Abstract
This article analyzes Francoism through its prison system – from the mass incarcerations of the 1940s (deployed as an instrument of overt political repression) to the gaols of the 1960s developmentalist dictatorship, by which time the majority of prisoners were not activists but the ‘ballast’/‘excess’ of high-speed industrialization/urbanization undertaken without any welfare safety net. The article discusses how the dictatorship conceived of the different groups it incarcerated, how it tried to manage them by ‘divide and rule’ and to what purpose. It explores prisoners’ counterstrategies and the paradox of ‘the political’ in a Francoist prison system which never used the term, yet saw each and every inmate as posing a threat to the dictatorship's ideology of ‘social peace’ (i.e., societal stasis). The article charts a prison transition by the early 1970s, from totalitarian to emerging neoliberal model, the latter still designed to ‘contain’ but no longer to ‘sculpt’ its inmates. Notwithstanding this key change, the article highlights core continuities in the prison system across forty years of Francoism: militarized discipline, rule by secret decree, ‘divide and rule’ strategies, and institutionalized abuse that was endemic and structural.
Keywords
In the critical scholarly literature on prisons, it is axiomatic that a penal system, and the profile of its incarcerated population, define the political measure of a society, and thus provide a forensic shortcut to illuminate its workings. But the analytical challenge is scarcely lessened because neither political measure nor penal system is ever fixed, and at certain points can become rapidly mobile, as happened in Spain under Francoism. The present article starts from the premise that one effective way of bringing this process of change into focus is by evaluating how the ‘political’ qualifier was applied to – or denied – Franco’s prisoners.
As specialist historians, we have framed our article with an interdisciplinary intent to serve scholars working across the humanities/social sciences on prison systems in other geographies and times. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of the changing but always ideologically driven function of prisons under the long Franco dictatorship, indicating the perennially blurred boundary between state classifications of ‘political’ and ‘common’ prisoners. We then explore how in the context of increasing numbers of common prisoners across the 1960s, there occurred more visible moments of cooperation between them and political detainees in order to resist/mitigate abusive prison routines imposed on both (even though the authorities still sought to keep them separate inside the gaols). Such ‘moments’ were always fragmented and transient, but they had a cumulative effect, significantly through their transmission into common-prisoner lore/memory. We conclude with a discussion of the singular common-prisoner-led protest movement of the mid-1970s, COPEL, as the conscious inheritor of that lore. As historians, we would ideally have structured our article ‘bottom-up’, with the analysis emerging principally from micro-data on prisoners’ daily lives deriving from both state and non-state sources. But while, as our footnotes indicate, we have excavated relatively extensive and qualitatively varied material, including on always-more-difficult-to-document common prisoners, there is still not enough, as we later discuss, to sustain a bottom-up structure throughout. Instead, the article synthesizes micro- and macro-analysis based on prisoner testimony, judicial documentation and some institutional prison sources. Sources generated beyond Spain’s official prison record remain crucial to researchers (especially for common prisoners) because of the continuing state censorship of the post-1950 institutional record on Franco’s prisons.
Francoism's Penal Exceptionalism
By the mid-1970s, the dictatorship stood on the threshold of self-dissolving, under pressure from both international and national politico-economic environments. But even as negotiators from its reform-inclined wing inched towards accepting a limited amnesty for ‘prisoners of conscience’ (i.e., anti-Franco activists who had not engaged in violent direct action), there remained a shining absence of any discursive adjustment of Francoism's permanent position – that in its gaols there were not, and had never been, political detainees, only a single, undifferentiated category of ‘criminal’. 1 So, while giving ground strategically, Francoism kept in place – by omission – its founding legitimation from the 1940s. Such political sleight of hand was the hallmark of Spain's transition out of formal dictatorship. Concurrently, progressive political activists elsewhere, notably in France, were themselves saying that there was no such thing as a political prisoner. They argued that the concept was a red herring, of dubious utility either as an instrument for practical prison activism or as a means of furthering a theoretical understanding of what prison systems were, at that very moment, in the process of becoming across the West. 2 The distance between Franco and Foucault is evidently vast, and yet in the definitional conundrum which orbits the ‘political’, there is a significant commonality to be teased out, and one which goes to the heart of understanding what we can term totalizing state practices.
Francoism is best defined as a single phenomenon across its existence precisely because it was a regime with a totalizing vision and practice, a highly interventionist system which never ceased aggressively defending its ideological project, which it called ‘social peace’. By this was meant precisely what Francoism practised: the fending off of all change-bearing behaviours through the exercise of perpetual security surveillance over the bulk of its population, outside as well as inside prison. The political repression of the 1940s, including mass imprisonment, exerted a terror effect not just while it was happening, but into the future. The memory of the repression functioned as a form of ‘bankable terror’ on which the Franco dictatorship continued to draw to bolster its rule. 3 But supplementary strategies nevertheless came to be required, once Francoism, in order to survive as a regime, saw itself obliged to permit from the late-1950s a vertiginous programme of private-sector-led industrial and urban developmentalism which brought the accelerated, ‘promiscuous’ mass migration of millions from countryside to city, and thus risked undermining the control achieved through the repression.
