National Movement

The National Movement is the political formation created when Franco’s decree of Unification merged the legal parties in his zone during the Spanish Civil War. In the novel, this imposed unity is both a contested settlement among the forces on Franco’s side and part of the institutional background to the repression that followed: military consolidation did not erase political rivalries, but gave the victorious regime a framework for exercising power.

Formation and Internal Opposition

The decree of Unification provoked opposition among Falangists who feared that their movement would lose its political identity through absorption into a larger organization. Fernando Villa, an advocate of Falangist purity in Navarre, was arrested in April after opposing the decree. His resistance is presented as an ideological dispute over whether Falange should preserve its own doctrine or accept a coalition with monarchists and Carlists.

That conflict remained unsettled when Captain Antonio Ochoa met Alfonso Navarro in Pamplona. The unification continued to rankle among Falangists, Carlists, and monarchists; the novel observes that the military were the only clear winners of the operation. The National Movement thus appears not as a harmonious alliance, but as a political arrangement whose consolidation strengthened the armed forces even as it disappointed or threatened factions incorporated into it.

Falangist Loyalty and Political Memory

María Eugenia León appeals to Pilar to help Fernando by emphasizing his loyalty to José Antonio and to Falangism. She acknowledges that he had opposed Unification in wartime, but argues that he acted in good faith, believing that the merger would dissolve Falange into an alliance with monarchists and requetés and endanger its purity. Her plea turns the decree into a personal test of political fidelity: Fernando’s opposition, she insists, should be understood as devotion to the movement’s legacy rather than disloyalty.

Pilar responds that she had heard of the controversy even while she was in Salamanca. The exchange shows how the decree’s consequences persisted beyond the moment of its promulgation: resistance to Unification remained part of how Falangists judged one another and remembered the reshaping of their movement.

From Political Consolidation to Repression

The novel places the National Movement’s founding consolidation beside the Republic’s own fractured wartime political landscape. In Madrid, socialists and communists supported the government in Valencia and the city’s Defense Junta, but their agreement was limited; anarchists and POUM supporters formed other forces within a divided Republican camp. Against that fragmentation, Franco’s unification of the legal parties offered his side a consolidated political structure, though the earlier resistance makes clear that it did not settle every conflict within the coalition.

In the dictatorship’s later history, political authority is tied to systems that obscure violence as well as impose it. The novel describes clandestine detention and executions in Madrid, including the instruction that a wounded Republican agent be saved without entering a hospital under his own name, so that those seeking to kill him could not locate him. It also depicts an unidentified man with a fatal gunshot wound being buried in a common grave under the routine fiction of cardiac arrest. These episodes give concrete form to a broader continuity in the book: political power operates through control of institutions, records, and the public account of what has happened.

A Wider Pattern of State Violence

The novel later extends this analysis to Argentina’s dictatorship, connecting it to the Cold War doctrine of national security and to political repression undertaken in the name of combating communism. Before the 1976 coup, the Operativo Independencia divided the country into five military zones and gave their commanders broad power to repress those labeled subversive. The campaign targeted civilians as well as guerrillas and is described as a precursor to the intensified terror of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional.

The subsequent dictatorship used clandestine task groups for distinct functions, including kidnapping, secret detention, torture, execution, concealment of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of babies born to prisoners. The novel’s account of death flights, in which living prisoners were drugged, bound, and thrown from military aircraft over the sea, shows the extreme endpoint of this organized violence. These later events do not make the National Movement identical to the Argentine regime; rather, the narrative places Francoist political consolidation within a wider history of authoritarian rule, anti-communist legitimation, and systems designed to conceal both victims and responsibility.