Torture in Modern Spain

Abstract

This article analyses 1 how the modern notion of torture by the state (that is, the illegal infliction of pain by government agents, the police and within prisons) was constructed after legal, judicial torture was abolished in Spain, a process which spans the entire nineteenth century and culminates in the first decade of the twentieth. The starting point for this investigation involves a theoretical approach that links torture to institutional violence. This facilitates an understanding of its historicity and modernity which helps us grasp the historical construction of torture before it was defined and categorized as a crime. Before it became a tool for agitation and denunciation, a discourse capable of influencing the institutional agenda (government and judicial), the notion of torture had to be constructed out of experiences that gave it cultural and political significance. This study looks to a wide variety of sources (principally newspaper, judicial and legal), it uses specialized literature and treatises from the period in order to identify a punitive (police and prison) practice that went underground under old names (such as "tormento", "agravios" (wrongs) and "malos tratos") before coming to light. 2Three stages in the process through which torture become a tool for political denunciation are identified. The first decades of the nineteenth century, seen by some historians as the end of the era of judicial torture, was the first stage. At this time there was much controversy stemming from the penal and penitentiary treatment proposed in Enlightenment thought, which was to lead to the abolition of judicial torture and "los apremios" (any form of coercion used against the accused during their captivity). The sources that remain from this time, in turn, reveal something that has largely gone unnoticed: it was then, in 1812 and 1814, that the political foundations that would make it possible to define (and denounce) government torture in centres of captivity and detention were laid down. The conflict-ridden decades of the construction of the liberal state in Spain demarcate the second stage: in periods of great upheaval (especially in the 1830s and 1860s), reports and political (sometimes parliamentary) debates emerged, indicating the existence of police and penitentiary bad practice, that is, of

Formes et traitement médiatiques d’explorations

“…La « composante narrative » des controverses « peut être caractérisée comme une tension entre un "champ d'expérience" et un "horizon d'attente" » (Terzi et Bovet, 2005 : 116), déterminés par les activités des protagonistes et à l'orientation desquelles ils contribuent. Dans les exemples qui nous occupent, l'horizon d'attente se module distinctement du fait de l'époque à laquelle surgissent les « affaires » de torture : l'Espagne en chemin vers l'adoption d'institutions démocratiques versus l'Espagne démocratique qui ne parvient pas à se défaire de pratiques antiterroristes abusives et d'une « culture » policière héritée du franquisme (Martínez Martínez, 2008 ;Oliver Olmo, 2019, 2020Lorenzo, 2020).…”