Falange

Falange is a political force whose influence in the novel extends from the fractured politics of wartime Spain into the authoritarian order that follows. It appears both as a participant in the Republican-era struggle over power and as an ally of the victorious Francoist camp, linking the language of political discipline to the consequences of repression and impunity.

Political setting and wartime divisions

In Madrid during the civil war, the Republican side is anything but unified. Socialists are divided among themselves; anarchists are numerous; and the small POUM current has been further inflamed by Andreu Nin’s disappearance. Socialists and Communists broadly support the Valencia government and the Madrid Defense Council, but agreement on that point does not erase their divisions. Within this crowded political field, Falange is part of the wider contest over who may act, speak, and claim authority.

The novel also depicts a Republican intelligence service compromised by internal rivalries and Soviet influence. Illegal detention centers persist despite the Madrid Defense Council’s attempt to close the checas, reopening elsewhere when one is shut. This atmosphere of divided authority and clandestine coercion provides a sharp contrast to the later frankness with which Francoist power can dispose of people and records.

Discipline, dissent, and public influence

Falange’s political ethic is condensed in a brief disagreement over the fate of Fernando Villa. María Eugenia León has come to ask whether anything can be done for him. Pilar first invokes a maxim attributed to Manuel Hedilla: mistakes must be paid for. Clarita Stauffer corrects her gently, insisting that the point was that rebellions are punished. Pilar dismisses the distinction. The exchange makes political punishment sound less like a disputed decision than a settled rule, while María Eugenia leaves without a rescue and cannot bring herself to write to Fernando.

Falange’s influence also reaches the military chain of command. When Adrián Gallardo asks to extend his leave so he can train as a boxer, Captain Junquera says the high command has lost its appetite for boxing. The commanders do not want trouble with chaplains and their supporters, and Falange is on Alfonso Navarro’s side. The sport is therefore not insulated from politics: a boxer’s prospects depend on religious and political loyalties as well as military orders.

From wartime coercion to Francoist impunity

The novel’s postwar scenes show how authoritarian power turns political control into administrative routine. After a body is found in Casa de Campo, police and officials avoid the ordinary safeguards that might establish the victim’s identity. At La Almudena Cemetery, the body is assigned to a common grave with other undocumented dead whose recorded cause of death is routinely reduced to cardiac arrest. The corpse bears a fatal gunshot wound to the neck, yet the men handling it discuss taking its good coat. The contrast between visible violence and its bureaucratic erasure gives the novel’s account of dictatorship its chilling material detail.

That impunity is set against the broader political climate of the Cold War. Manuel Arroyo warns that the democratic powers condemn war criminals in public while, according to rumors he has heard, some Allied officials recruit Nazis for anti-Soviet work. As the account of the Second World War is recast to emphasize the Normandy landings and diminish the Eastern Front, Franco can present himself as a champion of anti-Communism. Falange’s place in the novel thus belongs to a larger political reversal: the language of resistance to Communism helps make Francoist rule tolerable to powers that had once opposed its allies.

Repression and the reach of the security state

The historical account broadens the novel’s treatment of political punishment by tracing the Argentine dictatorship to the National Security Doctrine and the support it receives in the Cold War. Before the 1976 coup, the government of María Estela Martínez de Perón had already launched Operation Independence, ostensibly against guerrillas in Tucumán but used to divide the country into military zones and grant commanders sweeping powers. The operation’s terror reached civilians as well as political opponents and is presented as a precursor to the later repression.

Under the subsequent regime, the mechanisms of state terror are organized into specialized task groups: abduction and disappearance, secret detention, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, clandestine maternity wards, and the removal and reassignment of children born to detained women. The death flights represent an extreme endpoint of this system, in which living prisoners are drugged, bound, and thrown from military aircraft into the sea. This account does not make Falange identical to the later Argentine apparatus; rather, it places the novel’s concern with authoritarian punishment and concealed violence within a wider history of regimes that turn political enemies into people whose bodies, names, and fates can be erased.