Between 500[1] and 4,000[2] civilian and military supporters of the Second Spanish Republic were murdered by the Nationalist forces[3] after the seizure of the town of Badajoz on August 14, 1936.

The Republican government had passed the Agrarian Reform Law, which gave peasant farmers, who were more than 50% of the active population, the right to become owners of the land that they worked.

In March 1936, labourers in the Badajoz region attempted to accelerate the implementation of the law by invading and occupying the farmlands in question.

[citation needed] After the outbreak of war, on the night of July 18–19 in Fuente de Cantos, 56 people were forced into a church, which was then set ablaze from outside.

The siege of the town was carried out by 2,250 Spanish legionarios, 750 Moroccan Regulares and five batteries of artillery under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe.

The final assault was made on the evening of August 14, after the city had been bombarded from both land and air (by German Junkers Ju 52) for most of the day.

Badajoz's recently reoccupied 18th-century walls were defended by 2,000 Republican militiamen and 500 regular soldiers, led by Colonel Ildefonso Puigdendolas.

[15] The same day, Yagüe ordered the confinement of all prisoners, most of them civilians, in the town's Bull Ring (Plaza de Toros), and he began executions there that night.

[citation needed] The American journalist Jay Allen, in his report in the Chicago Tribune, spoke of 1,800 men and women killed on the first night alone.

[23] One employee of the city council, interviewed by Francisco Pilo Ortiz, recalled:[24][25] The Guardia Civil came looking for us at three in the morning of the August 15, "because there was work to be done".... One of them said he would get the truck from the yard and that we had to go to the bull ring.... At half past three we arrived.

Among those executed were men and women who supported the Republic, workers, peasants, soldiers who took part in the battle, local authorities and those who were merely suspected of belonging to one of those categories.

[26] After the fall of the city, Mayor Sinforiano Madroñero and his deputy, Nicolás de Pablo, both Socialists, crossed the border into Portugal, but they were tracked down by agents of the Portuguese regime and handed over to the Nationalist troops, who executed them without trial in Badajoz on August 20.

[27] Afterwards, a testimony was published in La Voz (October 20, 1936), in the Republican-controlled Madrid, that the executions in the Bull Ring had been like a party for the executioners, with a crowd present, and that some of the victims had even been killed in the manner of bullfight (stuck in the back with bandillero lances) and mutilated.

In late August, as the Basque towns of Irun and Fuenterrabia were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the rebels dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had "dealt with" the people of Badajoz.

He wrote that he was a soldier used to combat, who has fought in France during World War I, but he has never seen such brutality and ferocity as that with which the African Expeditionary Force carried out their operations.

An investigation by the historian Francisco Espinosa has established a list of 1,341 names of victims of the Nationalists in the city of Badajoz,[33] but he said that was only a partial figure and that the true death toll may be higher.

[39] The Nationalists tried to conceal the massacre, but some journalists (Mário Neves, Rene Brut, Daniel Berthet, Marcel Dany and Jay Allen)[40] entered Badajoz after the seizure of the town and discovered the executions.