Francisco Largo Cavallerio

Francisco Largo Caballero is portrayed as the Republican head of government whose authority is weakened by the factional conflict and clandestine politics within his own side. His tenure frames the transition to Juan Negrín’s government and the covert assignments that follow: Azcárate and Negrín distrust Largo Caballero, while Manuel Arroyo becomes the expendable link in their private channel.

Government and mistrust

Largo Caballero served as president of the government and minister of War. The narrative gives little direct access to him; instead, his position is defined by the distrust of two men who communicate behind his back. Pablo de Azcárate, the Republican ambassador in London, wanted to report directly to his friend Juan Negrín, then finance minister, and learn Negrín’s impressions through a channel outside official procedure. Their reason was stark: each trusted the other, and neither trusted their common superior. They considered Largo Caballero incapable in both of his offices.

That judgment turns a personal communication into a political risk. Manuel Arroyo, Azcárate’s envoy, made monthly trips to Valencia to carry messages between the ambassador and Negrín. If Largo Caballero discovered the arrangement, Azcárate warned, he and Negrín would disown Arroyo and claim that he had been conspiring on his own. The diplomatic superior and the minister could preserve themselves by sacrificing the intermediary. Arroyo accepted despite the explicit warning that failure could have serious consequences.

The Barcelona crisis and loss of office

The private channel took shape amid the aftermath of the May fighting in Barcelona. Trotskyists and anarchists had clashed by gunfire with the forces of the Generalitat and the Republican government; after six days of fighting, more than two hundred antifascists lay dead. The crisis precipitated Largo Caballero’s fall and Negrín’s rise to the premiership. Arroyo knew the public outline of these events while he was still in London, but had not been told that the leadership of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification had been arrested in reprisal or that its leader, Andreu Nin, had been missing since May 18, even from Republican civilian intelligence agencies.

Negrín’s new office did not end Arroyo’s role. On May 29, 1937, less than fifteen days after becoming prime minister, Negrín summoned him to the Palace of Benicarló in Valencia. Arroyo saw the physical cost of office in a man who seemed older and more exhausted than the forty-five-year-old minister he had recently known: Negrín slept too little, ate badly and irregularly, and appeared burdened by the responsibility he had undertaken. He discouraged congratulations and told Arroyo that he had summoned him because he trusted him, then prepared to ask him for something difficult.

The consequences of political distrust

Negrín’s request drew Arroyo into the disorder of the Republican rear. He described the Military Intelligence Service as compromised by rival forces: Russians exerted control, Communists looked the other way, Socialist colleagues obstructed one another, and anarchists and Trotskyists continued their revolution. Although the Madrid Defense Council had closed the city’s illegal detention centers, or checas, late the previous year, Negrín’s government believed that unregulated detention sites remained; when one was shut, another opened. This was the setting in which Arroyo was sent to Madrid under a fabricated identity, registered on June 28 as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a purported Interior Ministry official whose biographical details were all false.

Largo Caballero’s political significance in this account is therefore less a matter of personal characterization than of the system his government could not hold together. Distrust at the top produced an unofficial line of communication; the Barcelona violence and political arrests marked the breakdown of the old leadership; and Negrín’s succession transferred the danger to Arroyo, whose false papers made him both useful to the state and vulnerable to being disowned by it.