to the huídos, maquis, Republican leaders, and members of the radical left such as the labor movement; the subjugation reached deep into the social fabric of Spanish society. Franco’s ability to suppress the populace was greatly aided by the Western powers’ preoccupation with the advent of World War II, and later with the geopolitical divisions created by the Cold War, which forced Britain, France, and the United States to turn a blind eye toward Spain. It was not until the mid-1950s with the signing of the Pact of Madrid (1953), which channeled American military and economic assistance to Franco in exchange for the right to establish American naval and air bases on Spanish soil, that the West began to reconnect with Spain in an effort to deter the global spread of communism. Such disregard for the fate of Spain and its people under Franco allowed the authoritarian regime to impose harsh policies of political purification without a care for its international reputation.
As with the number of Civil War casualties, the number of Spaniards imprisoned by the Franco regime for political reasons remains intensely debated, with some estimates as high as 400,000 (Preston 1995: 230). The regime’s official numbers are dramatic enough: 270,000 in 1940 and 45,000 more by 1945 (Richards 1996: 158). This vast repression was facilitated by the 1939 Law of Political Responsibilities, a law that was applied retroactively and demanded “economic compensation not only from those who had actually opposed the regime in the Civil War, but also from anyone who had made the so-called ‘National Movement’—or the military rising—necessary” (Ruiz 2005: 5). Such a sweeping legal mandate made virtually everyone who had sympathized with the Republican government—including liberals, teachers, masons, intellectuals, regionalists, labor leaders, and urban workers—a target for prosecution by the Franco regime.
Life as Franco’s prisoner reveals the sinister nature of the Francoist repression. Many Republican prisoners were tortured by military psychiatrists determined to eradicate “the germ of anti-nation, a form of degeneracy that if not cleansed to the last trace would contaminate the healthy body of Spain” (Graham 2004a: 2). Other notable torturers were the nuns running the women’s prisons, the reported site of “episodes of extreme atrocity, of mental and physical abuse” (Faber 2007: 142). Homosexuals became a target of the state after 1954 with the enactment of the Vagrancy and Villainy Act, a law replaced in 1970 by the more repressive Social and Menace Rehabilitation Act, “a fiercely anti-homosexual text that reified the conceptualisation of homosexuality as an anti-social, dangerous activity” (Calvo 2005: 96–98). An untold number of homosexuals (mostly male), or invertidos (inverted) were imprisoned, tortured, and locked in mental institutions as a consequence of these laws.
For many of Franco’s prisoners, captivity turned into outright slavery. “Spain became an immense jail, in which the vanquished were put at the service of the victors,” observes historian José Luis Gutiérrez.12 Approximately 280,000 individuals convicted under the 1939 law were forced to work in the construction of their own jails (such as Carabanchel on the outskirts of Madrid) and concentration camps (such as Merinales in Andalusia) and massive public infrastructure projects (such as the Guadalquivir Canal, at the time the largest Spain had undertaken, built to provide irrigation to the region of Andalusia). Prisoners were also conscripted to work in the iron foundries of Bilbao and the mines of Asturias, and to erect monuments glorifying the authoritarian regime. According to historian Antonio Miguel Bernal, by 1941, approximately 10 percent of Spain’s male labor force were in jail.13 Many prisoners, grouped into twenty-four industries and 602 trades and professions, were parceled out to the private sector, especially to construction companies. Legitimizing this system of forced labor, from which the cash-strapped state benefited generously, was the Catholic notion of “expiation through suffering,” which allowed prisoners to redeem their political sins by offering their labor to the nation for free. “Redemption, when it was offered, could only come through labor,” remarked Franco in a December 31, 1938, speech (Richards 1996: 158).
Separating prisoners from their children was another common form of Francoist punishment. Auxilio Social (Social Aid), the largest social welfare agency in Franco’s Spain, is directly responsible for taking many prisoners’ children and placing them in state orphanages, where they were mistreated physically and mentally. According to one account (Faber 2007: 142), Auxilio Social officials separated some 30,000 children belonging to the “reds” based on the theory by military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nájera that “these children should be saved from the degenerative environment of their leftist parents.”14 This “totalitarian scheme,” according to one study (Cenarro 2008: 41–50), employed welfare programs to incorporate individuals into the state “not as social subjects entitled to social rights” but as “members of a hierarchically ordered state-controlled national community,” and was grounded in a “mix of eugenicist theories and Catholic ideologies whereby pro-republican attitudes were seen as the result of the lower classes’ polluted social and ideological background.”
The Basque Repression
Also targeted by the Francoist repression were those opposed to Franco’s myth of a culturally homogeneous Spain—key among them Basque nationalists. Until its very end, the Franco regime treated the Basque Country as occupied foreign territory or a colonial outpost. Underscoring this “occupation” were laws that applied exclusively to the Basque territory in an attempt to stamp out separatist sentiments. A case in point was the banning of the public use of Euskera, the Basque Country’s ancient language. The regime also banned public display of the Basque flag and the very intrusive, seemingly incomprehensible policy of forbidding parents to give their children Basque names. These policies resulted in thousands of Basques being arrested, tortured, or forced into exile during the years leading to the democratic transition. In doing so, the Franco dictatorship succeeded in creating an environment of societal resistance and resentment toward the old regime across the Basque territory unique in Spain.
By far the most important manifestation of Basque resistance to the regime was the emergence of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).15 Middle-class university students founded ETA in 1959, frustrated with the perceived passivity of mainstream Basque nationalists toward the Franco regime—such as those heading the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), the historic advocate of Basque nationalism. For ETA’s founders, the PNV was nothing short of “a collaborationist organization of Francoism” (Muro 2005: 579). ETA’s political orientations have varied over the years, but they have consistently adhered to the thinking of Sabino Arana, founder of Basque nationalism, who espoused the superiority of the Basque race and the need to prevent cultural contamination from Spain. Since embracing armed struggle in 1968, ETA has been a thorn in the side of the Spanish state.16 Its boldest act of terrorism was the 1973 assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s alter ego and designated political heir, which unleashed a wave of state oppression of the Basque region unlike that experienced by any other part of the country.
At the infamous Burgos trial of 1970, the Franco regime court-martialed and sentenced to death sixteen ETA members, including two women and two priests. Widespread international outrage, including opposition to the executions from the Vatican, a long-time supporter of the Franco regime, spared their lives. Decidedly less fortunate were the two ETA members and three communist leaders executed in September 1975, the last official act of state violence of the old regime, just as the democratic transition was appearing on the horizon. No fewer than thirteen countries withdrew their ambassadors from Madrid in protest against the killings. In March 1976, in one of the more notable acts of state violance during the democratic transition, the state police opened fire on a demonstration by Basque workers in the city of Vitoria, resulting in five deaths.
Less known, at least until quite recently, were the extrajudicial strategies the state used to suppress Basque nationalism and eradicate ETA. From the inception of ETA terrorism in the early 1960s through the mid-1980s, the state conducted a “dirty war” against suspected ETA members, which ended up killing many ordinary citizens on both sides of the French-Spanish border who got caught in the crossfire. The war’s architect was none other than Carrero Blanco, who believed that “only a specialized anti-terrorist force that would fight the terrorists with their own tactics could defeat the terrorists” (Encarnación 2007: 961). With that goal in mind, and well before his spectacular assassination by ETA in 1973, Carrero Blanco laid the groundwork for the creation in 1975 of Batallón Vasco Español