Policing Practices as a Vehicle for Brutalization: The Case of Spain’s Civil Guard, 1934–1936

Abstract

This article offers a new explanation for why brutalization occurred in only some parts of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The presence of veterans hardened by war was not enough for a broader brutalization of society to take place; the presence of pre-existing institutions with experience repressing civilian populations was also necessary so that their methods could then be applied more broadly by those in favour of employing brutality in political contestation and warfare. This article examines the repression of the rebellion of October 1934 in the Asturias region and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War as examples of this chain of events. Spain’s militarized police force, the Civil Guard, had a long history of dealing harshly with those who challenged the liberal regimes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the suppression of the Asturias revolt, colonial officers were able to apply the Civil Guard’s pre-existing methods on a wider scale in their effort to cleanse Spanish society of radical elements. In the Civil War, they extended a similar pattern of repression across the entire country.