Dictators Kill Poets: On Federico García Lorca’s Last Days / Aaron Shulman. In: Lit Hub March 5, 2019

Before dawn on August 17th, 1936, a man dressed in white pajamas and a blazer stepped out of a car onto the dirt road connecting the towns of Víznar and Alfacar in the foothills outside Granada, Spain. He had thick, arching eyebrows, a widow’s peak sharpened by a tar-black receding hairline, and a slight gut that looked good on his 38-year-old frame.
It was a moonless night and he wasn’t alone under the dark tent of the Andalusian sky. He was escorted by five soldiers, along with three other prisoners: two anarchist bullfighters and a white-haired schoolteacher with a wooden leg. The headlights from the two cars that had delivered them here illuminated the group as they made their way over an embankment onto a nearby field dotted with olive trees. The soldiers carried Astra 900 semiautomatic pistols and German Mauser rifles. By now the four captives knew that they were going to die. The man in the pajamas was the poet Federico García Lorca. 
Exactly a month earlier, Francisco Franco and other Spanish generals had launched a coup d’état against Spain’s young, contentious democracy. A brave, ruthless career officer with an incongruously reedy voice and the grandiose custom of riding a white horse into battle, the 43-year-old Franco led forces in Spanish Morocco, where he commanded the colonial army of 40,000 Africanista soldiers, including the notoriously brutal Spanish Foreign Legion. Coordinated uprisings in military garrisons across the Spanish peninsula followed the next day, buoyed by the support of right-wing sympathizers, foot soldiers of fascist militia, and members of the Civil Guard—or national police corps—who aligned themselves with the rebellion. The uprising’s goal was to remove the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition that had won elections in February, and save their country from what they saw as the excesses of the Second Spanish Republic, the system of governance instituted in 1931 after the military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera was ousted and his ally King Alfonso XIII left the country.
In the five years since the Republic’s founding, leftist administrations had carried out a series of ambitious reforms aimed at transforming and modernizing Spain: legislation to increase rights for women, new agrarian laws to reduce the suffering of the landless poor, changes in the educational system to free it from the dominance of the Catholic Church, and restructuring of the armed forces to decrease the influence of the military. Such attacks on the traditional structures of Spanish society earned the reformists, as well as the Republic itself, a committed bloc of enemies, from loyal monarchists to conservative Catholics, from wealthy landowners to the Spanish fascist party, the Falange. Now these groups united under Franco and other generals. They hoped to take back Spain and return it to its former imperial greatness, which in many cases meant eliminating perceived foes, such as Lorca.  ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/dictators-kill-poets-on-federico-garcia-lorcas-last-days/


Excerpt from The Age of Disenchantments by Aaron Shulman. Copyright 2019 by Aaron Shulman. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.