Militiamen controlling a warehouse at a port

In both the Republican and rebel rearguards individuals and groups considered enemies of the cause experienced intense repression. In the former, the principal targets were members of the clergy or people close to the Church as well as those who were considered to be ideologically conservative, especially industrialists and landowners, conservative political organizations and Falange and Carlist militants. In many cases, this persecution also involved personal motives, as people took advantage of the chaos to settle scores.

The repression was carried out by individuals. Not all of them were connected to the anarchist movement, although most were. They took advantage of the confusion that followed the military uprising to take control of the streets. This gave rise to a situation of dual power. One part was in the hands of the institutions of the Generalitat, the other in the hands of the Central Antifascist Militias Committee (CAMC), which had emerged as a response to the revolution triggered by the military coup. One of the CAMC’s responsibilities was the maintenance of law and order throughout Catalonia by means of patrols and the creation of revolutionary committees.

Local neighborhood committees emerged in every town, each of them sovereign in the territory it controlled and undermining the power of the established municipal governments. Armed groups acted as they wished. They began by burning churches, conducting searches, making arrests, killing, ousting office holders. They were the de facto new authority. 

The power that these committees managed to wield cannot be explained solely due to their monopoly on violence. They also undertook to apply a series of proposals, many of which appeared spontaneously. The committees that seized power at the local level in the first months of the war were in charge of organizing the life of all the population, even though the violence they unleashed obscured their efforts to create the new society they desired.

From the beginning of the war and the avalanche of violence, the Generalitat did everything it could to sabe the lives of people in danger, but despite its best efforts, it was only in May 1937 that it managed to bring the violence under control. But by then, at least 6,000 people had been murdered. Including all the victims, from the murders in the first months of the war to those condemned to death by a People’s Tribunal, a minimum of 8,360 people in Catalonia died due to repression and violence.