One afternoon last week telephone operators in Paris, Lisbon and Genoa kept telling people trying to get a line into Spain that the trunk lines to that country had all gone dead. They stayed dead for some 16 hours. Early next morning one short message came over the wire: ''There have been incidents. . . . The number of victims is not yet known." Something big was happening behind the silence and the heavily guarded Spanish frontiers. It was the climax to five months of Popular Front Government, of Socialist and Communist rioting, and of some 250 deaths by violence.
What set it off was the brutal murder early last week of the leader of the Spanish monarchists, able, eloquent Deputy José Calvo Sotelo, onetime Minister of Finance under the late Dictator Primo de Rivera. Calvo had just notified the Government that he planned to interpellate it next day on the riots. Assault Guardsmen called on Calvo with a warrant, took him off in their police car, dumped his body, shot, mangled and bashed, at Madrid's Municipal Cemetery (TIME, July 20).
Premier Santiago Casares Quiroga promptly suspended Parliament for eight days, and all the Monarchist Deputies swore never to return. Unwisely the Government refused to allow Calvo's body to lie in state anywhere, barred a mob of 30,000 Rightists from the cemetery where he was being buried. When the crowd gave the Fascist shout, "Up Spain!" Assault Guardsmen fired, killed five, wounded three. Forehanded, President Manuel Azaña ordered the Army and Civil Guards mobilized in quarters, ordered a roundup of Rightist leaders, jammed them into jails. Talkative Rightists had begun telling about a great Army revolt that was due any day and that was to have set up José Calvo Sotelo as President of Spain.
In this sultry, tense atmosphere, some Socialists last week leaned out of their headquarters windows in the North African garrison town of Melilla in Spanish Morocco and brashly booed a regiment of the famed Spanish Foreign Legion, marching home from drill. The Legionnaires broke ranks, threw the Socialists out their own windows. At this a huge revolt, carefully planned, erupted into plain view and silence descended on Spain.
General Francisco Franco Bahamonde deserted his post on the Canary Islands, hastened to Melilla, took charge of some 20,000 rebellious Legionnaires, regulars and Moorish native troops. Within a day the rebels controlled all Spanish Morocco, a 200-mile strip of coast across from Gibraltar. When they began broadcasting from the Ceuta radio station, pretending to be the Seville station, announcing the surrender of Madrid to the rebels, sympathetic Army garrisons throughout European Spain joined the revolt. They were defeated in Barcelona and Seville but seized the southern ports of Cádiz and Málaga for a landing by the Moroccan rebels, skirmished in Burgos, Pamplona, Valladolid and Zaragoza. Government planes soared over strongholds dropping, first bombs, then leaflets urging soldiers to rebel against their rebellious officers.