Valeriano Weyler

Captain General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, 1st Duke of Rubí, 1st Marquess of Tenerife (17 September 1838 – 20 October 1930) was a Spanish Army officer and colonial administrator who served as the Governor-General of the Philippines and the Governor-General of Cuba,^[2] and later as the Minister for War. He is infamous for the brutality with which he executed his assignment to suppress an 1897 rebellion in Cuba through a policy of mass-reconcentration, which is estimated to have killed between 170,000 and 400,000 Cubans, significantly influencing United States interests in declaring war on Spain.^[3]

Weyler was born in 1838 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. His distant paternal ancestors were originally Prussians and served in the Spanish army for several generations.^[4] He was educated in his place of birth and in Granada.^[5] Weyler decided to enter the Spanish army, being influenced by his father, a military doctor.

He graduated from the Infantry School of Toledo at the age of 16.^[5] At 20, Weyler had achieved the rank of lieutenant,^[5] and he was appointed the rank of captain in 1861.^[6] In 1863, he was transferred to Cuba, and his participation in the campaign of Santo Domingo earned him the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand.^[6] During the 1860s, he served as a Spanish attaché in Washington, D.C. during the American Civil War.^[7] During the Ten Years' War that was fought between 1868 and 1878, he served as a colonel^[6] under General Arsenio Martínez Campos, but he returned to Spain before the end of the war to fight against Carlists in the Third Carlist War in 1873.^[2] In 1878, he was made general.^[5]

From 1878 to 1883, Weyler served as Captain-General of Canary Islands. In 1888, Weyler was made Governor-General of the Philippines.^[2] Weyler granted the petitions of 20 young women of Malolos, Bulacan, to receive education and to have a night school. The women became known as the Women of Malolos. The original petition was denied by the parish priest of Malolos, who argued that women should always stay at home and take care of the family.

Weyler happened to visit Malolos afterward and granted the petition on account of the persistence the women displayed for their petition. José Rizal wrote a letter to the women, upon request by Marcelo H. del Pilar, praising their initiative and sensibility on their high hopes for women's education and progress. In 1895, he earned the Grand Cross of Maria Christina for his command of troops in the Philippines^[2] in which he fought an uprising of Tagalogs^[8] and conducted an offensive against the Moros in Mindanao.

On his return to Spain in 1892, he was appointed to command the 6th Army Corps in the Basque Provinces and Navarre, where he soon quelled agitations. He was then made captain-general at Barcelona, where he remained until January 1896. In Catalonia, with a state of siege, he made himself the terror of the anarchists and communists.^[4]

After Arsenio Martínez Campos proved unable to defeat the Cuban Liberation Army, the government of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo sent Weyler to Cuba to replace him in 1897. This decision met the approval of the Spanish public, who perceived Weyler as the right man to suppress the rebellion in Cuba. Weyler was made Governor-General of Cuba and was granted full powers to suppress the rebellion and restore Spanish rule alongside Cuba's sugar industry. Initially, he was frustrated by the same factors which had stymied his predecessors; while Spanish troops were trained in conventional warfare tactics and required substantial supplies to operate, their Cuban opponents engaged in hit-and-run tactics, lived off the land and blended in with the general population to avoid detection.^[4]

Weyler responded by implementing the reconcentration policy, which was intended to separate the rebels from the civilian Cuban populace by confining the latter to concentration camps guarded by Spanish troops. Under the policy, rural Cubans had eight days to relocate to concentration camps in fortified towns, and all who failed to do so were to be shot. The quality of the camps was abysmal, with the housing being in poor condition and the camp rations insufficient and of poor quality; disease also quickly spread through the camps. Perhaps it was his role as captain general and head of operations for the army in Cuba after the 1895 uprising that was most controversial, due to the black legend surrounding his actions, which is now beginning to be revisited by Professor Fernando Padilla of the University of Bristol. The so-called "reconcentration," which was neither an exclusive strategy of Spain nor was it Weyler who applied it for the first time, as it had already been used in the Ten Years' War, took place in two phases: the informal one and the one decreed by Weyler in February 1896. The first was initiated by the often cruel practices of the Mambí troops against the peasant population, most of whom supported Spanish sovereignty. This caused serious problems, especially in the cities where peasants who had no means of survival flocked. The phase decreed by Weyler involved the concentration of thousands of people in controlled areas that were not well prepared to care for the reconcentrados, which led to hardship and death among them. This terrible circumstance should be viewed in the context of the sanitary conditions in the area, which was the result of the complex management of a war with great shortages of means and resources, which affected the Spanish troops themselves and for which the various governments of the metropolis since the mid-19th century were also responsible. Comparing the Cuban reconcentration zones with the Nazi extermination camps is an exaggeration because the objectives were totally different. Equally exaggerated was the campaign against Weyler orchestrated by the United States, the government, and big media companies and, sadly, eagerly followed in Spain by Sagasta's Liberal Party in an attempt to remove Cánovas from power.

The reconcentration policy weakened the rebel position but resulted in the deaths of between 170,000 and 400,000 Cubans, was used by the US, the UK and other maritime powers in their Black Legend propaganda against Spain, particularly in the United States, where Weyler was labelled as "The Butcher" in a propagandistic objective.^[9] This wave of American anti-Spanish sentiment was used to legitimaze the United States declaration of war on Spain in 1898 and their expansionism in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Cánovas's government supported Weyler's tactics wholeheartedly, but the Liberal Party vigorously denounced them for their toll on the Cuban people.^[10][11] The term "reconcentration" is thought to have given rise to the term "concentration camp". Academic Andrea Pitzer considered Weyler's camps to be the world's first concentration camps.^[12] Weyler's strategy was successful only in completely alienating the Cuban populace from the Spanish as well as galvanizing international opinion against Spain. After Cánovas was assassinated on 8 August 1897 and a new Liberal Party government led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta took over, Weyler was recalled from Cuba and replaced by the more conciliatory Ramón Blanco, 1st Marquess of Peña Plata.^[13]

He served as Minister of War three separate times (1901–1902, 1905, 1906–1907)^[5] and as Chief of Staff of the Army in two separate terms (1916–1922, 1923–1925).

After his return to Spain, Weyler's reputation as a strong and ambitious soldier made him one of those who, in case of any constitutional disturbance, might be expected to play an important role, and his political position was nationally affected by this consideration; his appointment in 1900 as captain-general of Madrid resulted indeed in great success in the defense of the constitutional order. He was minister of war for a short time at the end of 1901, and again in 1905. At the end of October 1909, he was appointed captain-general at Barcelona, where the disturbances connected with the execution of Francisco Ferrer were quelled by him without bloodshed.^[4]

Valeriano Weyler, the Marquess of Tenerife, was made Duke of Rubí and Grandee of Spain by royal decree in 1920.^[14]

He was charged and imprisoned for opposing the military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s. He died in Madrid on 20 October 1930. He was buried the next day in a simple casket without a state ceremony, as he himself requested.

• Navarro García, L. (1998). "1898, la incierta victoria de Cuba". Anuario de Estudios Americanos. 55 (1). University of Sevilla: 165–187. doi:10.3989/aeamer.1998.v55.i1.370.