Here the policies and politics of state confinement in its many forms would remain key. The fact that by the mid-1950s a new liberalized discourse of prison reform had appeared, with its language of prisoner rehabilitation – which even made its way into penal regulations – changed little about how prisons were run on the ground. Those speaking the new language were and would remain until the end of Francoism mostly the old prison managements – military, ex-military and, above all, the enduring presence of integrist religious personnel charged with education inside prisons, for whom there was no difference between prisoner ‘redemption’ (1940s) or ‘reform’ (post-1955). 4 Nor did they take notice of the scant new young university professionals (social workers, psychologists, etc.) making their hesitant entry into the service from the end of the 1960s. 5 Moreover, the main purpose of the discourse of reform was as camouflage, to placate international interlocutors once the Franco regime normalized relations with the West, especially the US, of which it had become a client. But the reality of prison discipline, routines and personnel remained unchanged: throughout Francoism the prisons were militarized and run by secret decree, through which the regime retained tight, direct control – indeed the prisons remained militarized right until the end of the 1970s, i.e., throughout much of the political transition. 6 Francoism's prison practice thus operated outside liberal Western penal norms, just as its judicial practices contravened the legal codes/norms of Western constitutionalism. The Franco dictatorship achieved this by the widespread use of ‘special jurisdictions’. As the name suggests, these were judicial proceedings which operated outside the legal system/published corpus of law. 7
Franco's state would also deploy confinement as a means of removing from circulation not only those who had breached its own highly restrictive laws and codes of behaviour, but also those whom state officials believed might do so. 8 Francoism's increasingly labyrinthine system of preventive detention constituted one of the special jurisdictions and was used to investigate, process and imprison individuals who had committed no identifiable crime. It grew exponentially from the late-1960s onwards, when it was deployed widely against migrant populations and the ‘marginal’ – i.e., those not necessarily marginal to production at that time, but certainly to political power, thus at the sharp end of the economic ‘miracle’ and the ensuing 1970s recession. 9 Preventive detention was also deployed against diverse kinds of socially-dissenting persons, for whom there was no chance of being left alone to live outside the regime’s narrowly-defined norms of life or in opposition to its social, cultural and political dictates – one former (adolescent) detainee evoked this in a striking formulation: ‘they came for those who told stories in the city’. 10 Time and again in the judicial sources we see police, as well as regime-employed medics and psychiatrists, deploying preventive detention to close down perceived social as well as political ‘dangers’. 11 The same pattern of swingeing state action was also observable in the face of gradually emerging collective social initiatives. However small-scale or ‘ordinary’ these were, the authorities remained on watch to isolate and atomize them, using for this purpose the armoury of the Public Order Tribunals, operating from January 1964. These netted not only the more obvious anti-regime protests, such as those on university campuses, but also small, local protests: for example, when people gathered to protest a rise in local cinema seat prices, ‘ringleaders’ were tried for ‘rebellion’. 12
Viewed from a Western present, or even from the West of the late-1960s, such state action appears as what it was: a Canute-like battle ‘against change’, waged against the many and varied human subjects that historical change had already produced, as well as against the glimmers of potentially emerging civil society. But if we want to understand what Francoism remained in its constant core, then we need to concentrate on this will to control – for the power it wielded at the end of the dictatorship, as at the beginning, still had the capacity to ruin, or remove, lives. Through its actions, the Franco state never ceased defining everything beyond itself as a ‘political’ category, and therefore ‘dangerous’. Precisely because of this will to all-encompassing control, it saw in every transgressive act the same threat to ‘social peace’: in other words, the Franco state saw all of its judicial subjects as intrinsically the same. Rather than this signifying that every prisoner was criminal, it meant that the amalgam of Francoist laws, penal practices and prison routines converted every category of defendant and prisoner into a political being. This was most evident in the unfettered state violence of the 1940s, analyzed in the second section of this article, and not least because of the highly visible carceral archipelago of camps and labour brigades all across Spain, as well as the huge expansion in actual prisons. 13 But this article's argument is that such a state of affairs, while becoming less visible, never ceased to be so under Francoism: it was the dictatorship itself that kept alive the political ‘charge’ by its determination to ensure that the new masses produced by accelerated industrialization and urbanization never turned into ‘classes’, i.e., politically educated, literate and aware subjects. In the obsessive and fear-driven Francoist imaginary, it was remembered that such ‘classes’ had endangered traditional forms of social order once before, in the 1930s. Thus it was not solely, or even principally, the subjects of confinement who conferred on themselves the quality of ‘being political’ (although certainly all activists did), but rather the state project itself.
