Her husband, Captain Virgilio Leret Ruiz, was executed after opposing the July 1936 military uprising in Melilla which led to the Civil War.
Carlota Alejandra Regina Micaela O'Neill y Lamo was born on 27 March 1905 in Madrid, the daughter of Enrique O'Neill Acosta, a Mexican diplomat of Irish descent, and Regina de Lamo y Jiménez (also known as Nora Avante), a Spanish writer, pianist, passionate defender of unionism and of cooperativism, and a collaborator of Lluís Companys.
As it appears on page 42 of the case file, by resolution of 26 August 1936, dictated by judge Luis Anel y Ladrón de Guevara, "at the proposal of the Purification Commission I have agreed to keep her detained by the government for now."
[citation needed] On 12 July 1940, the Court of Political Responsibilities of Melilla opened a new case for Carlota O'Neill (file 4017, Act of 9 February 1939), where they note that her predominant influence on her husband, Captain Leret, and the writings which she authored, contributed to fomenting the anarchic and disastrous situation that necessitated the initiation of the national movement.
On this basis, the court's decision disqualified her from holding public posts of the state, province, and municipality for five years, and imposed an economic penalty.
[5] This newspaper was promoted by the Catholic Propagandists Association and the collaborators were qualified as traitors by defenders of the Spanish Republic[6] After her release from prison, she moved to her sister's home in Barcelona, Enriqueta, mother of Lidia Falcón, who worked in the Francoist censorship.
[9] Years later, O'Neill's daughter would remember this aid as qualifying him as a "good person" despite having fought on the side that had assassinated her father, Virgilio Leret.
It has been translated into English, with the title Trapped in Spain (Dumont Press, Toronto, 1978), and Polish, as Spojrzenie zza kr (S. W. Czytelnik, Warsaw, 1968).
The president of the republic, Manuel Azaña, named Leret a professor at the Four Winds School of Mechanics and commissioned Hispano-Suiza Aviation to construct a prototype in September 1936.
[citation needed] Carlota kept alive the memory of her husband and spread his story, collected in her book Una mujer en la guerra de España.
[17] In 1940, she handed over the plans and the memoir of the invention to Commander James Dickson, United Kingdom air attache in Madrid, in the hope that Leret's work would be of help to the Allies in the Second World War.