War on the pages of the Gibraltar Chronicle- from the 21st to the 31st July 1936” in the Revista Lacy of San Roque in 2009.
Curiously that article and an exhibition held in Jimena in November 2010 during the Eleventh Conference of the History of the Campo de Gibraltar (recorded in the 41st edition of the Almoraima Review in 2014) seemed to stir some “unease” in the area.
“Nobody wanted to ask questions and neither did anyone provide any further information that they might have had. The media did not cover the story. In fact silence has been the only response all these years”, says the author.
Far from discouraging him, the wall of silence added to the conviction that he had in his hands a historic revelation full of enigmas to be solved and moved Beneroso Santos to delve further.
In 2016 his work earned recognition from professor Salustiano del Campo and the Academy of Moral & Political Sciences in Madrid and now at last the public has a book which provides important new information about the matter under investigation and which, whilst not intended to upset anybody simply serves “the desired and noble aim of knowing the truth”.
