The Massacre of Badajoz - August 1936: The Myth, the Truth and the Memory

The Massacre of Badajoz examines the largest and perhaps the most infamous Francoist atrocity in the Spanish Civil War. Predictably, as with the notorious aerial bombing of Guernica, the premeditated mass slaughter of civilians at Badajoz was originally denied by Francoist propaganda. Since the late 1990s, this denialism has been resumed by a new wave of revisionist writers in Spain. Accordingly, the history, the subsequent representation, and indeed the very site of the massacre has become a key 'battlefield' of Spain's ongoing 'memory wars.' The book dissects the "investment in silence" over Badajoz overseen by Spanish democracy between 1977 and 2017. It also addresses culturally sensitive questions that remain unanswered eighty years after the conclusion of the conflict that redefined the political landscape of the Iberian Peninsula. This war crime was perpetrated only six kilometres from the Portuguese border, a circumstance that also remains central to understanding the debate over the toxic political legacy of the Portuguese dictatorship and Estado Novo of Salazar. Indeed, the dearth of academic studies on Portuguese involvement in the civil war is mirrored by an absence of critical research on the regional impact of the conflict across the Spanish-Portuguese border. This lack of academic investigation contrasts sharply with public interest in the subject. The book therefore also offers, for the first time, an examination of a period that combines both the foreign policy of the Portuguese state and the repercussions of the civil war for the civilian population of the Portuguese-Spanish frontier region. The analysis is grounded in new archival material located in regional and national repositories in both Portugal and Spain.