Preliminary Programme

The Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) had sought to institutionalize itself so that the regime would outlive the dictator. One of the most crucial institutions for this goal was the police (the Policía Armada in the cities and the Guardia Civil in the countryside), which was strongly linked to the military and its officer corps staffed with stalwarts of the regime. As such, the police was, in principle and in practice, ideologically ill-suited for a democratic state and society. This situation was exacerbated by the phenomena of Basque terrorism, which frequently targeted police and military officers throughout the transition period, eventually leading some officers, like Civil Guard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, to attempt a coup d’état in February 1981. Yet, how widespread was dissatisfaction among the police with the transition by 1981? Moreover, how resistant (or not) were the police, in general, to political reform? How was the police eventually assimilated into new political order, despite relatively few changes in its structure and personnel? This paper seeks to examine police attitudes towards the transition up to the Police Law of 1986, both positive and negative, making some tentative comparisons with those held during Spain’s previous attempt at democracy in the 1930s. (Show less)

The Portuguese transition to democracy started with a coup d’état led by the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). This April 1974 “Revolution of the Carnations” put end to Europe’s longest dictatorship. Some historians have argued that police forces were Salazar’s and Caetano’s main political tools: the political police, the PIDE, had been the backbone of the dictatorship. Whilst police activities comprised a wide field of action, all police forces collaborated with the feared PIDE and openly expressed their support for the regime’s most contested policies: colonial war in Africa, moral traditionalism, and that there was no democratic opposition but rather foreign-led communist agitation. During the Revolution of the Carnations, while no police units took part in the military operations, they sided with the regime and were virtually the only forces that attempted to resist its overthrow. The Armed Forces Movement, in order to consolidate its power, dismantled PIDE and imprisoned its officers. Other police forces were ordered to remain in their headquarters and wait for “democratic” reorganisation.


During the two “revolutionary” years that followed, the six successive provisional governments did not exercise effective authority. How could they deal with “people’s” disruptive mobilizations (the occupation of factories and empty housing, land seizures, the sacking of political parties headquarters, etc.) if the people’s will gave legitimacy to the revolution and “repression” was the mark that stigmatized the overthrown “fascist” dictatorship? During the following months, the role of the police in a democratic society and the limits of state’s use of legitimate coercion were going to be two of the most contested issues. The democratic governments, in order to put and end to revolutionary disruption and exercise effective authority, had to strengthen and utilize the police forces at their disposal. They had also devise a new interpretation of which repressive practices of the dictatorship had been the mark of its “fascist” nature and which ones could simply be understood as the exercise of ordinary public order duties and disseminate these ideas to a population suspicious of the police. (Show less)