La Guerra Civil y la represión franquista de la Cuenca Minera de Riotinto

Abstract

Since 1873, when the Riotinto mines passed from the Spanish State to the Rio Tinto Company Limited, the region where they were located became subject to a model of colonial rule that set it apart from the rest of the surrounding territories, both because of the socio-political consequences derived from this clrcumstance and because it was an unusual agglomeration of industrial workers in Andalusia between 1873 and 1936. Based on this premise, this PHD aims to investigate how the life of the Riotinto mining families was transformed by the uprising of July 18, 1936 and the subsequent civil war. To this end, it has been necessary to reconstruct the history of the Riotinto Mlning Basin from the pre-Franco period, paying special attention to the evolution of political and trade union organizations and emphasizing the relations between the workers and the RTCL durlng the Second Republic. In this sense, both the representative entities of the left and the right have been studied and an attempt has been made to explain some aspects of the political life of the region, such as cultural development and the consideration of women during the period studied. Later on, attention is focused on the attitudes of the miners towards the coup d'état, studying how they were organized before and alter the southern half of the province fell into the hands of the rebels and communication with the Republican State became impossible, which occurred on July 29, 1936. It also takes into account the different clashes between the militiamen and the rebels and describes how the region fell to finally tackle the process of implementation of the Franco state through the study of propaganda discourse, violent repression, phalangism and, of course, the forms of resistance of the miners to the historical rupture.