Retaguardia roja

From a perspective focused on ordinary citizens, who are given a face and voice, Red Retaguardia investigates the underlying logic of the violence that was brutally deployed against political adversaries in the Republican zone during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). In contrast to the trends and the majority studies in use, which have tended to prioritize the history of cities and the urban population despite the overwhelmingly agrarian profile that society presented at that time, the gaze has focused here on the rural world, a scenario privileged to gauge the meaning and political scope of the conflicts and contradictions that swept through Spain in the 1930s. In the midst of a European context characterized by the radical regression of democratic values, the coup of July 18, 1936 and the ensuing war and revolution were the circumstances that framed those massacres, a kind of selective cleansing policy that responded to the objective initial control of the disputed territory and neutralize the rebels. But that violence, in addition to being directly mediated by the progress of the conflict and the reprisals inherent to it, also responded to the mobilizing myths and tensions of international politics of the moment, to ideological assumptions that bet on the dehumanization of the adversary and the experiences traumatic daughters of political combat contracted in previous years.