Franco's "justice" in Calera y Chozas (Toledo): document forgery and the cover-up of extrajudicial executions in Spanish post-war

The history of political violence in the early stages of Franco's regime will be approached in this paper through macro aspects such as sources, methods, concepts and historiographical debates, starting though from a micro space like the one local history offers us. To achieve this goal, the text will analyze two cases of extrajudicial executions of socialist leaders which took place in 1939 in the municipality of Calera y Chozas (Toledo) and were attributed in official documents to either suicide or natural death. It will also explore a third study case in relation to other local spaces that apparently share some characteristics with them in spite of their geographical remoteness from one another. Starting from a given example from local history, the present work will point out at the need to handle all available sources with an interdisciplinary perspective in order to reach relevant conclusions. The presented methodology relies on connecting local historical researches with some of the main contributions on Franco's general usage of political violence. The sources used are very diverse: primary archival sources, secondary bibliographic sources, oral testimonies and archaeological and anthropological reports. Thus, the significance of interdisciplinary historical research will be demonstrated, together with its potential to go beyond more easily extractable results. Starting off with the hypothesis that the covering-up of these criminal acts would act as an indicator of genocidal practices, it would presumably help us to better understand the nature of the political violence exerted at the time. This article intends thus to contribute to a pending, yet possible line of research: the role played by document forgery in the cover-up of extrajudicial executions during Francoist repression. An approach that would potentially broaden our understanding of and help us to adequately characterize the violence exerted by the State founded after Franco's coup d'etat in 1936 in connection with various historiographical currents and concepts, such as genocide.