Inside the gaols, the dictatorship's commitment to all-encompassing control produced a set of enduring disciplinary practices whose object was to foment and maintain divisions between prisoners – differences of origin/provenance, age, life experience, horizons of opportunity, individuals’ degree of awareness about the conditions that determined their lives and imprisonment. All were divisive ‘grist’, aimed at consolidating the system’s rule over its changing constellations of inmate as the social and economic fabric of Spain rewove itself vertiginously, almost out of recognition.
Nevertheless, the regime was not consistently successful: indeed, we can tell a prison story of how episodes of regime loss of control from the 1950s onwards can be traced precisely to the impact of its own disciplinary practices. These had the effect of eliciting cooperation, even sometimes more significant initiatives, or alliances, between prisoners who often perceived little in common with each other, except one substantive thing: the shared experience of a prison regime where militarization increased the arbitrary and erratic infliction of violent authority, and in which prison ‘routine’, corruption and abuse blended seamlessly into the daily round. All such forms of prisoner cooperation began in encounters within gaol. In the years before 1944–1945, the Franco state sought to keep its then-minority of common-law prisoners segregated from its vast numbers of civil-war political detainees, for fear the former would become ‘contaminated’, i.e., acquire political self-awareness. 14 The sheer unprecedented scale of the political imprisonments of the early 1940s made this separation relatively more possible than it would be in succeeding decades when it became progressively harder to prevent such dangerous ‘mixed’ encounters in prison. The resulting reciprocal observation between detained political activists and ‘common’ prisoners generated useful knowledge and understanding for the prisoners themselves. These encounters were always easier between younger inmates: on one side, common prisoners who had not yet acquired old lag culture (or even had some political nous, whether acquired on the streets, or from their family stories, which were not infrequently striated by the repression), and on the other side, younger generations of activist detainee, who, by the 1960s, came from the new wave of trade unionism and from the burgeoning groups of the New Left. This article explores how ‘mixed’ encounters happened, and with what accumulated strategic wisdom – for it was not only the state and prison system which learned. But what the authorities did learn – of the utility of redoubling processes of categorization and segregation – afterwards occluded the historical substance of these encounters, and dispersed the strategic knowledge they had once produced.
Against the Mayhem of a Violently Sculpting State: Survival as Resistance
At the start of the 1950s, 17 year-old José Vicente Ortuño was sentenced to six years in a forced labour brigade for his part in an armed robbery. 15 A child during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, his family was hit hard by the ensuing repression, and when his mother died, his politically-targeted father escaped to join the guerrillas, eventually managing to reach France. José was left behind to cope alone, as so many youngsters from Republican families had to do, when parents and/or other close relatives were executed, imprisoned or forced to flee for their lives. He did his best to survive the integral economic misery inflicted by the regime's repressive autarkic policies, and to dodge the political revenge inflicted by the new Francoist authorities, often in the name of the old powers, which, in Albacete in central Spain, where José came from, were mostly large landowners. 16 All basic resources for survival were in the hands of regime insiders who used them to offer favours, promote dependence, or punish and exclude by withholding them. Finding even minimal amounts of food was a daily challenge for all those who did not have such connections, and in villages or smaller urban centres gaining access to any kind of paid work required approval from someone in good standing with the victors. The deadly twin pressures of near-starvation and what was for many people total social exclusion made it impossible for large swathes of the population to live unless they committed crimes, usually petty theft of some kind. This picture is reflected, page by page, in the case files from the ordinary courts, the juvenile court records, and those of preventive detention. 17 It was often arbitrary whether one got by, or at least got lucky in avoiding detection.
The learned experience of the repression was intended by its architects to inculcate submission, which in some circumstances it did. But it just as often bred anger or desperation, and a rage that could be sullen, or sometimes explosive, precisely because the imposed impoverishment was gruellingly total, and the engineered social exclusion hermetic: in Vicente Ortuño's words, ‘I have no family but my hatred, no companion but my knife’. 18 He was sentenced as a preso común (common-law prisoner), but the arc in his memoir crosses the boundaries and complicates the categories of what was and was not political, and speaks to a whole world of experience where the fallout from the political repression directly produced ‘ordinary’ offending. In the forced labour brigade (engaged in dam-building), he endured brutal conditions, living alongside many other prisoners who had been convicted by Francoist military courts for their political profile. After serving his sentence, he managed to get to France, where he made contact with Spanish Communist Party networks in the south, and years later found his father. Was Vicente Ortuño a migrant or a political exile? How does his story define him? How did the labour brigade produce him? The first edition of his memoir was published in 1971 in France and made clear the political terrain it had emerged from, as do other later testimonies by comunes, whether written or oral. Much later, a former ETA prisoner remembered how more than one Republican-identified member of his family, having been reduced to penury by the post-war repression, then did time as a preso común for acts of theft born of hunger and the desperate will to survive. 19 These lives indicate the artificiality of the categories themselves – political prisoner, common prisoner.
