Everything about Indalecio Prieto totally explained
Indalecio Prieto Tuero (
April 30,
1883 -
February 11,
1962) was a
Spanish politician, one of the leading figures of the
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the years before and during the
Second Spanish Republic.
Biography
Born in
Oviedo in 1883, his father died when he was six years old; his mother moved him to
Bilbao in 1891. From a young age, he survived by selling magazines in the street; he eventually obtained work as a stenographer at the daily newspaper
La Voz de Vizcaya. This led to a position as a copy editor and later a journalist at rival daily
El Liberal; his career there eventually made him the director and proprietor .
In
1899 he joined the PSOE. As a journalist in the first decade of the 20th century, Prieto became a leading figure of
socialism in the
Basque Country.
Spain's neutrality in
World War I greatly benefited Spanish industry and commerce, but those benefits were not reflected in the workers' salaries. This led to a great deal of social unrest, culminating on
August 13,
1917 in a
revolutionary
general strike. Fear of a repetition of the then-recent
February Revolution in
Russia (the
October Revolution was still to come), the general strike was harshly put down by the military, and the members of the strike committee were arrested in
Madrid. Having been involved in the organization of the strike, Prieto fled to
France before he could be arrested; he didn't return until April 1918, by which time he'd been elected to the
Spanish Congress of Deputies.
Very critical of the actions of the government and army during the
Rif War or
War of Melilla (1919-1926;
see Abd el-Krim) he spoke out strongly in the Congress after the
Battle of Annual (1921), as well as on the more than probable, though unproven, responsibility of the king in the imprudent military actions of general
Fernández Silvestre in the
Melilla command zone.
Opposed to
Francisco Largo Caballero's line of partial collaboration with the dictatorship of
Miguel Primo de Rivera, he'd bitter confrontations with both of them.
In August 1930 he participated on his own behalf, despite the opposition of
Julián Besteiro, in the
Pact of San Sebastián, which included a broad coalition of republican parties that wished to do away with the Spanish monarchy. In this matter he'd the support of Largo's wing of the party, who believed that the fall of the monarchy was necessary in order that socialism could come to power.
When the
Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed on
April 14,
1931, he was named Finance Minister in the provisional government presided over by
Niceto Alcalá Zamora.
As Minister of Public Works in the 1931-1933 government of
Manuel Azaña, he continued and expanded the policy of
hydroelectric projects begun during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, as well as the ambitious plan of infrastructural improvements in Madrid, such as the new
Chamartín railway station and the tunnel under Madrid linking it to
Atocha Station; most of these works that wouldn't be completed until after the 1936-1939
Spanish Civil War.
Unlike Largo, he opposed the
general strike and the
failed armed rising of October 1934; nonetheless he again fled to France to escape possible prosecution. While, prior to the period of the Republic, Prieto had arguably maintained a "harder" line than Largo, from this time forward he'd be identified as a relative moderate, opposed to Largo's more revolutionary tendency.
At the beginning of the
Civil War in September
1936, after the fall of
Talavera de la Reina, in
Toledo province, Largo became head of the government and Prieto became Minister of Marine and Air.
After the
May 3–
8,
1937 events in
Barcelona when the
Communists and government forces tried to establish control over the
Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and the
anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), the government of Largo was supplanted by that of
Juan Negrín, with Prieto designated Minister of Defense, although, privately, he recognized that the war couldn't be won because the Republican side lacked support from the
democratic powers such as
France, the
United Kingdom, and the
United States . During his ministry maritime access for
Soviet material aid remained effectively cut off by the attacks of
Italian submarines and the French frontier remained closed.
After the defeat on the northern front in October 1937, he offered his resignation, which was rejected. He finally left the government after the March 1938 defeat on the
Aragón front, following an escalating dispute with the
Communists.
He refrained from active political life for the remainder of the war,
exiling himself to
Mexico. In 1945, toward the end of
World War II, he was one of those who attempted to form a republican government in exile, hoping to reach an accord with the
monarchist opposition to
Francisco Franco, ruler of Spain since the end of the Civil War, with at view to restoring Spanish democracy. The failure of this initiative led to his definitive retirement from active politics.
In Mexico, he wrote several books, among them:
Palabras al viento (
Words in the Wind,
1942),
Discursos en América (
Discourses in America,
1944) and at the end of his life,
Cartas a un escultor: pequeños detalles de grandes sucesos (
Letters to a sculptor: small details of great events 1962).
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