Javier Rodrigo
Pamplona (EFE).- The coup general Emilio Mola died in June 1937 when the plane in which he was traveling to Burgos crashed and, thirty minutes after the news was released, the personal diaries he kept in his office at the headquarters of the Victory.
These real events are the starting point of the novel “El diario de Mola”, by the Navarrese writer Pello Guerra Viscarret (Pamplona, 1968), who narrates in his work the determination of the general’s widow, Consuelo Bascón, to find the diaries in that Navarra marked by the repression unleashed by the coup leaders in July 1936.
After the investigations that he has carried out for this novel, which mixes reality and fiction, Guerra affirms in an interview with EFE that “without a doubt” there are sufficient indications to suspect that the death of General Mola, who was the main person responsible for organizing the uprising military, it was not a simple accident.
Question: Are there substantiated doubts that Mola’s death was not due to an accident?
Answer: Without a doubt, we cannot prove it for sure, but there are a series of indications, several indications that Mola was the victim of a plot by his own comrades in arms and the disappearance of the diary would be one of the indications most notable or outstanding.
But the truth is that there are also other indications prior to Mola’s death that point in that direction.
Q: What exactly happened to your diaries?
A: The fact is that, on June 3, 1937, Mola left Vitoria in the direction of Burgos, that plane crashed.
When the general headquarters in Vitoria, where Commander Fernández Cordón is, is told what has happened, he makes a few last steps before leaving for the place where the accident occurred and, when he returns 30 minutes later, he goes to pick up the newspaper. and the diary has disappeared.
This fact is very striking because, if Mola is supposed to have been an accident, how is it possible that such a compromising document has disappeared in just 30 minutes?
Q: What was that Pamplona of 1937 like?
A: The Pamplona of 1937 was a coin with two sides, one in which there was the Army, the Carlists and the Falangists, who were the ones who totally controlled the situation, the ones who decided on life and death in the city, and then, on the other side, obviously there were those who suffered from this repression.
Pamplona was not a war front, but in 1936, when the coup broke out, there was a brutal repression. There are many executions in ditches, in mountains and in 1937 that circumstance no longer occurs, but there are still executions and, above all, there are many people who are languishing in prison.
Q: Do the echoes of those events still resonate in today’s Pamplona?
A: That post-war period is still being projected a bit in the present, without a doubt (…). It seems that a long time has passed, that this is already something related to the past, but these events continue to have a projection in the present, and there is more to keep in mind that Mola’s body was actually exhumed 7 years ago from where I was in the Monument of the Fallen.
Q: This is your eighth book and all of them are related to the history of Navarra. Is it time to go changing some official versions?
A: Yes, a little. If we talk about the Civil War, we should take a look at the version offered in textbooks. The conquest of Navarra is also another episode that has been resolved many times by saying that in 1512 Navarre was annexed by Castile, but the truth is that there were much more important events behind it, there was resistance from the Navarrese (…) I think Yes, it is important that that other version that has not had that gap is also known.