For all those thus targeted the goal was quite simply this: survival. It was the blanket and unremitting force of state repression and exclusion in the 1940s which blurred, virtually to the point of extinguishing, any meaningful distinction between survival and resistance. This was true even for those ‘simply’ facing the extreme economic impoverishment produced by autarkic polices. Survival was resistance because it required going head-to-head with the state, either by breaking the law over autarky, by stealing, or by eluding police controls to migrate. 20 For those caught in the web of direct political repression it was of course more immediately brutalizing. Moreover, the regime's direct political repression enveloped not only activist cadres but entire social sectors: the ‘masses’ that the regime felt had in some obscure way been ‘responsible’ for the war and thus had inherently ‘enemy’ potential. The Francoist military courts sentenced well beyond the ranks of activist cadres and the politically conscious, enmeshing tens of thousands of lowly individuals whose political connection to the Republic was highly contingent: war workers, soldiers, village women who were arraigned in lieu of a son or husband, or those denounced by their neighbours for having ‘modern ideas’ and/or voting for Republican parties. (Denunciations which were often self-interested in some way.) It was the military court process itself, and subsequent imprisonment, which would for many actively fix in them the identity that the new ruling order so feared and abhorred. But even greater for Francoism was the temptation to impose order by naming, configuring and categorizing. Those processed by military courts then became the civil dead. But not all of those being so configured were inside physical gaols: there were those in the guerrilla movement, like Vicente Ortuño's father. The guerrillas were largely constituted of those who had fled the repression in their towns and villages, joined by some who had escaped from gaol or, more frequently, from the forced labour brigades and work camps which pitted Spain's landscape. 21 The guerrilla was ‘just’ the most incendiary category of the civil dead produced by the regime. And for the guerrillas, too, it was all about survival, a harsh alternative to the even harsher realities of prison or death. Irrespective of the lifting (formally at least) of the state of war in Spain in 1948, as far as the Francoist state was concerned, the space occupied by guerrilla groups remained, just like the gaols, a grey zone of extreme violence, including torture and extrajudicial killing. The long-established state practice of shoot-to-kill (ley de fugas) was deployed systematically against both escapee prisoners and captured guerrillas, further blurring the distinction between ‘convict space’ inside and outside the gaols. 22
The civil ‘irregularity’/civil death produced by state action was itself frequently an enduring category: we see in Vicente Ortuño's own profile how families broken apart by state repression produced the economic destitution of the next generation, which then led on to a criminal career. It was a ‘conveyor belt’ leading from reformatory to adult prison. Miguel García, a veteran anarchist prisoner, recalled: When they had been in the gutter a year or two they might be picked up as hardened delinquents … Later I was to discover this ‘generation of criminals’ throughout the prisons of Spain. Their parents had been hard-working, self-sacrificing, self-respecting craftsmen who had disappeared under bullets or into prison.
23
In view of the complicated picture delineated here, it is therefore striking that so much of the extant historiography on Franco's prisons still draws an improbably clear line, indeed virtually a binary distinction, between ‘political’ and ‘common-law’ prisoners. In doing this, it reflects the perspective found in the best-known and most plentiful corpus of published prisoner memoir and life-history testimony, namely that written by activists from the communist movement (PCE), which formed the backbone of the clandestine anti-Franco opposition inside Spain in the 1940s and 1950s. 24 That optic, and memory, was formed in part under the immense pressure of the prison system itself, with its unceasing deployment of strategies for segregating activists (even while denying their political identity to the outside world), and for fomenting divisions between them, and above all for stirring up divisions between activists and comunes.
The PCE prisoner memoir trait of thus differentiating is not found to anything like the same degree in prison memoirs from other activist currents. 25 By the late 1960s, prisoners from younger, less gaol-institutionalized activist cohorts would also cooperate with comunes. But these points of connection had also happened in earlier decades, too, right back to the 1940s when anarchist prisoners cooperated with comunes, including on gaol breaks/escapes (fugas), in which the PCE's imprisoned cadres did not usually participate. 26 This is not to say that ordinary rank-and-file communists had never made escape attempts, especially from the camps and forced labour brigades in the first years of the 1940s. But the PCE activist cadres of clandestine post-1939 resistance obeyed the party codes which ruled out escape on numerous grounds of discipline and also the potential damage to those left behind in gaol. For their part, anarchist inmates probably found it easier to identify with the comunes because the prison authorities treated them virtually as if they were comunes. 27 The communists’ sense of themselves as a ‘prisoner-class-apart’ doubtless reflected their different treatment by the authorities, but it was also the result of a larger, enduring old-guard communist culture, which, for veteran prisoners, was reinforced down the years by their exchanges with the clandestine PCE machinery outside (via smuggled correspondence), and other no less dense psychological factors. Sustaining an activist identity in this way, by telling the story of ‘politicals’ and ‘others’, would help old-guard communists survive prison intact on their own terms. But it would also increase their isolation as an inmate group.
