On July 20, 1936, General José Sanjurjo, the nominal leader of the Nationalist military uprising, was killed in a plane crash in Estoril, Portugal, while attempting to fly to Burgos to assume command. Sanjurjo, a veteran of the Moroccan wars and a previous coup leader in 1932, had been the senior figure around whom the rebel generals had united. His death cleared the way for General Francisco Franco to emerge as the undisputed leader of the Nationalist faction, a role he would hold for nearly four decades.

Sanjurjo's death was initially mourned in right-wing poetry as the loss of a caudillo, but his memory was quickly eclipsed by the cult of Franco. The plane crash itself became a symbol of the contingency of history, a theme explored by some poets who reflected on how chance events shape political destiny. The succession crisis also highlighted the role of individual leadership in the civil war, a theme that would recur in the war's epic poetry.