The Archivo Histórico Provincial de Málaga does not have things of immediate interest to my research...but it does have things of interest.
I had a productive
Thursday, spending the morning in the Provincial Historical Archive
again and combing through personnel files of the cuerpos
de seguridad
which were useless to my research but quite amusing. I discovered
Nobby Nobbs levels of police corruption in one handwritten
transcription of the deposition of various complainants and one
guardia de vigilancia
charged with buying lottery tickets on credit from them and not
paying for the tickets throughout 1930-1931. He'd run up a tab of 50
pesetas to one lottery vendor and 45 to another before they finally
got up the courage to complain. (Since El ONCE
in
Spain is traditionally run as a charity for the blind, and the ticket
vendors were and are traditionally blind or visually impaired, this
falls into the category of taking money from a blind man's cup,
almost literally. One of the ticket sellers who complained added
specifically in his deposition that his only previous contact with
the police had been about precisely the theft of coins from his cup
and that at that time he had been “attended to courteously and
promptly” – suggesting that dealing with the shakedown guy who
didn't pay for tickets was an unpleasant surprise.) As I know from
reading several files, the annual salary for a guardia
de vigilancia
was 3500 pesetas, and for a blind ticket seller presumably
considerably less. So 50 pesetas could be a week's income from the
ticket seller, or at least a few days worth. (Say the equivalent of
about 150-200 euros.) Abusing authority that way seems sleazy, if
not actively criminal. The internal investigator apparently agreed,
since the deposition ends by saying that the accused was forced to
pay the amount he owed in the presence of witnesses.
