Mano Negra affair

The Black Hand (Spanish: La Mano Negra) was a presumed secret, anarchist organization based in the Andalusian region of Spain and best known as the perpetrators of murders, arson, and crop fires in the early 1880s.

[7][8] In early November 1882, a member of the Civil Guard in Western Andalusia sent the government a discovered copy of the "regulations" of a secret socialist organization: la Mano Negra, or "the Black Hand".

[13] The authenticity of the documents, which the Civil Guard claimed to have found under a rock,[11] and its proof of the Black Hand's existence has been the subject of multiple historians.

[14] Josep Termes wrote that the Black Hand was a police fabrication and that the Civil Guard's found documents were from the older Núcleo Popular collection.

[11] Historian Clara Lida wrote that the underground documents' characteristics resembled those of the prior era and that the name "Black Hand" would inconspicuously fit alongside those of other European, clandestine groups in the anarchist and revolutionary tradition.

The act of resurfacing documents from years ago to make dormant threats appear contemporary, Lida wrote, was a duplicitous manipulation of the sensationalist press to steer public opinion against the organized day laborers.

Two months later, on February 4, a young peasant named Bartolomé Gago, better known as "El Blanco de Benaocaz" was found interred in an open field on the outskirts of San José del Valle, near Jerez.

[21] The government, shopowners, and press—with the newspaper El Liberal as an exception[22]—associated the Black Hand with the Federación de Trabajadores (FTRE)[14] for two purposes, according to historian Clara Lida: to halt the International's growing influence in the country, and more locally, to forestall farm workers from organizing and striking against the coming harvest.

[23] The FTRE's Federal Committee denied any connection to the Black Hand and repeated its denouncement of violence through propaganda and any solidarity with such criminal groups.

[24] The anarchist Peter Kropotkin's newspaper, Le Révolté, based in Geneva, sympathized with the workers attributed as part of the Black Hand and criticized the FTRE's lack of solidarity with them.

Nine sentences were commuted to jail time and seven were executed by garrote[26] two months later in Jerez de la Frontera's Plaza del Mercado.

[35] Fallout from the Black Hand affair pressured the FTRE Federal Committee, based in Barcelona, to retreat from the Andalusian movement to avoid guilt by association.

Tuñón de Lara affirms that there was no single organization, but small, anarcho-communist crime syndicates between secular rebellion and delinquency were used to justify the repression would precipitate the death of the FTRE.

[39] Whether the Black Hand affair was a false flag fabrication or, more simply, an unfounded government attempt to quell the agricultural revolts was the subject of Republican politician and writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's 1905 sociological novel, La bodega.

[40] Historian and journalist Juan Madrid wrote that the governmental interest in associating anarchists with any crime capable of tarnishing their image has been a constant throughout the history of Spain and the world.

[41] The Mano Negra affair was the inspiration for a fictional South American guerrilla group in the comic series Condor written by the French writer Dominique Rousseau [fr].