Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE).- Only five weeks after the Civil War, Concha Espina published the article “Porterías” about the performance of the porters and porters in Madrid during the conflict, and now “The enemy at the doors”, the first historical study on these employees who saved lives as well as sentenced to death.
Of the eighty women shot in the postwar period in Madrid, seven were goalkeepers, according to this historical investigation published by Comares from Granada and carried out by the historian Daniel Oviedo Silva, a professor at the University of Navarra, who as proof that this group was “overrepresented” in the post-war repression he cites the republican chronicler Eduardo de Guzmán.
De Guzmán wrote that the prisoners of the Franco regime spoke of “the three Ps” in reference to police officers, journalists and doormen, professionals who more frequently received the death penalty.
A total of 525 goalkeepers and goalkeepers, of whom 70 percent were men, were decorated by the Madrid City Council in the immediate postwar period with the delivery of a “Loyalty Medal” that accredited them as ” loyalists” for having diverted complaints, concealed those persecuted or for having given testimony in favor of possible victims of republican repression.
Evidence in military trials
Even a doorman who was a member of a Catholic union assassinated during the war was beatified as a martyr, Oviedo Silva has highlighted in statements to EFE, whose work has been praised by the Hispanist Paul Preston, who has stated that it is “surprisingly novel” and which offers “an unusual vision” on the decisive performance of a group that had “an enormous social influence for decades”.
Preston also points out in his introduction that the study “illuminates the hottest debates on violence in the Republican rearguard”, since only in the first post-war period, Oviedo Silva has reviewed 1,681 incidents, episodes or incriminating circumstances that occurred during the war years denounced on some 300 buildings in the city.
These cases have the statements signed by 268 doormen and 563 tenants, which are related to 557 arrests in 224 properties; 227 records in 89 properties; 244 searches in 137; and 162 murders or disappearances with fatal outcome in another 113.
Although conclusive information was obtained in only 10 percent of these cases, these testimonies led numerous military judicial processes as evidence, while up to 86.75 percent of the victims of the incidents studied were neighbors, a percentage that increases if we include the doormen themselves, household employees and establishments related to the neighborhood.
Control and police the neighborhood
In the postwar period, the goalkeepers “were potential suspects and were subjected to severe reprisals,” which is why they had a special court to investigate their actions during the conflict, according to Oviedo Silva, who recalled that long before the In the Civil War, doormen were used as a source of police information, considering that they always had the ability to ‘control’ and ‘monitor’ the neighborhood.
The historian dedicates an epigraph to the brigade of the Chekist Agapito García Atadell and his committee of goalkeepers, made up of members of the Goalkeepers’ Society and the Grupo Sindical Socialista de Porteros in which they were already militants before the war and who, during the conflict, they called on their colleagues to “do their duty” by ratting out political enemies.
Oviedo Silva subtitles his book “Porteros y prácticas accusatorias en Madrid (1936-1945)” and does not use the word complaint because during the war some of these porters “were employed in protective practices” so that “personal and neighborhood solidarity could short-circuit the supposed network of complaints that they had woven.” EFE
