Survival Strategies and Non-Aggression Pacts Between the Guardia Civil and the Republican Guerrilla in Spain's Irregular War,1936–1952

Abstract

Existing literature on the anti-Francoist guerrilla has focused on the origins, development and decline of guerrilla parties. However, many aspects of the irregular war of 1936–1952 that pitted rebel forces, and later the Francoist dictatorship, against Republican resistance fighters remain unexplored. Historians have often cited civil guards as sources on killings and torture that took place in spaces of anti-guerrilla warfare, and the violence employed by the guerrilla has also been the subject of a significant amount of research. In contrast, this article looks at how civil guards deployed in the irregular war and guerrilla fighters not only interacted peacefully, but in fact came to establish non-aggression pacts as a survival strategy. The existence of such agreements was known not only to the men on both sides, but also to the civilian population and the dictatorship itself.