Insurrection in Asturias
| Asturian miners' strike of 1934 | |||
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Location of Asturias within Spain
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| Date | 4 – 19 October 1934 | ||
| Location | Asturias, Spain | ||
| Caused by | Asturian miners strike | ||
| Resulted in | Strike suppressed | ||
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The Asturian miners' strike of 1934 was a major strike action, against the entry of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) into the Spanish government on October 6, which took place in Asturias in northern Spain, that developed into a revolutionary uprising. It was crushed by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish troops from Spanish Morocco.
Francisco Franco controlled the movement of the troops, aircraft, warships and armoured trains used in the crushing of the revolution. Visiting Oviedo after the rebellion had been put down he said; "this war is a frontier war and its fronts are socialism, communism and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism." Though the forces sent to the north by Franco consisted of the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Moroccan colonial troops known as Regulares, the right-wing press portrayed the Asturian rebels in xenophobic and anti-Semitic terms as the lackeys of a foreign Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.
Following the victory of the parties of the right in the general election of 1933, the new government, led by Alejandro Lerroux, met stiff resistance from the leftist parties. As a result, the anarchists and communists called a general strike. However the strike immediately exposed differences on the left between the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) linked Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), which organised the strike and the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), which was sceptical of the value of strike action as a political tactic. As a result, the strike failed in much of Spain. A "Catalan republic" lasted just ten hours, and despite an attempt at a general stoppage in Madrid, other strikes did not endure and Asturias was left to fight alone.
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Wikipedia