The ‘War’ to Control Prison Space
Francoism’s war to categorize and exert close spatial control over ‘dangerous’ populations was waged all across Spain, as the material in this special issue indicates. What occurred inside the gaols was not then qualitatively distinct from what occurred outside, above all not in the 1940s, but it was of a particular brutal intensity. For the regime, a prisoner’s entry into gaol was the beginning of further categorization. Inmates were separated into ‘politicals’ and presos comunes not only to prevent ‘contamination’, but also because the act of separation into different prison wings increased regime control over all prisoners. In 1939, the officially declared population of Franco’s gaols was 270,719, the vast majority of whom were ‘politicals’, as would be the case until 1943. (Official prison statistics, especially for the 1940s, are only baselines as they exclude forced labour brigades/camps, and because there is always a great deal of imprecision over (i.e., not counting) remand prisoners and other short-term detainees.) In 1940, 233,373 inmates were officially declared and by 1942, 124,423. The pre-war average annual prison population in Spain for 1931–1934 had been under 10,000. 28 But the very fact of vast political incarceration produced massive overcrowding, to the point that the regime soon came to understand it as a security issue (see aforementioned escapes) which threatened its own capacity to enforce internal prison discipline. This concern became critical as the gaol population increased, with more and more political detainees coming in under the raft of hefty new state security legislation rolled out across the 1940s. (These were all special jurisdictions – such as the 1940 Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, the 1941 state security law, and, in 1947, the Law against Banditry and Terrorism, all of which would be renewed or replaced by similar legislation from the end of the 1950s.)
To reduce the pressure on gaols, the regime started issuing pardons (indultos) between 1943 and 1945, including to some of the wartime ‘politicals’, i.e., those who had been processed by military courts for ‘crimes’ related largely to the battlefield war years of 1936–1939. Many more in this political category were also released, but not into normal circulation. Instead, they entered another form of close state/police surveillance under the system of ‘conditional liberty’ (libertad condicional). This was a highly punitive form of parole where prisoners’ place of residence was set, only limited forms of (manual) work could be undertaken, and regular and frequent reporting to the police was required, which itself further problematized finding, and keeping, a job. Any infraction, as determined by the reporting authorities, could result in a return to gaol. The system remained embedded throughout Francoism: the popular refrain ran, ‘if you’re not already a prisoner, they’re looking for you’, as the regime's institutional war ran on. 29 Between 1943 and 1945, as a result of these combined measures, wartime ‘politicals’ became dramatically reduced in number inside the gaols, until by June 1945 there were more comunes than political detainees (just over 33,000 and 18,000 respectively). 30
There were still some old-guard activist prisoners from the 1936–1939 wartime cohort, but after 1945 most were cadres of the clandestine post-war anti-Franco opposition who had, in their own lexicon, ‘fallen’ in police raids, and been sentenced, in the lexicon of the regime, for ‘later crimes’ (delitos posteriores). A majority here belonged to communist networks but there were anarchists, too, if fewer. By the 1950s activist prisoners, of whichever chronological cohort, constituted a clear minority of the overall ‘intra-mural’ prisoner population, which thus reversed the situation of the early 1940s. It was now the activists whom the regime sought to segregate, in separate prison wings (galerías), and in some cases by confining them in specific separate gaols under particularly tough discipline (for example, Burgos or El Dueso (Santander) or San Miguel de los Reyes (Valencia), with the latter having a particularly high concentration of anarchist prisoners). Political detainees were also moved between gaols in what inmates colloquially called prison tourism: transferring prisoners, often without any prior warning and sometimes at dead of night. 31 As a specific tactic against activist prisoners, this became more widely used after the 1940s. But it remained a double-edged sword: on the one hand it could potentially break up a functioning gaol network/prisoner committee, but on the other it allowed for easier communication between activist cohorts across different gaols and thus could facilitate prisoners’ campaigns in other ways. But total separation was always an aspiration rather than a reality. In many prisons there would remain a mix of activist and other types of inmates, including among the always-large population of remand prisoners. There was a prisoner mix in most provincial gaols, but also in prominent gaols such as Madrid's Carabanchel or La Model in Barcelona, which were deployed as first-destination prisons.
