ABSTRACT
On 19 January 1932, the miners of San Cornelio in Figols began a strike. They disarmed the local police and the conflict spread to other areas of the Alt Llobregat and Cardoner. Five days later the army entered the mines of Figols and put an end to the last embers of the uprising. On 8 January 1933, the Regional Defence Committee of Catalonia provoked an armed uprising which spread, without much success, to several towns in Valencia and Aragon. When the uprising had already been put down, the violence and revenge of the security forces were unleashed on Casas Viejas, a small town in the province of Cádiz. Eleven months later, on 8 December, the revolutionary movement reached unprecedented levels of intensity. Spreading through several of the counties of Aragon and La Rioja, it threatened the authorities of Zaragoza for several days. There were three attempted insurrections in two years, initiated by anarchist activists and with a degree of support amongst industrial and agricultural workers. If these are measured in terms of deaths then nothing happened in the first, the second went down in history as the ‘tragedy’ of Casas Viejas and the third left dozens dead in combat. They began for different reasons, developed differently and had different consequences. Nevertheless, they were identified by some of the leaders of the CNT as landmarks on the same path that lead, through insurrection, to libertarian communism.
