Eduardo González
Just over a month ago, on July 4, it was one hundred years since the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera's decision to declare a general amnesty for all those involved in the so-called “Picasso File”, the report that exposed the chain of errors that accelerated Spain's defeat in the disastrous colonial war in Morocco.
At the end of the 19th century, Morocco had become Spain’s last asset to feel like an international power after the loss of the colonial empire. French imperialist pressures, on the one hand, and pressures from the military, on the other, encouraged the two great dynastic parties (Liberal and Conservative) to get involved in North Africa and to claim for Spain its share of the cake in the distribution of Africa between the European powers, alleging alleged historical rights and the defense of the Canary Islands and their African enclaves.
As the author Rocío Velasco de Castro, from the University of Extremadura, points out, at the end of the 19th century Spanish troops already had to face the armed resistance of the local populations in the so-called Margallo War (1893-1894), named after General Juan García-Margallo y García, great-grandfather of former Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo, who died during a confrontation with the Riffian militias at the Cabrerizas Altas Fort, in Melilla.
Spain officially took control of the coastal regions of the Rif, under a Protectorate regime, thanks to the Franco-Spanish bilateral treaty of 1904 and, above all, to the Algeciras Conference of 1906 for the distribution of the areas of influence in Morocco (which was completed in 1912 with the creation of a third international administration around Tangier). Thanks to this, Spain had achieved international recognition of its possessions in Morocco, but could not get the support of the Riffian Kabyles, who began to direct their attacks, above all, towards Spanish mining facilities.
Under pressure from military and economic circles, very interested in the very lucrative iron mines in the Rif, Spain launched progressively, especially from 1906, on an adventure in Morocco with a poorly organized army (almost 20,000 officers and generals). for barely 80,000 soldiers) and poorly prepared and in whose ranks the group of “Africanist” soldiers had begun to grow, which would have so much weight in the Civil War of 1936-1939.
The Annual Disaster and the Picasso file
The war in Morocco experienced two especially hard moments, both with the seal of “disaster”: the Barranco del Lobo Disaster, in July 1909, with more than 150 dead Spanish soldiers (a few dates after the outbreak of revolts in Madrid and Barcelona , precisely against the forced mobilization of reservists to fight in Morocco), and the Annual Disaster, between July and August 1921, which caused between 8,000 and 13,000 deaths, hundreds wounded and more than five hundred captives at the hands of the Riffian militias of an old collaborator of the Spanish, Abd el-Krim, and that implied the complete disappearance of an 80 kilometer front and the almost total lack of protection of the General Command of Melilla.
After knowing the seriousness of the defeat -which generated in Spain a wave of indignation against the war that ended up deteriorating the Restoration regime-, the newly minister of War, Juan de la Cierva, ordered an investigation to clarify what happened and settle responsibilities. For this purpose, on August 4, 1921, an investigation commission was created, chaired by General Juan Picasso González. The commission’s file, the so-called “Picasso file”, determined among the causes of the disaster the abuses against the Riffian population, which generated strong hostility against the Spanish presence; the clumsiness, inefficiency and cowardice of some high military commanders, the bad relations between the highest authorities of the Protectorate, the equipment problems, the lack of training of the combatants, the embezzlement and the smuggling of arms with the enemy. The report (which contributed to the fall of the conservative government of Antonio Maura) was delivered in April 2022 to the Supreme Council of War and Navy and, after its approval, it was sent to the Parliament in July.
In addition, the Picasso file (again following the historian Rocío Velasco de Castro) also contributed to changing the perception of public opinion about the war in Morocco and caused widespread social indignation and a political scandal that directly affected King Alfonso XIII and the high commands of the Army of Africa. At that point, Spanish society was already highly polarized, not only between “deniers” and “responsibilityists”, but even between those who spread the blame to the Monarch and those who did not go as far as that and were merciless only with the political class.
Coup d’état and final point
In this context, the Parliament convened a meeting for October 2 in order to discuss the purification of political and military responsibilities. However, the debate was not possible. On September 13, 1923, the Captain General of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, carried out a coup, dissolved the Cortes and proclaimed the Dictatorship. Immediately after that, the Picasso file was returned to the Supreme War and Navy Council (a body with exclusively military powers), which issued its ruling and handed down a few light and few sentences. Light, scarce and without any effect, because, on July 4, 1924, Alfonso XIII signed an amnesty for those prosecuted or convicted of the Annual Disaster that allowed the final shelving of the entire process of purging responsibilities and putting an end to the Criticism of the Monarchy.
The main beneficiary of that amnesty was Dámaso Berenguer, who, in his capacity as High Commissioner of Spain in Morocco between January 1919 and July 1922, had been prosecuted for negligence and separated from service for his responsibility in the Annual Disaster. . Over time, and once duly “whitened”, Berenguer ended up becoming president of the Council of Ministers between 1930 and 1931, during the so-called “Dictablanda”.
On the other hand, the dictator Primo de Rivera (who, curiously, had been significant for his rejection of the war in Morocco, to the point of proposing in 1917, when he was Captain General of Cádiz, the abandonment of the Rif and the exchange of Ceuta for Gibraltar) decided, in October 1924, to personally assume command of the Army of Africa to put an end to the Rif revolt through a broad offensive that began at the end of 1924 and lasted throughout 1925.
To do this, he had the support of France, whose positions were also being threatened, to launch the famous Al Hoceima Landing on September 8, 1925, the first air-naval landing in history, in which more than 13,000 soldiers took part and which allowed put an end to the Riffian state of Abd el-Krim, as recorded by the historian Alfonso Iglesias Amorín, from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
Despite this defeat, the Riffian Kabyles continued to resist, which gave rise to a vast counterinsurgency operation (“pacification”, in the language of the Dictatorship) throughout 1927 that allowed them to occupy the entire territory of the Protectorate, disarm the Kabyles and submit them to the command of indigenous people controlled by the Spanish military. With this, Spain consolidated its dominance in Morocco until the uprisings that would put an end to the Franco-Spanish Protectorate and led to the country’s independence in 1956.
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