The Resistance

This photo of the Mauser belonging to Benigno Andrade from A Coruña symbolizes the armed resistance of part of the population of Galicia to the coup and the Francoist dictatorship. It was used as an exhibit in Andrade’s trial in 1952 and was then sent to A Coruña’s Military History Museum as a trophy of war.  It was also number 79 in a touring exhibition telling the history pf Galicia in one hundred objects created by public institutions in 2016 with the aim of breaking the victors’ hegemonic narrative of the Civil War.

Studies of the resistance focused on the guerrilla. This is a fundamental matter for understanding the evolution of the war and the subsequent dictatorship, and a key factor in the social and political transformation of the rural world in the 1940s. Those who took refuge in the hills organized themselves into small groups that grew as people deserted. By 1938, there were stable settlements of resisters motivated by the political beliefs in the Casaio-Carballeda de Valdeorras region. Most of them came from maritime or farming communities, something that illustrates the extent to which many parts of Galician society rejected the coup.

The presence of fugitives, the attacks on barracks and rectories, the local insurrections and confrontations with the authorities are all evidence of a dynamic society that had emerged from and developed with the ongoing implantation of democracy. 

Women played a crucial part in this, as the violence directed against them by the rebels testifies. The rebels attempted to deny the role of women by refusing to call them combatants or resisters and reducing them to being only “red sluts”.  Eliseo Fernández and Dionisio Pereira highlight the case of María Teresa Domínguez Prada, who was labelled as the “Witch of Espino”. In 1937, she took to the hills with her three daughters and joined a guerrilla group composed of residents of Corzos-Xares. A year later, they were brought to trial as the guerrilla fighters’ “lovers”.

AGF