Wandering the lands of La Mancha. Notes about revolutionary violence in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Abstract

This article examines certain aspects of the revolutionary violence that developed in the republican rearguard during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). It contends that the uprising of July 1936 had a limited impact in the territory studied, that of the province of Ciudad Real, due to the loyalty of the forces of public order and the rapid mobilization of the left-wing workers’ organizations. The article assesses the number of victims of the revolutionary left —insofar as the available sources permit— in terms of the territorial distribution of the province (municipalities, counties, and other administrative areas). Also analyzed are the networks, contacts and coordinated strategies that permitted the killings to take place, as well as the social and political profiles of the victims. The central thesis is that this violence was not the result of unresolved structural problems, it was not spontaneous and defensive, and it was not the work of uncontrolled groups. On the contrary, the roots of this phenomenon lie in the politics, discourses, leadership, exclusionary practices and the confrontations that occurred immediately prior to the outbreak of the conflict. Finally, the article underlines the many similarities between the republican violence of the first few months of the Civil War with that deployed in the insurgent territory.