“To Dance between the Bodies”: The Castilblanco and Arnedo Incidents as Case Studies in Political Violence and Policing in the Spanish Second Republic

Recent quantitative research has proven Spain's gendarmerie, the Civil Guard, to have been one of the most violent police forces in Europe during the Second Republic period, 1931-1936. This paper uses case studies to suggest one reason why the Civil Guard was so violent was the disconnect between systems of power at the local and national levels. In so doing, it aims to demonstrate the importance of studying how the interplay between local and national politics influenced policing in interwar Europe as a way to understand the causes of the political violence that contributed to the destabilization the continent complete democracies. At the local level in Spain, the rigid discipline and centralized organization of the Civil Guard created tension with townspeople accustomed to doing business through an informal clientalist system. Meanwhile, at the national level, the rapidly growing Socialist Party aimed to assert its own authority locally through propaganda attacking both the Civil Guard and the clientalist system. Such a move to assert Socialist power sparked a strike in the town of Castilblanco (Badajoz Province) in December 1931 that left four civilian guards and one protester dead. A week later, it was the civil guards who killed eleven during a protest in Arnedo (Logroño Province) to demand the rehiring of some Socialist workers fired for political reasons. Drawing on local archival records as well as the national press, this paper will examine, first, how local specific conditions caused the two events and, second, how then both Socialists and supporters of the Civil Guard sought to strengthened their own positions at the national level by using news of the events to scapegoat the other side. As a result, tensions between the Socialists and the Civil Guard heightened, culminating in vicious fighting between the two groups during the Socialist Insurrection of 1934.