Republican Directorate-General of Security

The Republican Directorate-General of Security is the Republican institution whose official documentation gives false identities their convincing administrative form. In the novel, its papers expose a double edge of state authority: documents can identify and control people, but they can also be forged or repurposed to protect them. The later account of Argentina’s dictatorship offers a darker counterpoint, where state power systematically destroys identities and conceals the fate of its victims.

Documentary authority and clandestine identity

On 28 June 1937, Manuel Arroyo Benítez registered at a Madrid hotel using papers that were impeccable because they came from the Republican Directorate-General of Security, yet entirely false in what they claimed about him. They identified him as Rafael Cuesta Sánchez, a civil servant born in Talavera de la Reina on 12 January 1904, a married member of the UGT since 1929, and a resident of Valencia. None of those biographical details was true. The forged identity was the first of many Manuel would use, and its credibility depended not on the invention alone but on the institutionally convincing documents that carried it.

The false identity was built to withstand verification as well as casual inspection. When Manuel later passed the papers to Guillermo, he explained that the invented Rafael had no surviving parents and came from a Toledo village whose church and baptismal register had burned in a bombing. Manuel had destroyed Rafael’s UGT record, made the identity internally consistent with Guillermo’s circumstances, and supplied a document that could not readily be checked against surviving local records. The same administrative machinery that made official identification powerful thus provided the form and materials through which a fabricated identity could pass as real.

Papers as protection—and exposure

The importance of such credentials becomes visible when a wounded man is mistaken for a corpse. Soldiers called medical attendants, who carried him to the infirmary; a commander found a Junta de Defensa public-order credential in his wallet and telephoned for instructions. A police commissioner identifying himself as Basilio Rodríguez ordered that, if the man was dead, he be buried as an unknown person without registration; if alive, he must be kept out of any hospital under his own name so that no one could try to kill him again. The credential made the injured man legible to authorities, but also triggered an effort to prevent his identity from exposing him to renewed danger.

The episode shows the institutional ambiguity surrounding records in a wartime city: a document could connect a person to official structures while the state’s own agents sought to conceal that person from other forces. The commissioner offered no explanation beyond saying the man was vital to Republican interests. The protection therefore operated through controlled invisibility—no hospital entry, no death registration, and no ordinary public trace.

Reuse under changing rule

After the Republican defeat, Manuel’s forged documentation enabled Guillermo to approach the new authorities under Rafael Cuesta Sánchez’s assumed identity. At a Madrid police station, a guard directed him to the counter for exchanging documents from the Nationalist zone. Guillermo joined the queue and presented the Republican-era credential; the clerk paid little attention while filling out a form with his details. A paper created within one government’s security apparatus could therefore be carried into the administrative procedures of its successor, where its origin did not prevent it from being accepted.

The episode is not a story of the Republican institution surviving intact, but of the practical afterlife of its documents. Guillermo’s ability to use the credential rested on the mismatch between the document’s official appearance and the identity it purported to certify. The story repeatedly makes identity dependent on files, seals, registers, and the possibility—or impossibility—of checking them. A forged paper can open a path through bureaucracy, but that same dependence on records also makes people vulnerable to systems that classify, pursue, or erase them.

A later contrast: state violence and erased identity

The novel’s account of Argentina’s military dictatorship presents a radically expanded and criminal use of state power. Before the 1976 coup, President María Estela Martínez de Perón’s decree of 5 February 1975 established Operativo Independencia, officially directed against guerrillas in Tucumán but used to divide the country into five military zones and authorize repression. The campaign terrorized civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious people. The novel presents it as a precursor to the dictatorship’s later methods, not as the same institution or situation as Republican wartime documentation.

From 1976 to 1982, the dictatorship made forced disappearance a central instrument of rule; the account estimates some thirty thousand victims, while noting that many bodies were never recovered. Clandestine task groups divided repression into specialized functions: kidnapping, secret detention, torture, execution, disposal of bodies, and the theft and reassignment of babies born to detained women. The death flights carried living, drugged prisoners in military aircraft and threw them into the sea. Here, administrative and clandestine structures do not provide a precarious route to safety, as forged papers do in Manuel and Guillermo’s story. They coordinate disappearance and concealment, attacking both the person and the evidence of what happened.

Across these episodes, the Republican Directorate-General of Security belongs to a broader narrative about the political force of identification. Its name lends credibility to papers that can be manipulated for survival; elsewhere, official and clandestine apparatuses turn classification into a means of persecution and erasure. The contrast lies not in treating all state systems as equivalent, but in showing how records and institutional procedures can serve opposing ends: making a threatened person pass unseen, or making a victim disappear without trace.