Red Terror (Spain)

Red Terror (Spain)

The Red Terror in Spain (Spanish: Terror Rojo en España) is the name given by historians to various acts committed "by sections of nearly all the leftist groups" such as the killing of tens of thousands of people (including 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy, the vast majority in the summer of 1936 in the wake of the military rising), as well as attacks on landowners, industrialists, and politicians, and the desecration and burning of monasteries and churches. News of the military coup unleashed a social revolutionary response and no republican region escaped revolutionary and anticlerical violence - though in the Basque Country this was minimal.

A process of political polarisation had characterised the Spanish Second Republic – party divisions became increasingly embittered and questions of religious identity came to assume a major political significance. Electorally, the Church had identified itself with the Right, which had set itself against social reform.

The failed pronunciamiento of 1936 set loose a violent onslaught on those that revolutionaries in the Republican zone identified as enemies - " where the rebellion failed, for several months afterwards merely to be identified as a priest, a religious or simply a militant Christian or member of some apostolic or pious organization, was enough for a person to be executed without trial."

In recent years the Catholic Church has beatified hundreds of the victims, 498 of them on 28 October 2007 in a spectacular ceremony, the largest single number of beatifications in the church's history.

Some estimates of the Red Terror range from 38,000 to 72,344 lives. Paul Preston, speaking in 2012 at the time of the publication of his book The Spanish Holocaust, put the figure at a little under 50,000.

Historian Julio de la Cueva has written that, "despite the fact that the Church... suffer appalling persecution" in the Loyalist rearguard, the events have so far met not only with "the embarrassing partiality of ecclesiastical scholars, but also with the embarrassed silence or attempts at justification of a large number of historians and memoirists." Analysts such as Helen Graham have linked the Red and White Terrors, pointing out that it was the military coup that allowed the culture of brutal violence to flourish. Graham wrote of the coup, "...its original act of violence was that it killed off the possibility of other forms of peaceful political evolution." Others see the persecution and violence as predating the coup and found in what they see as a "radical and antidemocratic" anticlericalism of the Republic and its constitution, including dissolution of the Jesuits 1932, nationalization of virtually all church property in 1933, prohibition on teaching religion in schools, prohibition on teaching by clergy, and violent persecution proper beginning in 1934 in Asturias with the murder of 37 priests, religious and seminarians and burning of 58 churches.