Rebel Military Justice as a Diffusing Element of Responsibilities During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

Abstract

As the latest research on the topic has pointed out, the brutal violence that followed the coup d'état of 1936 was not exercised by a large number of perpetrators. However, they managed to make the feeling of guilt emanating from the process perceived as a feeling to be shared by broad social groups. This paradox has had severe repercussions after the fall of the dictatorship, the most obvious being the lack of any transitional justice. This article will analyze eliminationist violence as an element of union that creates collective guilt and acts as a new pillar of Franco's political power. We will delve into the universe of terror by elaborating a prosopography of the elements that form it, explaining how they articulate it and relate to each other. To this end, we will focus on the functioning of the military judicial system, both in its role as a critical piece within the genocidal logic and in its facet of interpreting a legal dramaturgy that pursues specific interests. The military plaza of Pontevedra (Galicia) will be our case study, showing on the one hand how the lack of a war front did not imply the absence of violence and, on the other, how the rearguard acted as a laboratory for testing eliminationist practices that would later be exported to different territories of Spain as the war progresses.