Fall of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera

The fall of the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera took place on January 28, 1930, when General Miguel Primo de Rivera was forced to present his resignation to the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, which he accepted, giving way to the Dictablanda of Dámaso Berenguer. The end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship was the culmination of a process that began several months earlier.

Historian Genoveva García Queipo de Llano places the beginning of the crisis of the dictatorship in mid-1928, when several factors converged: the worsening of the dictator's diabetes, which shortly after leaving power would lead to his death; the failure of the dictatorship to establish a new regime; and the growing role of the opposition, which was joined by a sector of the Army that organized several armed conspiracies against the regime.^[1] Ángeles Barrio Alonso situates it a slightly earlier, at the end of 1927, when with the constitution of the National Consultative Assembly it became clear that Primo de Rivera, in spite of the fact that from the beginning he had presented his regime as "temporary", had no intention of returning to the situation prior to the coup d'état of September 1923.^[2]

For his part, Alejandro Quiroga delays the beginning of the crisis to January 1929 when the insurrection led by José Sánchez Guerra took place and, despite its failure, "managed to show the cracks in a regime with less support than it claimed". "Certainly, until the beginning of 1929 there was nothing to indicate that the primorriverist regime was in crisis", adds Alejandro Quiroga.^[3] Francisco Alía Miranda agrees with Quiroga: "Since the January 1929 uprising, things were never the same again for the dictatorship. Primo de Rivera himself would confess it after his resignation to the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación: "...they gave me the discouraging impression that the Army, that with so much correctness, loyalty and citizenship had been on the side of the dictatorship, was distancing itself from it".^[4]