Its life was ephemeral since its activities lasted less than a year until it was dissolved by the republican authorities, pressured by the Communist Party of Spain, in August 1937.

The origins of the Regional Defence Council of Aragon are, for the most part, in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition of the Aragonese peasantry and the influence that the CNT enjoyed in this territory.

In the areas that theoretically remained under the jurisdiction of the Republic, those who really had the power were the militias that protected the revolutionary committees, almost all of them made up of anarchists who worked outside the Republican State.

The Plenary debated the proposed collaboration with the republican governing bodies, resolving to create, in the margin of the republican governments, Regional Defense Councils linked in a federated way to a National Defense Council, following the directives proposed on September 15, 1936 in Madrid by the National Plenary of the CNT.

Although it was not definitively legalized and regulated by the republican government until December 23, 1936, on the condition that other members of the Popular Front were represented in the administration of the Council.

From January 1937, the revolutionary character of the Council would be progressively diminished under pressure from the members of the government coalition, whose presence and number gradually increased.

In mid-February 1937 a congress, attended by 500 delegates representing 80,000 collectivists from Libertarian Aragon, was held in Caspe with the purpose of creating a regional Federation of Collectives.

Conservative historian Hugh Thomas argues that coal production in the Utrillas mines only reached one tenth of the pre-war figures.

[7] After the dissolution of the Council and the arrest of Ascaso, the Government appointed José Ignacio Mantecón as Governor General to manage the republican territory in the three Aragonese provinces.

For their part, the leaders of the CNT made every effort to prevent the executions of anarchists, but eventually accepted the dissolution of the "Council of Aragon" as a matter of fact.