Casas Viejas incident

The anarchist movement spread across Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was based on the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin and propagated by Giuseppe Fanelli.

It quickly took a hold among the long-exploited agricultural workers in Andalusia, who joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) or the more radical Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) and had some limited success in improving wages and working conditions.

[3] When guards under the command of Captain Rojas arrived, they set the house on fire with the anarchists and their families still inside.

[4] Soldiers and police then arrested anyone in the village who possessed a gun, marched them to the smoking ashes of the cottage and their dead colleagues, and shot them in the back.

[3] The massacre led to national outrage and weakened the republican left government as the anarcho-syndicalists widely boycotted the 1933 elections.