A few days ago it was a century since the coup d’état by Miguel Primo de Rivera, then captain general of Catalonia and descendant of a long line of generals. The commemorative activity has not been very notable in the midst of the torrid heat and the endless investiture that should result from the elections held last July. It was during the night of September 12 to 13, 1923 when Primo de Rivera proclaimed a state of war in Barcelona and took the troops out into the streets. It was a somewhat strange blow, because outside of Catalonia and Aragon no general endorsed the coup. The poor president of the Government at that time, an intelligent politician named Manuel García Prieto, ran to see Alfonso XIII and proposed calling elections after dismissing and imprisoning the military commanders of the coup. The king told him no, wished him good night and a few hours later he called Primo de Rivera to form a government. Thus, all those involved – starting with the monarch – destroyed the Constitution of 1876 – the basis of the liberal, but not democratic, political system of the Restoration – without a sigh of regret. It must be recognized that to many thousands of Spaniards – soldiers, officials, businessmen, socialists, shopkeepers, intellectuals – the coup seemed like magnificent news.
It is a shame that all our commemorative efforts focus on pop or salsa concerts and not on stopping to spread the word about historical events or processes that are as interesting as they are forgotten. For the Canary Islands – as for all of Spain – the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, which began as a military directorate, undoubtedly was. It is certainly a period insufficiently investigated by researchers, but we have some interesting works, such as historian Antonio Juan Padrón Acosta’s graduate thesis The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. A solution to the island dispute, presented in 2017. In summary, the primoriverista regime – which failed when trying to institutionalize itself, despite trying seriously – was relevant on the islands for basically three factors: for ending the colonial wars in Moroccoto serve as a reorganization experience policy of the power bloc in the Canary Islands and, especially, because it was under Primo’s government that the provincial division between Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas Gran Canaria. On the other hand, the modernizing facet of the dictatorship – the growth of significant public investment and credits in transport infrastructure or heavy industry, for example – barely had an impact on the Canary Islands, which it presented at that time – and this was confirmed with certainty. irritation the dictator himself during his visit to Tenerife and Gran Canaria in 19828 – an economy strongly characterized by the presence of English capital, although already then declining, and since the financial crisis of 1929, non-existent.
The most interesting thing about Padrón Acosta’s interesting study is his hypothesis about the political and legal development of the provincial division. The Provincial Council of the Canary Islands was always a cage of crickets and a source of disputes between politicians from Tenerife and Gran Canaria: one of the public spaces that most and best projected the fury of the island dispute. The Gran Canaria authorities, already in the mid-twenties, refused to even pay their quota for the maintenance of the Provincial Council. Calvo Sotelo’s administrative reform in 1925 damaged the divisionist aspirations of the Gran Canarian people. Why did Primo de Rivera give in? Because he wanted his National Assembly – the parody of parliament that he tried to found – to be represented – not democratically, but organically – all the territories and Gran Canaria was left with a very minority representation in a single province. With two provinces and three representatives in the National Assembly each, everything was left in peace for the dictator. “It was the Primo dictatorship that established a new status quo in the Canary Islands,” says Padrón Acosta. And he did it because of the authoritarian institutional dreams of the regime more than because of demands or objections from Gran Canaria or Tenerife.
