Melilla 1936

Shortly after the general elections won by the Popular Front in February 1936, Joaquín María Palomo Calvente, an educated career judge as described by the legal teacher Joaquín Garrigues, arrives in Melilla full of illusions to take charge of his court of first instance and investigation, aware that the work of a judge, especially in those convulsive days, must always seek the conciliation of interests. Soon he plunges into a tense Melilla in which groups of soldiers and civilians led by Lieutenant Colonel Juan Seguí Almuzara find themselves immersed in the preparations for the military uprising that would eventually begin there on July 17, 1936. Polonio Calvente acts as a scrupulous guarantor of the legality in force, to its ultimate consequences, and his professional practice threatens to irritate those who are plotting an uprising against the regime of the 1931 Constitution. Through the personal adventures of Judge Polonio Calvente, the professor , academic and writer Luis María Cazorla describes with detailed historical rigor and careful style the tense and dramatic social, political and economic scenario of a Melilla in which the initial outbreak of the tragedy that cruelly scourged Spain from 1936 to 1939 took place, with effects that still persist today.