Ángel Pestaña

Ángel Pestaña

Ángel Pestaña Núñez (born February 14, 1886 in Ponferrada -Santo Tomás de las Ollas, † December 11, 1937 in Barcelona ) was a Spanish syndicalist , multiple secretary of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), founder of the Partido Sindicalista (PS) and Member of the Cortes Generales .

biography

youth

Ángel Pestaña grew up in very poor circumstances. His childhood was marked by the absence of his mother, who had left the family, and by frequent changes of residence due to the father's constant search for work. He had to work from a very young age. When he was 14 years old, his father died. From then on, he was solely responsible for his livelihood.

Pestaña was imprisoned for the first time for three months at the age of 15 after publicly demanding the eight-hour day . In the following years he worked in various places in northern Spain and southern France, among other things as a seasonal worker in viticulture, salesman and seamstress. Finally he moved to Algiers , where he learned the trade of watchmaker and was able to improve his social situation. There he wrote his first articles for the anarchist newspaper Tierra y Libertad . After the outbreak of World War I , he moved to Barcelona in the summer of 1914, where he became an active member of the CNT.

Activity within the anarcho-syndicalist movement

From then on, Ángel Pestaña played an important role in the Spanish labor movement . He continued to publish regularly in Tierra y Libertad and speak at conferences and union meetings.

In early 1915, Pestaña published an article about clashes between workers and the police in the village of Cenicero ( La Rioja ), during which a member of the Guardia Civil was killed. These events met with a great response from the public. To avoid his arrest, he fled to France. However, the French authorities ordered his deportation. He returned to Barcelona, ​​where he hid until an amnesty allowed him to return to public life.

Pestaña during a meeting with Álvaro Figueroa Torres .

In 1916, Pestaña was appointed Secretary of the CNT Regional Federation of Catalonia . He called a strike at a gathering of bricklayers and unskilled workers, whereupon he was arrested and spent three months in prison. After his release he was appointed head of the CNT newspaper Solidaridad Obrera . At the end of the year he was involved in organizing a 24-hour general strike . This was the first general strike that the CNT carried out together with the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). Subsequently, the delegation of the CNT, which included Pestaña and Salvador Seguí as well , tried to further develop the cooperation with the UGT. These efforts resulted in an agreement between the two trade union federations and in 1917 an open-ended general strike. During the preparations for this strike, the CNT delegation worked with various party and trade union leaders, such as Largo Caballero and Pablo Iglesias Posse .

In 1919 the CNT organized a general strike in Catalonia, which developed revolutionary dynamics and which was only finally ended after the government made far-reaching concessions. With this huelga de La Canadiense , the eight-hour day was implemented throughout Spain. In the wake of the subsequent wave of repression, Pestaña was arrested again in April 1919.

In December of the same year, the CNT decided on its provisional entry into the Third International at a congress in Madrid . Pestaña was appointed delegate of the CNT at the congress of this International, which took place in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1920 . On site he met various Bolshevik leaders, such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , Leon Trotsky and Grigory Evsejewitsch Zinoviev . During the congress, however, he found that the decisions had already been made in advance. After his return to Spain in December 1920, he wrote a very extensive and detailed report in which he expressed his criticism of Bolshevism and the October Revolution . This text contributed significantly to the fact that the CNT subsequently distanced itself from the Soviet Union and in 1922 joined the International Workers' Association .

Like Salvador Seguí, Pestaña spoke out within the CNT in the early 1920s against the use of a terrorist strategy that was propagated in response to the increasing number of attacks on CNT members. On August 15, 1922, he was seriously injured in an assassination attempt while attending a meeting in Manresa . The assassination was carried out by pistoleros financed by members of the political class and the economic elite. After Seguí was assassinated in March 1923, Pestaña was the leading figure in the CNT.

From the Primo de Rivera dictatorship to the Second Republic

Pestaña together with other prominent prisoners in the Modelo prison in Barcelona (1930)

During the military dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1931, the CNT was forced into illegality. Thousands of CNT members went into exile. Ángel Pestaña was imprisoned from 1924 to 1926. At the end of the 1920s, fundamental controversies arose between Pestaña, who was now Secretary General of the CNT, and Juan Peiró about strategic issues, including the possible legalization of the CNT under the conditions of the military dictatorship. Pestaña spoke out in favor of legalization, while Peiró and also Diego Abad de Santillán criticized this as a departure from the basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism . This conflict finally led in 1929 to Pestaña's temporary resignation from the CNT National Committee. After the fall of Primo de Rivera in 1930, in the transitional phase until the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, he was imprisoned again several times. In prison he met other well-known political prisoners, such as Lluís Companys and Ramón Franco .

Second republic and civil war

From 1930 Ángel Pestaña was again Secretary General of the CNT. In 1931, he and 29 other CNT activists signed the Manifesto of Thirty , in which both the Republican government and the insurrectionalist faction within the CNT around the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), whose spokesmen were Buenaventura Durruti and Juan García Oliver, were signed . The ensuing clashes led to the expulsion and resignations of unions that supported the manifesto. On May 1st of the same year he gave a speech in Zaragoza assuring that the CNT would defend the republic. Pestaña was deposed as general secretary in March 1932 in the wake of the increasing controversy over his person and expelled from the CNT at the end of the same year. Together with other former CNT members, such as Peiró and Juan López Sánchez , he founded a new trade union federation called Federación Sindicalista Libertaria (FSL), which appointed him its first general secretary.

In 1934 Pestaña left the FSL and founded the Partido Sindicalista (Dt .: Syndicalist Party). For the parliamentary elections in 1936, the PS joined the Frente Popular . He won two seats in the Cortes Generales. Pestaña won one of them in the province of Cádiz . When the Spanish Civil War broke out , he stayed in Barcelona, ​​where he was initially arrested by insurgent military, but was released after the military coup in Catalonia was suppressed in the course of a social revolution . When the CNT entered government in November 1936, he was offered a ministerial post on condition that the PS be dissolved. He refused.

Ángel Pestaña died on December 11, 1937 after a long illness. Shortly before, he had rejoined the CNT. Numerous leaders of the republic attended his funeral at the Cementiri de Montjuïc , such as Indalecio Prieto , Diego Martínez Barrio and Lluís Companys.

Works (selection)

• Setenta días en Rusia. Lo que yo vi. 1924.
• Setenta días en Rusia. Lo que yo pienso. 1929.
• Lo que aprendí en la vida. Zero, Algorta 1971, OCLC 803112608 .
• Terrorismo in Barcelona. Planeta, 1979, ISBN 84-320-0615-7 .

literature

• Walther L. Bernecker : Anarchism and Civil War. On the history of the social revolution in Spain 1936–1939 . Verlag Graswurzelrevolution , Nettersheim 2006. ISBN 3-939045-03-9 , p. 22.
• Miguel Ìñiguez: Esbozo de una Enciclopedia histórica del anarquismo español. FAL, Madrid 2001, ISBN 84-86864-45-3 , p. 479.

Web links

Commons : Ángel Pestaña  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• The "Manifesto of Thirty"