Unearthing Franco's Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain

The Faces of Terror: Violence during the Franco Dictatorship

The Faces of Terror Violence during the Franco Dictatorship Julián Casanova The war ended April 1, 1939.1 With it ended not only the class struggle and political contests but also the secular Republic and revolutionary atheism: these demons were exorcised from the body politic by Franco, who claimed divine protection for his victorious army. Spain would begin a new era, which would be marked by its purity, free from the “corruption” of political pluralism, liberalism , and foreign philosophies, not to mention the “Reds,” all of whom would be disarmed and captured. The new order, founded on the ruins of Republicanism, would completely eliminate all signs of the society that came before it. Secularism and the workers ’ movement would be eradicated through a process of terror, and a reign of order, soon to be called franquismo, would establish its hegemony. In the last days of the war the complete destruction of the vanquished was deemed an absolute priority. Especially in the last provinces conquered by Franco’s army, killings were rampant, and Franco’s soldiers enjoyed the free hand of impunity that had been granted to them by their leader from the very first days of the war in July 1936. Later, after the formal end of the fighting, a new period of mass executions, incarcerations, and torture began. In Catalu ña and the province of Valencia, the regions where many of the Republicans and leftists were able to escape to neighboring France, the executed numbered nearly four thousand and five thousand, respectively. In Albacete 1,026 men and women were executed by 90 military orders between April 1939 and 1953. In the city of Jaén the authorities registered 1,280 executions from the end of the war to 1950. There were 935 executions (or assassinations) in eighty-two of the municipalities of the western province of Badajoz by 1945. In the Cemetery of the East, known in Spanish as Cementerio del Este, in Madrid, there were 2,663 victims registered by that same year. The hand of vengeance was heavy in the zones occupied by Franco’s troops from the beginning of the war, as well as in the territories conquered in the course of the conflict. Nearly a thousand men and women were executed in the postwar period in the western, Republican part of Aragón. In Málaga there were 710 executions, and 1,100 in Granada. But this is only the number of people who appear in the registers; many more were taken for a paseo in which they were summarily executed. Such unrecorded “walks” with no return, which began in Granada and Aragón in the summer of 1936 and in Málaga in February 1937, put an end to thousands of people’s lives. Upon the rout of the Republican army in the summer of 1939, hundreds of prisoners were sent to impromptu concentration camps throughout Spain. In the last months of 1939 and in 1940, officials of the regime recorded the internment of more than 270,000 prisoners, a number that lowered continually over the next two years as a result of the many executions, as well as illnesses and malnutrition caused by the poor conditions of the camps. The complete or partial information that is available about thirty-three provinces indicates that there were more than 35,000 executions that can be accounted for in the postwar period. It is true that among the provinces appear the majority of those that remained Republican throughout almost the entire war, but reliable statistics about Vizcaya, Badajoz, Toledo, Santander, and Madrid are still needed. One should add to official numbers the hundreds of cases of violent deaths by summary execution , which reached their apogee in the summer of 1939. Also, according to official sources, 4,663 prisoners died of hunger and disease. The conclusion one reaches according to our current knowledge of the postwar period is clear: at least 50,000 men and women were executed in the decade following the war. And in addition to this number it is essential that one considers the deaths caused by the dismal conditions of the regime’s many camps and prisons.2 The Faces of Terror 91 THE MONOPOLY OF VIOLENCE The primary characteristic of the terror that was implemented at the conclusion of the war is that it was organized from the top down. In the wake of...