On July 13, 1936, in Madrid, monarchist opposition leader José Calvo Sotelo was assassinated by Republican police officers in retaliation for the murder of a left-wing officer. Calvo Sotelo, a prominent conservative politician and vocal critic of the Republic, was taken from his home and shot without trial, his body dumped at a cemetery. The assassination, carried out with the complicity of government forces, became the immediate catalyst for the military uprising that began just four days later, as it convinced many officers that the Republic had no respect for the rule of law.

Calvo Sotelo's assassination was memorialized in numerous poems by right-wing writers, who framed his death as the martyrdom of a Christian soldier. The event also haunted left-wing poets, some of whom expressed unease about the extrajudicial killing even as they supported the Republic. The assassination sharpened the rhetorical extremes of Spanish poetry, with each side using verse to justify its violence and mourn its dead.