Calle Rafael Salazar Alonso

The street recalls Rafael Salazar Alonso, a Madrid lawyer and journalist who became one of the most feared figures of the Second Republic. He began on the republican left and drifted rightward within Lerroux’s Radical Party. As Minister of the Interior in 1934 he ruled with a hard hand: he declared a state of war and broke the great farmworkers' strike of that summer. His career derailed with the estraperlo scandal, the rigged roulette wheel for which he took money and a gold watch. Arrested when the Civil War broke out, he was shot in the Cárcel Modelo in September 1936. The street belongs to the Hogar del Empleado development, subsidized housing from the 1950s in the Estrella neighborhood.