Given the limitations on segregation, this redoubled the strategic importance for the authorities of fomenting discord between different categories of prisoner as a matter of policy. A role that would become pivotal here was that of the cabos (Kapos), prisoners appointed to help warders administer aspects of prison routine and daily life. This system has had, and still has, a generic usage and notoriety far beyond Franco's Spain of course, but the same conventions applied there: the prison authorities tended to confer the power of cabo on the most corrupt, venal and violent – in sum the most ‘feral’ – among the comunes, who were then free to exercise erosive and destructive sub-regimes of tyranny to build their own corrupt networks of power, while also serving as informers. 32 Nor was there ever a clear dividing line between the cabos and prison warders, many of whom connived in and benefitted from cabo-centred networks of graft inside the gaols. These were the cogs of brutality which fitted into the main wheels generated by the prison system itself, instrumentalized through the militarized discipline imposed by the prison regime, all of which was geared to the subjection and humiliation of inmates. Random violence was an institutional constant: physical and mental abuse, arbitrary beatings, or the unprovoked infliction of punishment in isolation cells. 33
The unpredictable, erosive violence of prison's wild frontier environment led imprisoned activists of the 1940s to form their first collectives (comunas) as a means of protection. The most active and longest-lived of these would belong to communists and anarchists by dint of these groups’ extended presence and embeddedness in gaol, and also their clear, cohesive political identities. Each collective constituted between four and ten prisoners, and provided material and morale support because its members pooled their resources (e.g., food and parcels from outside) and also offered solidarity and help to each other in navigating life inside. In the years before 1945, the large presence of imprisoned activists meant the regime was obliged to use them in posts of responsibility inside the gaols (destinos) to cover the running of key services, such as the kitchen, hospital wing or prison co-op (economato), because the prisons, like all Francoist institutions of confinement, were always run on the cheap. These were the years when communist and anarchist prisoners launched themselves into the struggle to achieve destinos in order to protect their own collectives by exerting influence in key areas of prison life. The fact that communists and anarchists competed with each other for control of the destinos produced additional forms of tension and fragmentation. 34 Nevertheless, the collectives were effective, not least in their ability to impose a greater group discipline on individual inmates, especially those who were informants or who otherwise acted against the basic common interests of inmates. 35 Indeed, we could posit that the power of the cabos as an indirect weapon of the regime would become stronger over time, as the number of activist prisoners decreased substantially after the 1940s – another aspect, then, of how channelling activists into the extra-mural system of ‘conditional liberty’ was a net gain for the regime in terms of tightening its micro-control inside the prison.
Difficult Encounters, Difficult Bonds
But it was not only activist prisoners who suffered the daily arbitrary power and brutality of the cabos and of the prisoner routine writ large: many of those who were categorized as comunes suffered similarly, and in some ways even worse, because they had fewer defences. For both comunes and activists, every gaol terrain was a site of battle for basic needs to be met: everything was weaponized by power – access to space, work, food, education, medical assistance. In all regards what counted was the arbitrary will of prison staff and management – ‘grace and favour’ was effectively always a primary technique of rule inside Franco's gaols, as beyond them. 36 The imposition of punishment was, in consequence, often arbitrary, with constant collusion between warders and cabos. But unlike activists, comunes had no external solidarity networks, and until the 1970s, rarely anything by way of a prison collectivity to support them. 37 What veteran PCE prisoners (and sometimes anarchist prisoners too) saw as the comunes’ lack of solidarity, was itself a result of what their life experience outside gaol had taught them, that to survive they only had their own resources to fall back on. 38 Their rampant, ethically unattractive individualism, anathema as it was to many veteran activists, was as hard-learned a response as the activists’ own culture of solidarity. By the mid-1960s the most usual común profile was of a young man under 30. Lacking basic education or any job skills or training and sometimes functionally illiterate, their levels of recidivism were also predictably high. 39 They were sentenced for theft, often of motor vehicles, or robbery – not infrequently with violence, and the younger they were the more likely the occurrence of aggravated theft. Drawn from the poorest and most deprived sectors, they were also frequently urban migrants from families originating in the rural centre and south of Spain and were thus part of the accelerated migrations of Francoism.
The prison authorities themselves fomented an almost Darwinian struggle between activists and comunes, and they exploited the real and grave frictions between prisoners generally caused by the stresses inherent to confinement, which one común later described in a perceptive memoir as a (literally) dreadful mix of tedium and high tension, of fear and sapping boredom. 40 But in spite of the authorities’ divisive strategies, already by the 1950s, and much more in evidence by the 1960s, there would come to be moments of confluence and learning between activist and común prisoners, precisely because they were subject to largely the same forms of endemically brutalized prison routine – poor conditions, lack of food at times (including through corruption in prison intendancies), piecemeal brutality 41 and the arbitrary and abusive imposition of punishment. Nor was this cooperation only about fending off or protesting abuse. Sometimes it was about finding tricks and workarounds to make daily life less harsh: for example, collaborating on smuggling in, and hiding, useful but forbidden objects (shaving equipment), exchanging information on how to get notes in and out without passing through internal censorship, which warders were amenable to bribes, how to get cigarettes into punishment cells, on finding ways to improvise clandestine communication between cells, or to dissuade informers or distract warders’ attention during ‘patio time’.
