José Sanjurjo
(José Sanjurjo y Sacanell; Pamplona, 1872-Estoril, Portugal, 1936) Spanish military.Orphan of a Carlist colonel, he pursued a military career and received destinations in Cuba (1894-98) and Morocco (1898-1921).He ascended by war merits to the generalship in 1921, the year in which he was appointed military governor of Zaragoza.
José Sanjurjo
From there he supported the coup d'état of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923), with whose dictatorship he collaborated closely.As general commander of Melilla, he prepared the landing of Al Hoceima (1925), which ended the Abd-el-Krim insurrection, consolidated the Spanish protectorate in Morocco and provided the dictatorship with one of its greatest successes.His work at the head of the Moroccan army earned him promotions, decorations, a title of nobility (Marquis del Rif, in 1927) and an uncontested prestige among young Africanist officers.
When the Second Republic was proclaimed (1931), he accepted the post of director of the Civil Guard, from which he was dismissed for his excesses in the repression against labor movements such as Arnedo (Logroño) in 1932.He passed then to direct the Police Corps; But the right instrumentalized this change by presenting it as sectarian discrimination from the government of Manuel Azaña.
Of course, Sanjurjo did not sympathize with either the leftist orientation of the government or the democratic character of the republican regime, as he demonstrated by leading an attempted coup in Seville, which failed (1932); That attempt reaffirmed the reformist will of the republican authorities, deciding them to approve the Agrarian Reform Law and the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia shortly afterwards.
As for Sanjurjo, the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment; but he had barely begun to fulfill it when he was released from prison by the right-wing government that came out of the 1933 elections.He went into exile in Portugal (1934), where he was able to conspire against the Republic with total freedom.
Converted into a symbol for the reactionary military unhappy with the electoral victory of the left in 1936, he was recognized as leader by Emilio Mola, Francisco Franco and the other conspirators who prepared the uprising in July.He died in an aviation accident when he was preparing to travel to Burgos to assume the leadership of the State offered by the rebels.
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