It was virtually impossible for any political aspirations to find legal expression outside the two great oligarchical parties. Liberal and Conservative governments followed one another with soporific regularity. When results were not faked in the Ministry of the Interior, they were fixed at the local level. The system of electoral falsification rested on the social power of local town bosses or caciques (a South American Indian word meaning ‘chief’). In the northern small-holding areas, the cacique was usually a money lender, one of the bigger landlords, a lawyer or even a priest, who held mortages on the small farms. In the areas of the great latifundio estates, New Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, the cacique was the landowner or his agent, the man who decided who worked and therefore who did not starve. Caciquismo ensured that the narrow interests represented by the system were never seriously threatened.
On occasion, over zealous local officials would produce majorities by more than 100 per cent of the electorate. It was not unknown for results to be published before the elections took place. As the century wore own, casual falsification became somewhat more difficult and, if the requisite number of peasant votes could not be mustered, the caciques were said sometimes to register as voters the dead in the local cemetery. In consequence, politics became an exclusive minuet danced out by a small privileged minority. The nature of politics in the period of caciquismo is illustrated by the celebrated story of the cacique of Motril in the province of Granada. When the coach with the election results arrived from the provincial capital, they were brought to him in the local Casino (club). Leafing through them, he pronounced to the expectant hangers-on the following words: ‘We the Liberals were convinced that we would win these elections. However, the will off God has decreed otherwise.’ A lengthy pause. ‘It appears that we the Conservatives have won the elections’. Excluded from organized politics, the hungry masses could choose only between apathy and violence. The inevitable outbreaks of protest by the unrepresented majority were dealt with by the forces of order, the Civil Guard and, at moments of greater tension, the army.

Paul Preston, A Concise History Of The Spanish Civil War, págs. 14, 15, publicado pela FontanaPress