Word: cortes
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...Cortés had not only served on the Republican side but, even worse, had before the war been elected mayor of the Andalusian village of Mijas, running on the ticket of the moderate Socialist Workers party. When the army revolted against the republic, bloodletting took place in rural Mijas in retaliation. Recalling those events, Cortés says now: "I had no forces of order at my disposal. I was helpless to stop them. But they were not crimes by the people here. Others came from the outside...
Walled Up. When the war ended in 1939, the Republican units disintegrated. Thousands of ex-soldiers, fearful of the victors' vengeance, fled across the French border. Cortés found himself in Valencia, far from the safety of any international border. Besides, his wife Juliana and his infant daughter Maria were back in Mijas. Then Corts was, in a sense, paroled by the victorious Falangists: he was given a railway ticket and told to return to Mijas, there to report to an office that was judging local Republicans...
...Cortés made his way back to his village by night, circling through outlying fields until he was directly above Mijas, which clings to a clifflike promontory above the Mediterranean. He moved cautiously past his neighbors' shuttered houses and knocked softly at his father's door. Juliana and the baby were quickly sent for, but his wife was dismayed by Manuel's reluctant decision to follow orders and turn himself in. "Don't go," she said. "Don't even think about it. They'll kill...
...Cortés spent the next two years virtually walled up in his father's house-hidden in a hollow space of 3 ft. by 6 ft., originally intended as a cupboard. "Sometimes I would come out at night," he says, "but the house was often searched in those days." Then, in 1941, the landlord told the family that they must leave the house and find another. They managed to find one with a conveniently similar wall cupboard elsewhere in the town, and Cortés made the move by night, dressed in women's clothes, his head...
Warm Abrazos. There, Corts was hidden in an upper room, small, bare-containing only a bed, a chair, an electric heater, a radio and a single picture of Jesus Christ. Though the years stretched out in a monotony of sameness, there was always the fear of detection. With his father now dead, Cortés realized that each pack of cigarettes, each shirt his wife bought could give them away. Juliana became a peddler and would go down to Málaga to sell Mijas' hemp products and to buy miscellaneous goods and clothes for resale in Mijas...