He spent the night sitting beside General Gutiérrez Mellado. They didn’t say a single word to each other, but exchanged countless looks and cigarettes. In spite of being almost the same age and having shared the corridors of the Cortes for almost four years, they didn’t know each other well, they’d barely spoken except on chance or formal occasions, they barely had anything in common except for friendship with Adolfo Suárez: almost everything else divided them; most of all, history divided them. They both knew it: the difference is that Gutiérrez Mellado, who thought he knew it more specifically, never mentioned it (at least not in public), while Carrillo did so on several occasions. In an interview on his ninetieth birthday, the former Secretary General of the PCE recalled that during those hours of captivity, while listening to Gutiérrez Mellado’s bronchitic cough and seeing him sitting there elderly and exhausted, he thought more than once of the strange and ironic figure destiny was forcing them to compose. In 1936 this general was one of the leaders of the fifth column in Madrid, he thought. And I was the Public Order officer and my mission was to fight against the fifth column. At that moment we were mortal enemies and tonight here we are together, and we’re going to die side by side. Carrillo glimpsed the figure, but not its precise form, because the data he had was not precise: had it been he would have discovered that the figure was still more ironic and strange than he imagined.
The first part of the figure consists of the crucial point of his biography: on 6 November 1936, when the Civil War had barely started, Carrillo began to turn into the villain of Francoism and the hero of anti-Francoism. He’d just turned twenty and, like Gutiérrez Mellado except from the opposite trench, was anything but the champion of concord he’d turn into in later years (‘Concord? No!’ he wrote at the beginning of 1934 in El Socialista newspaper. ‘Class war! Mortal hatred of the criminal bourgeoisie!’). For several months he’d been head of the JSU, the unified Socialist and Communist youth wings, and that very day, as a result of his gradual ideological radicalization but also of his certainty that this was the best way to contribute to defending the Republic against Franco’s coup, he’d joined the Communist Party. The Republic, however, seemed about to be defeated. For several days Madrid had been in a panic, with the troops of the Army of Africa at its gates and the streets invaded by thousands of refugees who were fleeing Francoist terror in a mass exodus. Convinced that the fall of the capital was inevitable, the government of the Republic had escaped to Valencia and left the impossible defence of Madrid in the hands of General Miaja, who at ten o’clock that night called a meeting at the War Ministry to constitute the Defence Junta, the new government of the city in which all the parties supporting the fugitive government should be represented; the meeting went on until very late, and it was decided to entrust the position of Security Chief to the leader of the JSU: Santiago Carrillo. But after that general meeting an improvised restricted meeting was held, in the course of which the Communists and the anarchists organized an expeditious arrangement for the secondary problem posed during the first meeting; a secondary problem in the midst of the life-and-death emergency of the defence of Madrid, I mean: the prisons of the capital — Modelo, San Antón, Porlier and Ventas — were overflowing with about ten thousand prisoners; many of them were fascists or rebel officers who’d been offered the opportunity to join the Army of the Republic and had turned the offer down; Franco could take the city at any moment — in fact, there was fighting two hundred metres from the Modelo prison — and in that case the officers and fascists locked up there would go immediately to swell the ranks of the mutinous Army. We don’t know how long the meeting lasted; we do know that its participants resolved to divide the prisoners into three categories and apply the death penalty to the most dangerous ones: the fascists and rebel officers. Before dawn on that very morning the executions started at Paracuellos del Jarama, just over thirty kilometres from the capital, and during the three weeks that followed more than two thousand Francoist prisoners were executed without any trial whatsoever.
It was the biggest massacre perpetrated by the Republicans during the war. Did Carrillo participate in that improvised restricted meeting? Did he make the decision to carry out the slaughter or take part in the decision? Francoist propaganda, which made the Paracuellos executions into the epitome of Republican barbarism, always insisted he did: Carrillo, it claimed, was the person responsible for the slaughter, among other reasons because it would have been impossible to remove such a huge number of inmates from the prisons without counting on the Security Chief of the Office of Public Order; for his part, Carrillo always defended his innocence: he simply evacuated inmates from the prisons to avert the risk of them joining up with the Francoists, but his jurisdiction ended with the capital and the crimes occurred outside it and should be imputed to the groups of uncontrolled elements that prospered in the heat of the disorder of war reigning in Madrid and the surrounding area. Was the Francoist propaganda right? Is Carrillo right? The historians have argued over the matter ad nauseam; in my opinion, the investigations by Ian Gibson, Jorge M. Reverte and Ángel Viñas are those that get closest to the truth of events. There’s no doubt about the Communist and anarchist authorship of the murders and that they weren’t the work of uncontrollables; it’s certain that the inspiration came from the Communists, that Carrillo did not give the order to commit them, and that, as far as the documentary evidence shows, he was not directly implicated in them. According to Viñas, the order might have come from Alexander Orlov, Soviet NKVD agent in Spain, it might have been transmitted by Pedro Checa, strongman of the PCE, and executed by the Communist Segundo Serrano Poncela, Public Order delegate on the Public Order Council. The preceding does not exonerate Carrillo of all responsibility for the events: there is no record of his participation in the restricted meeting after the meeting of the Defence Junta in which the executions were planned — not decided: the decision was already made — but Serrano Poncela answered to him and, although it’s likely that the executions on the first days happened without Carrillo knowing, it’s very difficult to accept that those on the days that followed wouldn’t have reached his ears. Carrillo can be accused of not having intervened to stop them, of having looked the other way; he cannot be accused of having ordered or organized them. Not intervening to stop such an atrocity is unjustifiable, but maybe understandable if one makes an effort to imagine a young man just past adolescence, newly joined member of a militarized party whose decisions he was not in a position to argue with or contradict, recently arrived in a post the reins of power of which he had not yet completely mastered (although as he did so he put a stop to much of the arbitrary violence infesting Madrid) and especially overwhelmed by the chaos and the vast demands of the defence of a desperate city, where militiamen were falling like flies on the outskirts and the bombs and shelling were killing people every day (and which astonishingly resisted Franco’s siege for another two and a half years). Making the effort to imagine these things is not, I insist, trying to justify the deaths of more than two thousand people: it’s just not to fail completely to understand the real horror of war. Carrillo understood it and that’s why — and although probably in the Spain of the 1980s very few would dare to exonerate him of direct responsibility for the murders — he never denied his indirect responsibility for them. ‘I cannot say, if Paracuellos happened while I was in charge of Security,’ he declared in 1982, ‘that I am totally blameless for what happened.’