The anti-Franco Resistance by Bruno Rascao (21 images)

The anti-Franco resistance: a forgotten story

During the period of the civil war (1936-39), the dictator Francisco Franco announced that "the balance of the contest should not be made the liberal way, with monstrous and deadly amnesties which are rather a deception gesture than forgiveness." Two months before the end of the war, the regime passed the Law of Political Responsibilities, hoping to erase any legacy of the democratic period of the Second Republic, launched...
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The anti-Franco resistance: a forgotten story

During the period of the civil war (1936-39), the dictator Francisco Franco announced that "the balance of the contest should not be made the liberal way, with monstrous and deadly amnesties which are rather a deception gesture than forgiveness." Two months before the end of the war, the regime passed the Law of Political Responsibilities, hoping to erase any legacy of the democratic period of the Second Republic, launched on 14 April 1931.

In those early months of 1939, half a million of Spanish people crossed the Pyrenees into an unknown future, being held in refugee camps in France. In the interior of Spain the "moles" multiplied, people who protected themselves of repression by locking up at home and in all kinds of hiding places for years. In areas of mountains and forests, many other chose to "take the hills" to escape from the interrogations and corporal punishments as well as prison and executions or "walks" of the totalitarian Franco regime. These first "runaways" in the mountains of Spain would be the precursors of the future Spanish guerrilla groups that would be consolidated as armed and political structures after 1942. The anti-Franco guerrilla, or "maquis" - from the French word "maquisards" - the French Resistance fighters against the Nazis - disappeared as a widespread movement in 1952, although remaining some "pockets" until the '60s.
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