Rafael Salazar Alonso

Rafael Salazar Alonso (27 December 1895 - 23 September 1936) was a Spanish lawyer, newspaper proprietor and politician who engaged in left-wing and right-wing politics.

He became editor of the newspaper El Sol and at different times owner or chief of several others, including Informaciones in Madrid and Almadén published in the municipality of that name.

During the trip to Villafranca de los Barrios, he met a new lover and confidante, Amparo Munilla, the wife of another rich landowner.

In the elections of November 1933, he laced criticisms of his popular socialist opponent in Badajoz - the writer, translator and art expert María Teresa Lea Nelken y Mansberger, known as Margarita Nelken - with sexual insults and allegedly organised the release of a local thug from jail to deliver beatings to her and another socialist candidate, lawyer Juan Simeón Vidarte y Franco Romero and another popular candidate, physician and anarchist Dr. Pedro Vallina.

He described a strike by Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) unions protesting at government's reversionary measures against agrarian reform as "revolutionary" and ordered its prohibition.

He declared the harvest as a national public service, strike plans made by the FNTT as revolutionary and imposed severe press censorship.

In June 1935, socialist diputado Pedro Rubio Heredia, a popular activist for the peasants of Badajoz, was shot dead in a restaurant by Regino Valencia, a political fixer who worked for Salazar Alonso.

Juan Simeón Vidarte, acting for the victim's family, caused a scene by saying Salazar Alonso should be wearing the convict's overalls, not lawyer's robes.

[10][11][8]: 32, 61, 65, 66, 70–77 [9] From the end of 1934, Salazar Alonso was involved in a gambling scandal with a rigged version of roulette game, which came to be called Straperlo or Estraperlo.

With the support of the right-wing coalition, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), he barely survived a vote after a debate in the Cortes (October 1934).

A humiliated Salazar Alonso walked out of the Cortes when, in a further debate about the bloody uprisings and their repression in Asturias and Catalonia, Ricardo Samper Ibáñez, former Presidente del Consejo de Ministros and Ministro de Estado (president of the council of ministers and minister of state) said that Salazar Alonso was to blame for the events.

He hid in the flat of an ex-lover, Irene Más, who was taking refuge with her family in the Palacio de Viana under the control of Melchor Rodriguez.

He was held in the Cárcel Modelo and was visited only by lawyers, Aurelio Núñez Morgado (the Chilean Ambassador) and daily by Munilla (who had earlier ignored threats to reveal his whereabouts, was detained for a week along with a baby son and a daughter and released on 14 August).

However, Mariano Gómez then spoke to Prieto explaining his fear that allowing him to live would lead to a revolt in which the remaining 100 or so prisoners would be killed.