Terror and Repression .. Violence in the Final Stages of Dictatorships

On the morning of September 27, 1975, Franco’s dictatorship carried out its last five executions—in fact, the last executions in Spanish history. In Madrid, three members of the National Anti-Fascist Revolutionary Front (FRAP) were shot: José Humberto Baena,

José Luis Sánchez Bravo, and Ramón García Sanz. In Burgos and Barcelona, ​​two members of ETA (the political-military wing) were executed: Ángel Otaegui Etxeberria and Juan Paredes Manotas (Czech). Four military tribunals had sentenced them to death for their involvement in the murders of armed police officers Lucio Rodríguez Martín and Ovidio Díaz López, and civil security guards Gregorio Posada Zorrón and Antonio Bós Rodríguez. Unlike his predecessor on other occasions, the government of President Carlos Arias Navarro upheld the sentences. This book analyzes the interplay between the two forms of political violence that indelibly marked the regime’s turbulent decline. On one hand, there was the terrorism of ETA, FRAB, GRAPO, and other groups, which resulted in the deaths of 68 people and injuries to hundreds more between 1968 and 1975. On the other hand, there was Franco’s repression,

culminating in the executions of 1974 and 1975. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, historians, legal scholars, and journalists examine various aspects of this dynamic: the historical context, the final crisis of the dictatorship, the activities of the anti-Franco opposition, the third international wave of terrorism, the legislative responses of the most affected European countries, France’s role as a haven for ETA, the attacks themselves, the strategies of action and repression, the state of emergency, legal proceedings, executions, the abandonment of victims of terrorism, the commemoration of some and the forgetting of others, and the reflection of all these events in cinema.