The anarchist IV Army Corps commander who saved Casado's Madrid coup from Communist counter-attack
'I was aghast at donning a military uniform, but I could see no other option. From here on my conduct will bear witness to my integrity.'
A Madrid bricklayer who led the CNT construction union and was jailed on the eve of the war, he was freed when the rising began and organized a column that crushed the revolt in Guadalajara and Cuenca. Rising to command the 14th Division and then the IV Army Corps, he routed the Italian CTV at the Battle of Guadalajara and became one of the Republic's most prominent anarchist commanders. In March 1939 he backed Casado's coup against the Negrín government's Communist dependence, and when Communist forces were closing in on Madrid, Mera's IV Corps reserves entered the city and crushed the resistance in three days, sealing the path by which the war would end.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1931Secretary of the Madrid CNT construction union
- 1936.07Organized a militia column, retook Guadalajara and Cuenca
- 1936.11–1937Commander of the 14th Division
- 1937–1939Commander of the IV Army Corps
- 1939.03Backed Casado's coup, crushed Communist resistance in Madrid
- 1939–1942Exile in Oran and Casablanca, extradited to Spain by Vichy regime
- 1946–1975Freed, re-exiled to France, worked as a bricklayer in Paris
Related historical events
Formation as a Madrid anarcho-syndicalist organizer
Cipriano Mera was born on 4 November 1897 in Tetuán de las Victorias, Madrid, the son of a bricklayer. At eleven he went to work at every kind of job instead of school, and at sixteen he entered construction work, enrolled by his father in the bricklayers' society "El Trabajo," affiliated with the UGT trade-union federation. Though he could read and write, he attended night classes for eight months around the age of twenty, and about 1920, disillusioned with UGT activity, he made contact with anarchist circles. After the assassination of Prime Minister Eduardo Dato on 8 March 1921 his involvement in the anarchist movement became total, and during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he belonged to an anarchist group operating inside the bricklayers' society, conspiring against the regime.
After the dictatorship fell he organized the construction branch of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Madrid and was its president in 1931. He took part in organizing the Confederal Defense Groups and in 1933 joined Buenaventura Durruti in forming the Zaragoza Revolutionary Committee. This brought his arrest and imprisonment in Burgos until May 1934. In the summer of 1936 he led the construction strike that paralyzed more than 100,000 workers in Madrid, and in early July he was jailed again together with other members of the construction strike committee. The organizational experience he accumulated between mass strikes and insurrectionary conspiracy became the foundation for his later command of militia columns and regular army units.