Police against Franco: "The government, to stay in power, doesn't hesitate to send us to kill."

BarcelonaThis year, the Spanish government celebrates fifty years of Spain's freedom. That is, half a century since the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Despite the fierce repression, there were always people who stood up to him.. Even within the police.

Franco's repression did not soften in the dictator's final years. There was also a lot of violence during the transition. Some demonstrations ended with deaths, beatings, and reprisals.Until the very end, Franco ordered executions, and torture was practiced in police stations. After the dictatorship, there was no purge of the police force, and even under democracy, police practices in traffic weren't particularly exemplary. However, within the police force, not everyone yearned for or felt nostalgia for the harshest years of the dictatorship: there were anti-Franco officers.

In March 1971, a leaflet signed by the Barcelona Armed Police Corps circulated, openly and forcefully criticizing the fascist government: "In recent months, our problems have increased. The service is exhausting: hours and hours at a time, without sleep and in the worst conditions. youth, who do not see us as guardians of order, but as the repressive force of a government that, in order to stay in power, does not hesitate to send us to murder, as in Granada and elsewhere. What authority do we represent, that orders us to violently repress the desire for freedom of our people, in the name of a law as many aslarge-scale scams and thefts, as Matesa, "Gibraltar Clothing...?"

The police officers who signed the handout stood by the workers because they considered their struggle "just and logical." "The exploitation of which the workers are victims is not just," it reads. "Let's not fool ourselves, the struggle will continue and go on. We must think about what our attitude will be when we confront the people, which means, nothing less, than confronting our families and friends." In the same statement, the police officers said they should not go to universities to repress students and that their bosses did not solve problems but rather the opposite: "transfer of the Mobile Flag from Valladolid, because they feared that the Barcelona staff would revolt." The signatories encouraged their colleagues to fight so that the police force did its job, which was to "represent" justice. This is not the only handout kept in the National Archives of Catalonia. There are more.

Obviously, they weren't the majority. "They were a minority and they had a very hard time," he says. the historian David Ballester, which recalls the case of a police officer who explained to him how Tejero's coup d'état of February 23, 1981, was experienced in some police stations, after elections had already taken place in Spain. According to Ballester, the police officer worked at a Madrid police station where several officers linked to the fascist Fuerza Nueva party were stationed. When he showed up at the station voluntarily—because he was not on duty—to confront the military commanded by Tejero, they told him: "No one called you, get out of here." A group of extremists from his station, armed with Z-45 submachine guns and shouting "Tejero, kill them," had gone toward Congress. Naturally, not to help the democrats, but quite the opposite. These fervent extremists had condemned the democratic police officer to death for his ideology.

During the dictatorship, there was the Superior Police Force, which included the Political-Social Brigade and the Armed Police, which had a military character. The dictatorship enacted various laws to facilitate police repression against the anti-Franco opposition and did not allow even the slightest attempt at union organization. With the arrival of the Transition, tensions within the police force intensified. On one side were officers who had been in the force for years and were retrained to use their experience (mainly infiltration and torture) to fight terrorism. On the other side were the younger officers, who began joining the force in the 1970s.

On October 28, 1976, several police officers were tried in Barcelona for mistreatment of various neighborhood leaders. Their colleagues prevented anyone from entering the courtroom. On November 5, police officers in Zaragoza published a manifesto in the newspaper The Country in which they disapproved of the attitude of the Barcelona police. Another turning point came on December 17, 1976, when a group of police officers demonstrated in front of the General Directorate of Security and the Ministry of the Interior in Madrid. The reaction of the commanders was overwhelming: dozens of police officers ended up in prison in Soria and in various police station cells where they were treated degradingly.

Democratic Jurists

When police officers were finally able to unionize, two unions emerged: the Professional Association of the Superior Police Corps and the Police Union (USP). The former was legalized in May 1978 and reached membership in 90% of the force's officers. It was very conservative. Antonio Plaza, chief of the local police in Cartagena and Murcia, and honorary commissioner of the National Police Corps, was one of the founders of the Union, which began its history with only 500 members. The USP was more progressive and explicitly committed to the values of democracy. The first public appearance of a USP member was before it was legalized, on September 2, 1977, in an office at the Workers' Commissions.

Antonio Plaza explained to Ballester that, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, power in the police force was still controlled by a hardline group: "An irreducible core nostalgic for Franco's regime, who found it difficult to accept new ideas and new times."

On September 26, 1975, another pamphlet from the armed police began circulating. They complained about a new decree law that "ostensibly" was created to defend the forces of public order, but in reality gave more force to a state of emergency that was being prolonged. This was Decree 10/1975 on the prevention of terrorism. "It eliminates the few constitutional guarantees we have. Furthermore, they directly involve us, in the public eye, turning us into agents of arbitrary and repressive measures that they use against sincere democrats in Spain. They even threaten us with Article 20," the pamphlet stated.

There weren't just minorities within the police force. There were also lawyers and military personnel who complained about the regime's conditions. In April 1972, a group of "democratic jurists" denounced a prison regime that they considered "illegal.": "The current penitentiary regime, regulated by the Decree of February 2, 1956 and by a multitude of ministerial orders and minor provisions of the General Directorate of Prisons that modify at their whim and illegally the Regulation"It is the culmination of a criminal persecution based on revenge and the elimination of the individual, which takes advantage of prison confinement to crush the inmates' personality and reduce them to defenseless beings devoid of rights and guarantees," he added. "The prison regime is based on the authoritarian and fascist approach of discipline maintained by a system of punishments and rewards."