ABSTRACT
After the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the fascist dictator Francisco Franco institutionalized a regime of fear and repression that was maintained by the systematic use of violence. Francoist violence was aimed not only at physically eliminating any political opposition to the regime but also at cultivating a climate of fear to control society at large. The multiple and devastating forms of violence imposed on the defeated sectors of Spanish society ranged from their forced removal from jobs, homes, and loss of livelihoods, to exile, extrajudicial incarceration, kidnapping, clandestine adoptions of newborn babies, regime-sanctioned torture, and summary execution. Recent estimates put civilian deaths during and after the war at some 170,000, out of which 38,563 were the responsibility of Republican forces and 129,472 were victims of insurgent (Nationalist) violence.1 With respect to detentions and incarcerations, Javier Rodrigo estimates that between 367,000 and 500,000 prisoners were, at some time of another, imprisoned in one of the 180-190 Francoist concentration camps established throughout Spain. Some of these camps were of a provisional nature, although 104 of them were “of a more or less stable character” and were in operation for years after the war (2005, XXIV).2 Furthermore, it is estimated that more than 500,000 people were forced into exile after the war.3 The postwar regime also institutionalized the pervasive culture of a lower-grade, but no less pernicious, violence, whereby anyone related to the defeated Republican side of the war lived in perpetual fear of reprisal, suffering a relentless campaign of dehumanization and effective exclusion from social normality.4 Paul Preston has called this institutionalized practice of violence, especially the systematic extermination of the “enemy,” a “Spanish Holocaust,” whereas Ricard Belis and Montse Armengou have referred to it as a “Spanish genocide.”5
