Name Gonzalo Aguilera | Died May 16, 1965 | |
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Lieutenant-Colonel Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro, 11th Conde de Alba de Yeltes (December 26, 1886, Madrid – May 15, 1965), was a Spanish aristocrat and military officer who served with the nationalist faction of the Spanish Army during the Spanish Civil War. He served as the press officer for General Francisco Franco and General Emilio Mola. He inherited the title of Conde de Alba de Yeltes (Count of Alba de Yeltes) in 1919.
Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro was born in Madrid on December 26, 1886, the son of Lieutenant Colonel Agustín Aguilera y Gamboa of the Spanish Cavalry, the thirteenth Conde de Alba de Yeltes. His mother, Mary Monro, was Scottish. He was educated in England, first at Wimbledon College and then at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit public school in Lancashire where his father had been a pupil.
It is alleged that Aguilera carried out many atrocities during the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of the war, according to his own account, Aguilera lined up the labourers on his estate and shot six of them as a lesson to the others.
As the press officer of the nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War, Aguilera worked with war correspondents covering the war, including Sefton Delmer and Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker.
As he got older, Aguilera seemed to suffer increasingly from mental instability. On Friday, 26 August 1964, he shot dead both his adult sons in the family mansion near Salamanca. He was subsequently incarcerated in an asylum in Salamanca, where he died the following year, having never stood trial for killing his sons.
