The murder of a prosecutor and three of his sons for accusing a PSOE leader

Attacks on the judiciary by Pedro Sánchez's government and his party, the PSOE, are nothing new.

José Calvo Sotelo: this was the socialist crime that caused the start of the Spanish Civil War
The facts omitted from the left's narrative of the Spanish Civil War

The intensity and baseness of those attacks are nothing new, either. In fact, that party has a very dark past regarding justice system officials. Let us recall that during the Spanish Civil War, within the Republican camp—in which the PSOE played a prominent role—more than 100 justice system officials were murdered by leftist militiamen.

The PSOE played a prominent role in one of those crimes. I am referring to the crime committed against a public prosecutor and his family in the summer of 1936—ninety years ago. Born in 1879 in Arechavaleta (Guipúzcoa), Marcelino Valentín Gamazo was a Catholic, a father of nine, and a highly respected jurist by the time the Second Republic was established in 1931. He served multiple terms as secretary of the Madrid Bar Association and as Dean of the State Attorneys. On November 16, 1935, the then-President of the Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, appointed him Attorney General—a testament to the confidence the Republic placed in him.

One of the matters he addressed as a prosecutor was the coup d'état perpetrated by the PSOE in October 1934, in response to the center-right's victory in the November 1933 general elections. Valentín Gamazo sought a 30-year prison sentence for the then-president of the PSOE, Francisco Largo Caballero—the coup's leader—charging him with the crime of rebellion. Largo Caballero had threatened a "civil war" if the right won the elections, a threat that materialized with that coup, during which the coup plotters murdered 33 priests and religious figures and 300 military personnel and members of law enforcement, and also destroyed 17 churches, 40 religious buildings, and dozens of other structures.

Despite the solid evidence against Largo Caballero, and following an intense pressure campaign by the Socialists against the Supreme Court (which raised fears of a new armed insurrection should the prosecutor's request regarding the leftist leader be granted), Largo Caballero was acquitted of all charges. The scandal was of such magnitude that Valentín Gamazo ended up resigning shortly thereafter.

Shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, when the situation in Spain was already highly tense—on July 13, PSOE gunmen had abducted and murdered right-wing deputy José Calvo Sotelo, a prominent opposition leader—Valentín Gamazo and his family moved to their home in the small village of Rubielos Altos, in Cuenca. The Socialists had not forgotten his prominent role in the prosecution of Largo Caballero during the trial regarding the 1934 coup. On August 5, 1936, PSOE militiamen arrived at the house and took away Valentín Gamazo and his three eldest sons: José Antonio (aged 21), Francisco Javier (aged 20), and Luis Gonzaga (aged 17).

The older children initially resisted, but their father ordered them to obey after their captors assured him they were being taken to Albacete to give a statement. It was a ruse. PSOE militiamen (ten or twelve of them) tormented and tortured Valentín Gamazo and his three eldest children for hours in an olive grove near a road. Finally, the next day, the socialists murdered the children (starting with the youngest), forcing their father to witness it, before finally murdering him as well, leaving the bodies abandoned in the olive grove. The bodies were recovered by the family when decomposition had already set in. The former prosecutor’s widow, Narcisa, identified the bodies, naming them one by one.

After the crime, the socialist militiamen boasted about it in a bar in El Picazo, specifically bragging about how they had to brutally savage one of the young men to finally kill him. Only one of the perpetrators of this crime was ultimately captured and executed for his actions. All the others went unpunished. Today, those criminals are counted among the great "democrats" whom the Spanish Left champions as the "good guys" of the Civil War. The PSOE has never condemned nor apologized for crimes like this one, and today, moreover, it is once again launching vile attacks against judicial officials who are merely doing their jobs. Given these precedents, what will happen next?

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Main image: Francisco Largo Caballero.