Boots on votes. Elections in Cuenca as a decanter of the leadership of the 1936 coup plot

Abstract

Between April 20 and May 3, 1936, the two weeks separating the date scheduled, and then aborted, for the military coup designed by the “Junta de Generales” and the second round of elections in Cuenca, the plot of the coup against the Government of the Republic was recomposed. The present article studies the process that led to the conversion of an electoral convocation of a province of the interior, with hardly any parliamentary transcendence, into an event that focused not only the national political focus but also the military one. Although it is a well-known historical episode, the novelty offered here lies in the approach, as it inserts it, on the one hand, into the debate on the alleged electoral fraud and, on the other hand, and more importantly, it gives it a dimension that goes beyond its sociological and political profiles. Their ballot boxes were hiding a decoy to redirect the blow against republican democracy. The boots mattered at that juncture more than the votes.