The Interior Minister decorates Lt. Col. Carlos Silva Rivera of the Assault Guards

The governments of the second biennium reversed the police reforms of the previous period and strengthened the coercive capabilities of the security institutions. The first steps in this process were the readmission of the policeman who had been purged in 1931 and an amnesty for the military men and Civil Guards involved in the “Sanjurjada”.

The Civil Guard recovered its operational autonomy and enjoyed large staffing increases that took its numbers to 34,366 in 1934. In the autumn of 1933, the office that had been set up in the Interior Ministry was subordinated to the force’s Inspectorate General and the Technical Secretariat that had been established to coordinated the actions of the Civil Guard with other police forces was replaced by a new office within the Inspectorate. The Assault Guard, which was now under the command of Lt. Col. Agustín Muñoz Grandes, was given a new set of operational rules similar to those of the Civil Guard which gave forearms priority over truncheons.

The approval of the Catalonia Autonomy Statute in 1932 forced the republican leaders to decentralize control of security there. At the end of 1933 the responsibilities of the Civil Guard and the police were transferred to the new regional government, the Generalitat, but the central government took them back following the October 1934 insurrection. The 689 agents and 1,984 guards were merged into the Government Police, but pressure from the right led to their immediate dismissal.

Following the Asturian insurrection, the government announced projects to create a uniformed branch of the Investigation and Vigilance Corps and to militarize the Assault Guards, although these were never carried out. The intention was made clear in the ceremony in the Retiro on 29 September 1935 in which the national flag was given to the Security Corps. The photograph shows Interior Minister Joaquín de Pablo Blanco decorating Assault Guard Lt. Col. Carlos Silva Rivera with the Commendation of the Republic. After this, the minister’s wife, Dolores Aguilar, gave a speech in which she reminded the decorated officers that their loyalty to the army came before their loyalty to the police.

This process of militarization ended in December 1935 with two important measures taken by the government of Manuel Portela Valladares. The first, which never came into effect, was a set of regulations intended to strengthen the civilian character of the police. The second was the presence during the February 1936 elections of a unit of eleven female police officers, the first ever in Spain’s history.

SVM