ABSTRACT
Since 2000, there have been numerous exhumations all over Spain whose aim has been to recover the corpses of those killed by right-wing violence during and after the Civil War and to expose the true nature of Francoist power and its lingering effects in the present (Ferrándiz 2009).1 My point in this chapter is that mass graves are just one part of the wider “deathworlds” (Mbembe 2003, 40) of the Franco regime. Francoist necropower was not limited to killing people and burying them in unmarked graves. A proper understanding of the death-worlds that emerged since July 1936 requires paying attention to the tactility of terror in all its dimensions. Space in its most material, tangible form (prisons, camps, police headquarters, and execution sites) was essential in producing and propagating the “atmosphere of terror” to which General Mola famously referred, which in turn shaped both the subjectivity of the vanquished and that of the victors. To describe the Francoist death-worlds, I find useful Goldhagen’s (2009) concepts of “eliminationism” and “eliminationist practices.” As with Mbembe’s necropower, eliminationism goes beyond mass killing and may include a plethora of physical, psychological, economic, and cultural punishments, such as death marches, systematic employment of torture, looting, rape, and ethnocide (including the destruction of collective memory) with the aim of eliminating a group, either physically or as a social collective. From this point of view, there is no doubt that General Franco’s dictatorship and the rebel faction during the Spanish Civil War engaged in an eliminationist campaign that only subsided by the late 1940s, when the enemy had been effectively neutralized.
