The news spread like wildfire in the Raval. Saturday March 10, 1923 in a convulsed Barcelona. At the corner of Cadena and San Rafael streets, some gunmen had just shot the union leader Salvador Seguí, who died with a sudden shot to the temple. Beside him, the trail of blood led to another future corpse, the wounded body of Francesc Comas, who died three days later at the Clinical Hospital. He was the penultimate victim of gunmen.
At that time, around 7:45 p.m., the journalist Domènec de Bellmunt was killing time in the newsroom of La Veu de Catalunya when he thought he heard shots in the distance. Perhaps he remembered the adage of another young journalist, Josep Pla, who said that the chronicles should be found in the open air, where the events occurred. No sooner said than done. He went out to the Rambla, ran 300 meters and found the scene of the crime scrambled and already collected, because the body had been transferred to the morgue.
Salvador Seguí’s funeral was secretly held a few days later. The forces of order, accustomed to violence since 1917, were more concerned with containing the indignation of the crowd at the funeral of Comas, called to be the substitute for the great fallen, one of those men obscured by chronic amnesia for History. In our country.
Born in Lleida in 1887, Seguí was one of those children of the first wave of migration to Barcelona, ??when many workers packed their bags to work at the Universal Exposition of 1888, the debut of the city’s cosmopolitan ambitions. Barcelona touched its heaven and, At the same time, he put on candy to live a little hell in the form of class struggle and terrorist attacks. The band called Propaganda for the Fact executed General Martínez Campos in September 1893, bombed the Liceo in November of the same year and the Corpus in June 1896, triggering a terrible wave of repression against “subversive elements”.
All these lessons must have had an impact on Seguí, a precocious child, a famous reader of books on the French Revolution and owner of an incomparable golden beak. At the age of 15, he must have sensed his destiny when he participated in the General Strike of 1902, a baptism of fire that little by little became a discourse, a system of ideas based on organization and dialogue.
Seguí was present at the founding of the CNT in the now-defunct Palace of Fine Arts, in 1910. The union was the measure that would counteract the summer riot of Tragic Week. If some bet on burning, others would focus on union work, much more practical to solve the pressing problems of the proletariat.
The Catalan industrial exceptionality made Barcelona a sensational revolutionary focus. The obstacles for the workers in struggle were numerous, from the collaboration of the incipient Catalanism with the conservative power to the meddling of Alejandro Lerroux, an a priori ally of the most disadvantaged since his populist demagogy. In reality, his role was rather that of a containment dam between those two enemy blocs of the established order.
Fortunes changed for the workers with the First World War. Catalonia became strong in Spanish neutrality. Many businessmen became rich without passing on their prosperity to the wage earners. The entry of the US into the conflict in 1917 opened a multiple crisis between the uprising of fifths, the parliamentary revolt and the August strike called in unison by the CNT and the UGT. Its balance, thousands of arrests and 71 deaths throughout Spain, made Seguí think of a Copernican turn for the worker movement, endorsed in January 1918 at the Regional Congress of the Confederation in Sants. Seguí, a wall painter, convinced his colleagues to join his colleagues in unique unions that would stand up to the employers.
The new strategy debuted in January 1919, at the La Canadiense electricity company, the one with the emblematic three chimneys of Paralelo, which had just laid off 10 employees. The CNT applied Seguí’s model of the single union and, after a month, Barcelona was in the dark. The strike lasted 44 days and ended with the achievement of the eight-hour day, the reinstatement of the dismissed workers, the recovery of the monthly payments and the release of the prisoners, except those pending trial.
It was a victory like no other, but many thought of Russia and wanted more. Seguí made them see reason at a rally in the Plaza de Las Arenas. It was better to accept the gain and prepare for tomorrow’s revolution. El Noi del Sucre, so called because of his fondness for eating coffee clods, calmed down his people despite their initial reluctance. Just for a few days.
Since 1917 gunmen had been normalized in the streets of Barcelona. The period, perhaps because it is so black, has been little studied. Until the pronouncement of Miguel Primo de Rivera in September 1923, more than 200 people died in an urban civil war between the workers of the CNT and those of the Free Union, a manipulative invention of the bosses.
This conflagration had the full support of the higher authorities, who promoted laws such as escape laws, perfect for freeing the inmates and then executing them by surprise, and they used German spies as hit men. I kept knowing that he was in the spotlight and that he was misunderstood by part of the left, poorly documented about his past, who reproached him for his friendships with progressives of that first third of the 20th century. Among others, with Francesc Layret, assassinated at the door of his house in November 1920, just when the soldier Severiano Martínez Anido had been appointed as Civil Governor of Barcelona to increase terror and death statistics.
Seguí was an anarchist of pure creed. For him, the key was to educate the proletarians in order to grow and appease the opponent with intellect, not with bullets. Perhaps he talked about it with Lluís Companys at the Tostadero in Plaça Universitat before walking towards his fateful fate, the epilogue of a fateful time, the prelude to a long night devoid of all hope.
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