Archaeology, anthropology and archival research have changed our way of understanding Franco’s repression. An clarifying knowledge with which we leave behind an endless trail of shadows, accusations and blame. Hidden between the end of the war and its consequences, she was silenced by fear, poverty and the official version. It was left out of the 25 years of peace and the reconciliation model of the Transition. Nothing, not a single mention in textbooks about that strange epidemic of sudden death that cut short our collective childhood. Forgetting, the passage of time and the need to know. Knowing, understanding, sharing through reading such terrible events from our past has kept alive the healing, narrative function of history. The appearance of a series of recent studies and research on the phenomenon of repression bears good faith to this.
The discovery of a body between 10 and 14 years old in the Víznar ravine (Granada) shows that children were also targets of massive violence. An eraser and a pencil; two bullet holes in a small skull, yet to be formed, yet to be identified. At least 30% of the victims of Franco’s repression during the war remain unregistered or missing. They are no longer simply “disappeared.” Most were tied up and executed from behind, without ever seeing the front, with a shot to the back of the head. Nothing to do with that idea of a firing squad, after a mock trial or court-martial, which has reached us in detail. The corpses, at first, were left as they were, finished on the ground, in the ditches or at the entrance to the towns. To set an example. The bad international image forced them to be buried, hidden in hundreds of mass graves.
Violence evolved, soon combined with other means, from the planning of the 1936 coup to the different phases of the Civil War. In order to ensure control of the rear, the rebellious military authorities agreed not to take prisoners among their lines, nor among their collaborators. An irregular conflict began, with the Civil Guard as the main actor, which lasted until 1952. Arnau Fernández Pasalodos skillfully documents and connects this episode with European history and the Second World War in Until its total extermination. The antipartisan war in Spain (Gutenberg Galaxy, 2024). Franco’s General Headquarters began this type of war, which was ensured, in the long postwar period, by General Alonso Vega. However, the direction and driving force of political repression were always urban in nature. The Political-Social Brigade was the fundamental preventive apparatus of the dictatorship against any form of opposition. In the last years of the regime, it expanded its scope of action towards all types of protests. The arrests multiplied, regardless of neighborhood or student origin, without any distinction between the working or middle classes. Its impact increased and diversified anti-Francoism. For decades, the Madrid headquarters of the General Directorate of Security in Puerta del Sol centralized this work, essential in the maintenance and internal cohesion of the dictatorship.
The discovery of a body between 10 and 14 years old in the Víznar ravine (Granada) shows that children were also targets of massive violence
Today it is still an impossible mission to consult his archive, although cracks are opening. Pablo Alcántara, in The DGS. Franco’s palace of terror (Espasa, 2024), analyzes its scope and long journey in the destruction of all dissidence, especially in its final stage. Its information and infiltration procedures, documented by Fernando Hernández Sánchez in false comrades (Crítica, 2024), were lethal in the successive falls and dismantling of all branches and clandestine organizations. A task to which men like Roberto Conesa, Billy el Niño’s teacher, or the agents Pavón and Gracián with whom Jorge Marco composes, dedicated themselves before the end of the war. The red alphabet (The Storm, 2024). A journey through the formation and specialization of the political police in the underworld since another dictatorship, that of Primo de Rivera.
The material cost of prolonging this war by all means further widened the division between victors and losers. An enormous social fracture, of massive and widespread scope, in which women barely appeared as companions. With political, union and cultural participation long before the war, they suffered particularly humiliating procedures as subjects who had to be marked, broken and converted. A reality very far removed from the regime’s propaganda, which also varied in its Falangist, traditionalist or national-Catholic version. In The shaved ones. Memory of Franco’s repression against women (Vizca, 2024), María Rosón, Lucas Platero, Ana Pol, Rocío Lanchares and Maite Garbayo show the marks that these policies left on the bodies and minds of women who suffered the harshest of collective punishments. Esther López Barceló claims her legacy in The art of invoking memory (Barlin Libros, 2024) opening portals in time that return us there, to the moment in which its most precious objects were created. Like the notebooks with which Manolita del Arco communicated in code with her fellow prisoners. A memory that she kept and transmitted to her son Miguel Martínez del Arco in Memory of the cold.
Spain was the European country that hosted the most war criminals since 1945. This is demonstrated by José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez, in Under the mantle of the Caudillo (Alianza, 2024), an essay with the figure of León Degrelle as a common thread. Protected throughout the dictatorship, he died well into democracy. A time in which there were several attempts to bring Franco’s crimes before a Criminal Court. In the late 1960s an attempt was made with a new type of international tribunal established to try war crimes committed in Vietnam. In Juger Franco? (La Decouverte, 2024), Sophie Baby addresses the crisis at the end of the Franco regime and the suspension of its criminal responsibilities. The debate about its consequences continues to this day and clouds the vision of our recent past. We are living a spectacular moment in historical research that contrasts with the reproduction, even greater, of the mission that José María Pemán established in his day for the Spanish intellectuality: to place, face to face, Good against Evil.
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo is a professor of Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid.
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