ABSTRACT
The judicial area (partido) of Pozoblanco in the north of Córdoba province in rural southern Spain came under the heel of the Francoist army at the end of the war in late March 1939. With prosecutions in the military court system across Spain surging towards their peak at this point and with the occupation authorities in the Pozoblanco area wasting little time in rounding up opponents for prosecution, studying this region in detail offers a crucial worm’s eye view of the post-war Francoist repression around the country.2 It also affords an insight into the biting social and political confl icts on the ground which, as we have seen, poisoned personal relations and hardened attitudes to the extent that groups across Spain became prepared to collaborate with the central authorities in convicting many of their own despised neighbours. In this particular area, such loathing grew most of all out of the refusal of landholding groups to ease confl ict over the land issue. As a result opposing interest groups fl ooded into political organisations dedicated to fi ghting their corner and increasingly locked horns until people became prepared to put their own lives on the line or take the lives of others.
