Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista


Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista was a nationalist and fascist movement in 1930s Spain, merged with the Falange Española into the Falange Española de las JONS in 1934.

History

JONS was founded on 10 October 1931 as the fusion of the group around La Conquista del Estado of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and the Juntas Castellanas de Actuación Hispánica of Onésimo Redondo. JONS was a small organization, primarily based amongst students in Madrid and workers and peasants in and around Valladolid. Its followers were called "jonsistas" and the leadership of JONS was the Central Executive Triumvirate.
In 1933, JONS experienced a period of expansion and it started publishing a theoretical journal, JONS. Amongst other things, it engaged in trade union work in Castile. In January 1933, Gutiérrez Palma set up a transport workers union in Valladolid. Later the same year, JONS founded the Agrarian Trade Union Federation. In six months it had set up 175 trade unions, which together claimed around 3,000 members. During that year, Onésimo Redondo returned from exile in Portugal and restarted the publication Libertad.
JONS also expanded throughout the country. The party had its main strongholds in Valencia, Granada, Valladolid and Santiago de Compostela. It also formed nuclei in Zaragoza, Bilbao, Salamanca and Barcelona. The party also started publishing Revolución in Zaragoza, Unidad in Galicia and Patria Sindicalista in Valencia.

Merger with Falange Española

At the national council of JONS, held clandestinely in Madrid on 12–13 February 1934, the organization formulated its intention to merge with the Falange Española of José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The merger formed the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, or FE-JONS.
During the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco forced a further merger with the very different traditional Carlists three years later to create FET y de las JONS, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, later known simply as the Movimiento Nacional, which became the only legal political party in Francoist Spain. The Movimiento was disbanded upon Spain's transition to democracy in the late 1970s.