Comunes observed the ways in which activist prisoners’ collectivities resisted, and how they organized against what were commonly experienced abuses in daily prison life. In this way, comunes also learned which strategies were sometimes successful. This watching and learning was an uneven and intermittent process composed of a multiplicity of ‘incidents’, some as already described, but also many other similar ones which inevitably remain undocumented by historians, but which, as we know from the oral testimonies of prisoners (including comunes) would remain in the collective memory of the prison, passed on as stories between cohorts and generations of inmate, along with more tangible things – such books and personal objects – bequeathed by those departing for the outside world. 42 Such a process of watching and learning occurred across the whole span of Francoism, even if it would yield more visible results by the later 1960s and 1970s. But for each and every decade this confluence depended on activist and común prisoners being able to encounter each other in spaces within the prison where, in spite of the segregationist ethos of the authorities, de facto control was less, or could be temporarily eluded – such as in the prison workshops, toilet block or hospital wing, or during patio time which often in practice involved a mixed presence of activists and comunes. 43 There were also instances of activists teaching comunes trade skills in the prison workshops. 44
By the late 1960s, there also emerged denser webs of prisoner-on-prisoner violence, as gangs and ‘mafias’ emerged to prey on other comunes, committing acts of theft, violence and extortion, often in collusion with warders who delegated to them, much as earlier they had to individual cabos, the maintenance of prison ‘order’. 45 Sometimes this collusion was about individually corrupt officers, but much more generally, whether in earlier or later decades, it was driven by the endemic strategy of divide, abuse and rule. Over the decades, Francoism's goal of ideologically ‘sculpting’ its entire population would become hollowed out, but the regime's enduring will to control never slackened off, for all its greater pragmatism. Key here were the integrist religious personnel who remained present throughout in educative and disciplinary roles in both male and female prisons. Nor did highly ideologized warders disappear from the prison scene of the later 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, their continuing presence was assured by the privileged access to the service conferred from 1939 on Franco's young wartime, non-commissioned officer corps, the alféreces provisionales, who remained an ultra sector of warders to the end of the regime and beyond. But despite their presence, which in the period up to 1945 was a powerful driving force of violence against the Republican prison population, Spain's prison service as a whole remained somewhat ‘piebald’ under Franco. By the late 1960s it was other sectors of warder who came to best reflect the new disciplinary moment, including newer cohorts who, while broadly Francoist (the system had given them stable employment), primarily saw themselves as working a job, unladen by any layer of political meta. There was also always a cohort of warders who constituted the equivalent of prisoner ‘old lags’, and whose memory of service and clientelism inside the gaols was longer even than the Franco regime's. And here too endogamy as a pattern of intra-familial and intergenerational recruitment to prison jobs ensured the persistence of non-ultra sectors in the service. A lack of overt ideology did not of course preclude them from deploying violence, whether randomly and/or in a short-term instrumental way – and of course this too served to perpetuate and sustain the integrally repressive project of Francoism. 46
It was precisely the increasingly ‘feral’ nature of the 1960s prison environment, with its new mass of desperado comunes, that confirmed old-guard activist prisoners, especially those from the PCE, in their aloofness and shunning of what was easily seen as an undifferentiated lumpen mass. But the custom and culture of reciprocal, almost anthropological, observation and encounter remained alive, as a new influx of activists came to the gaols, drawn from the union activism of the Workers Commissions and also from a range of the many small parties and groups of the emergent New (extra-parliamentary) Left. 47 New-Left activists in Spain, as across Europe, were taking on board (and sometimes contributing to) then expanding critical perspectives on the systemic injustices of justice systems across the West – from the extremeness of the US's prison industrial complex, which had first sparked prisoners’ rights campaigns out of the broader 1960s civil rights movement, all the way to Italy's antiquated gaols where a cycle of protests and rebellions in the late 1960s and early 1970s focused attention on how all prisoners in Italy were still devoid of constitutional and civil rights not only de facto but de jure. In Spain, the spirit of 1968 existed ahead of that calendar year, in the major labour mobilizations and strikes of 1967. New-Left activists saw comunes as social prisoners (presos sociales), a conceptualization reminiscent of the anarchist thinking of the 1930s which saw all prisoners as equally victimized by punitive state discipline/policies, economic or otherwise. In August 1969, in the youth wing of Barcelona's Model prison, there was a joint action to protest an industrial accident in the prison workshops where a young común lost a finger in a mechanical sawing machine. 48 New-Left activists also taught comunes to read – just as anarchist activists had done earlier – and were punished by the prison authorities for it. Others like Alicia Mur, a libertarian prisoner in Madrid's women's gaol (Las Ventas) wrote letters for their often illiterate co-prisoners. Not that everything was sweetness and light – as before, the gulf of experience and possibility between activists and comunes meant that at times ‘we got thoroughly fed up with them’. 49 But instances of cooperation across the divide occurred, and in ways that supposed a greater risk for all involved, such as hunger strikes, which in turn suggests that a level of cohesion and sense of common purpose was achievable. Even if the fabric of these temporary alliances remained taut and fragile, the fact that they occurred threw into relief the impoverishing, sometimes paralyzing effects of the prison authorities’ relentless internal segregation.
