Jerez uprising
While the event itself was unexceptional amid the regional history of rebellions, the disproportionate repression following the uprising resulted in a series of protests and retaliatory bombings throughout the remainder of the decade.
The uprising consisted of 500 to 600 fieldworkers who marched into Jerez with their farm equipment and demands of prisoner release and economic relief.
By 1870, the revolts began to associate with the anarchist movement and the Spanish Chapter of the First International (FRE-AIT), but the causal connection between anarchism and rural rebellion is contested.
Three people were killed: a tax official and a wine salesman, who were mobbed for their bourgeois associations, and a Cuban army soldier, who was shot by mistake.
Some anarchist papers followed the official reports of the uprising as revolutionary violence, the type of spontaneous and inevitable reaction to debilitating regional poverty.
[2] Le Corsair of A Coruña justified the fieldworkers' rage as the result of farm owner exploitation and the impropriety of the 1882 Mano Negra affair.
The largest Spanish, non-Catalan anarchist newspaper, La Anarquía, doubted the uprising's revolutionary potential as either a political or social revolution based on its organization and location.
The hunger and deprivation that sparked the uprising, El Heraldo de Madrid wrote, would be better quelled through knowledge than violence.
[3] Madrid's republican La Justica acknowledged the "anarchists" as culpable but considered tribunal response an overreaction, both an "abominable crime" and a "political blunder", exacerbated by governmental and press pressure.
They referenced a cycle of violence in which the desperation contemporary society had caused the uprising and the choice to respond by killing workers would only further aggravate relations and prompt hatred.
[6] Anarchist Paulí Pallàs would later attempt to assassinate Catalonia Captain General Arsenio Martínez Campos for the latter's role in the Jerez uprising's repression and executions.
