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Cortes that the extreme right was manipulating the anarchists. He stated that those who occupied factories, assaulted town halls, uprooted railway tracks, cut telephone lines or attacked the forces of order would be treated as rebels. His response was to send in the army, apply the Law for the Defence of the Republic, suspend the anarchist press and deport the strike leaders from both Catalonia and Seville. Inevitably, CNT hostility against the Republic and the UGT intensified to a virtual war. 63
    There were other fatal incidents involving the Civil Guard throughout the months following Arnedo. As part of the 1 May 1932 celebrations at the village of Salvaleón in Badajoz, a meeting of FNTT members fromother towns and villages in the province was held at a nearby estate. After speeches by several prominent Socialists including the local parliamentary deputies Pedro Rubio Heredia and Nicolás de Pablo, a workers’ choir from the village of Barcarrota sang the ‘Internationale’ and the ‘Marseillaise’. The crowd dispersed, many to attend a dance held in Salvaleón. Afterwards, before returning to Barcarrota, the choir went to sing outside the home of the Socialist Mayor of Salvaleón, Juan Vázquez, known as ‘Tío Juan el de los pollos’ (Uncle John the Chicken Man). This late-night homage infuriated the local commander of the Civil Guard whose men opened fire, killing two men and a woman, as well as wounding several others. In justification of his action, the commander later claimed that a shot had been fired from the crowd. Arrests were made, including the deputy Nicolás de Pablo and Tío Juan, the Mayor of Salvaleón. Pedro Rubio would be murdered in June 1935, Nicolás de Pablo at the end of August 1936 and Juan Vázquez in October 1936 in Llerena. 64
    Sanjurjo was relieved of the command of the Civil Guard in January 1932 and appointed Director General of the Carabineros (frontier guards). He, and many others, assumed that he was being punished because of his stance after Castilblanco. 65 As a result, he was fêted by the extreme right. Eventually in August 1932, he led an abortive military coup. It was briefly successful only in Seville, where it was enthusiastically supported by the local right. During the so-called ‘Sanjurjada’ (the Sanjurjo business), the plotters arrested the most prominent Republicans in Seville, including the Mayor, José González Fernández de Labandera. When he had heard of the coup attempt on 10 August, Labandera had immediately gone to the town hall and ordered all the town councillors, heads of parties and unions to attend. He had already created a Committee of Public Salvation (Comité de Salvación Pública) when Major Eleuterio Sánchez Rubio Dávila arrived, sent by Sanjurjo to take over as Mayor. Labandera had refused and a perplexed Sánchez Rubio Dávila withdrew. He returned shortly afterwards with a unit of the Republican anti-riot police, the Assault Guards, and arrested Labandera who, as he was taken away, shouted, ‘Last decree of the Mayor, declaration of a general strike of all public services.’ The declaration of the strike virtually guaranteed the failure of the coup and saved his life, but the local right would take its revenge when the Civil War started. Labandera was shot on 10 August 1936.
    Among the civilian participants in the coup were many of those who had been involved in the Guardia Cívica responsible for the events in theParque de María Luisa in July 1931. There is no sign that they were deterred by their failure in 1932. Indeed, several of them, along with the officers involved, would be prominent in the events of the summer of 1936. 66 Sanjurjo was tried for treason on 25 August in the Military Section of the Supreme Court. The acting president of the court, Mariano Gómez González, had no choice but to issue the death sentence, but he recommended a pardon with the sentence reduced to expulsion from the army. 67 Plutarco Elías Calles, the