It is noteworthy, too, that at the end of the 1960s there was also a parallel and unprecedented cooperation across politically sectarian lines, even between old-guard activist rivals, including on hunger strikes. 50 Prison cooperation with other ‘politicals’ or comunes came more easily to the new generation of activists, but this also depended on their specific brand of politics. Maoist and radical left groups were more open to cooperation than the radical Basque nationalists of ETA – and within ETA, the more open group were the poli-milis, who already favoured hybrid political alliances across the left to oppose Francoism, a strategy opposed from within ETA by its hard-line military wing. We should also acknowledge that it is through the testimonies and perceptions of political activists that we mostly ‘know’ the comunes. There are común oral testimonies (male and female) from the Franco period, but their stories are relatively less available – comunes are harder to locate, and because of their life experiences tended to die younger. Smaller again is the body of written memoir by comunes, although there is material. 51
For their part, activists, intellectuals, and those who were both, turned their gaze towards what the functioning of prisons (and asylums) revealed of the changing forms of state power and economy – the linkages between factory and prison discipline were prominent in the resulting analyses well before the beginnings of cyclical recession made these connections absolutely plain. Foucault's analyses and, more specifically perhaps, the activism in France of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP) of which he was a co-founder, inflected critical thinking about the situation in Spain too: the 1976 White Book on Franco's Prisons, which coincided with large-scale, común-led gaol protests, flagged Foucault explicitly in terms of its own bid to bridge the conceptual division between activists and comunes. 52 Published pseudonymously in Paris by the main anti-Franco publishing house, Ruedo Ibérico, which had first been established by anarchist exiles in the 1950s, the White Book's signal analysis chimed with ideas of comunes as social prisoners, arguing for them as an explicitly political category of prisoner in their own right. Indeed, the comunes’ status had become very much more visible and notorious by the 1970s because of the Franco state's expanding and extreme deployment of preventive detention as an instrument of social control. Under the new law of ‘social dangerousness’ (LPRS) many comunes would be engulfed for years (beyond Franco's death in 1975, through the transition period and after) in a suffocating system of detention, hearings and civil restrictions. The workings of the LPRS made evident the regime's permanent politicization of everything it deemed ‘social dangerousness’. Conversely, the LPRS also saw the coming to political awareness of numerous comunes. Among them was Agustín Rueda, who supported the clandestine resistance activities of the CNT in the 1970s and who, after re-imprisonment, would in 1978 lose his life in what became one of the most infamous, legally contested episodes of torture and lethal violence inflicted by prison staff. 53
Conclusion: From Encounters to Dispersion
The repertoire of protest tactics learned by comunes, through long observing activist practice, came to be a common lore (in both senses) stored inside the prison. Encounters between diverse types of prisoner were a constant, and produced, if in fits and starts, episodes of shared action and initiative which came to have a greater visibility and consistency by the 1970s. Here the abusive practices of the LPRS and of preventive detention itself could be hypothesized as a driving cause. 54 All these memories and experiences constitute the genealogy of what would become by the end of 1976, the COPEL (Coordinadora de Presos en Lucha/Coordination of Prisoners in Struggle). Headed up by activist comunes, COPEL constituted a loose network of contacts rather than an organization. Nevertheless, it impelled a series of continuing protest actions across several of Spain's major gaols, kicking off spectacularly in 1977 in Madrid's Carabanchel on the symbolic date of 18 July – the date of Franco's 1936 rising against the democratic Republic. COPEL's emergence had been spurred by the mass anti-Franco mobilizations in the streets of Spain's cities demanding an amnesty for imprisoned activists – the demonstrators’ ‘interlocutors’ being the reformist Francoists then negotiating an exit from the dictatorship in the highly charged months since Franco's death in November 1975.
COPEL's principal demand was for the inclusion of the comunes in any political amnesty. (They also sought the abolition of the special jurisdictions and the demilitarization of the prisons.) They argued that, like activists, comunes had been victims of abusive state practice, because of the workings of preventive detention, and also subject to torture and violence, including lethally. These arguments found a substantial reverberation among those demonstrating on the streets – it was said that the screams of the tortured could be heard from the blocks of flats close by Barcelona's Model prison. 55 The call for prisoner amnesties was also made by opposition parliamentarians of both the social-democratic PSOE and the PCE (legalized in April 1977), many of whom had been prisoners themselves. But in the end, the comunes remained excluded from the political amnesties granted across 1976–1977, and the Law of Social Dangerousness remained ‘activated’ across the 1980s, not being abrogated until May 1996. 56
A major goal of the reformist Francoists who drafted the key amnesty law of October 1977 was to protect state personnel from future prosecution. In extending the amnesty to anti-Franco activists still in gaol (provided they had not been sentenced for violent direct action) they were able also to meet the international community's conditions for Spain's admission to the European Economic Community (EEC). But the amnesty did not imply any substantive concession in domestic policy terms. The Francoist project had for the most part relinquished the overt sculpting of its population, and in the case of prisoners, now merely ‘warehoused’ them, as the gaols in Spain transitioned to a neoliberal model of incarceration. The amnesty, by removing experienced activists from the gaols, diluted and dispersed the ‘contaminating’ flow of ideas and tactics to a nascent, politicizing COPEL, as well as, at a stroke, allowing the system to reinscribe the comunes as ‘not political’. As Foucault himself had remarked, the arguments around naming who was and was not a political prisoner always were, and remain, tactical and contingent. 57 In retrospect, we could thus argue that the terms of Francoism's political amnesty constitute another case of not recognizing, indeed of deliberately eliding the political.