4- SPAIN TALKS Agrarian Reform

MR. MacLEOD: But the agrarian reform, was that confiscation of land? . . .

Many vehement negative shakes of the head. then

PROFESSOR SICHES explains: In 1931 at the beginning of the Republic the law provided land for peasants and they got some during those first years. But when the reactionaries came into power in 1933, they interpreted the law in such a way as to bankrupt the peasants, so that tens of thousands of them lost their lands again because they could not make the heavy payments and fulfill all the heavy conditions. After February 16, the new People's Front Government enabled the peasants to get lands back again. They interpreted laws in favor of peasants and not land- lords, putting on the landlords the burden of proof, regarding title and reasonableness of rent.*

LARA, former Minister of Justice: I want to add one thing. The People's Front attacked neither the church, the army nor the capitalists. It was more moderate than the Right Republicans in 1931 when the Republic began.

DR. WARD: What is the attitude of the Anarcho-Syndicalists to the People’s Front Government?

SICHES: The Anarchists are not raising the idea of getting their own program.

Their idea is the same as ours, to smash Fascism. They also have learned from our recent experience that we must act together.

Who Are the Fascists?

DR. WARD: Who organized the revolt against the People’s Front Government, which was legally elected last winter?

ALL, one after another: The army oflicers. . . . The big land owners. . . . The church. . . .

DOMINGO: But there is no common idea among the rebels: nothing unites them except their common hate of democracy.

LARA: And the wish of each class to preserve and expand its own privilege.

. *Ellen Wilkinson reports in The London Daily Herald, August 8, that in the prov- ince of Valencia, the land reform in the four years after 1932 gave only 17,000 acres to 1.360 peasants, but in the first two months of the People's Front Government, 3,000 peasants got 50,000 acres belonging to absentee landlords. who were told to present their claims to the Department of Agriculture in Madrid.