Spanish Guardia Civil

Gabriel,

I'm not trivializing anything. My family was not allowed to express itself in gallego. Some family spent over a year in a refugee camp in France. I'm simply saying that the agent's behavior was reminscent of the behavior that we experienced back then. Furthermore, since I was expressing myself in castellano, there was no way for him to be sure if I was a "foreigner". Needless to say, it shouldn't mater. And if you had problems in the US, it doesn't justify his behavior.
 
If you push film to say 1600 or higher does the x-ray machine still have an effect? To my uninformed opinion I would think that it would. Reason being you are developing the film past it's rating therefore any minimal x-ray exposure would be more prone to become visible. Opinions?
 
fgarciam said:
Gabriel lo menciono en su exposicion.
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Aclaración: dije que lo dicho trivializa, no que tú trivializas, la época Franquista. Suponer una acción de una persona no significa que todo un país está bajo el yugo de una dictadura, y hay que tener cuidado con tales declaraciones, pues especialmente para los extranjeros les dá soga de donde colgar estereotipos.

Si lo que escribí fué tomado personalmente, pido disculpas; sinceramente, ni en lo mas remoto fue mi objetivo el dirigirme así con nadie. Quise subrayar el error en el que caemos cuando hacemos este tipo de generalizaciones, y dí un poco de contexto para aquellos que obviamente no saben de donde provenía mi observación.

Tomando un poco de lo que ya dijo Beniliam, there are still some elements of years past that will come up time to time; apparently Spain is still undergoing growing pains, and it's great to hear that there is public pressure to weed out this sort of abuse of power. We could go into a deep social debate of the ills of the past, but that's just for another forum and another day, methinks.

Like I said before, there are a few bad apples everywhere, and those will stick out everywhere. I have seen some people complain about similar (not quite the same, but similarly "rude") incidents within the U.S. and there have been some rabid reactions from some individuals saying they'd rather have despotic guards in the name of safety. Despotism isn't safety.
 
No apology necessary. I understand what you say perfectly. I've fortunately never had an unpleasant episode with a police officer in the States. I did have a Policia Nacional point a machine gun in my direction in Santiago de Compostela years ago; all I was trying to do was get to a Biochemistry class. Maybe that's why I'm so sensitive.

Still, and not wanting to beat a dead horse, I think that any abuse of authority should be aired and never ignored.
 
In 1936, at the outbreak of the Civil War, there were about 32,000 Guardia Civil in Spain, of whom 18,000 sided with the Republicans and only 14,000 with the Nationalists (who eventually were led by Franco).

I think it really trivializes Franco's dictatorship. It was no mere dictatorship; he persecuted anybody who wasn't catholic, didn't speak "castellano" (he banned catalan, vasco --euskera--, you name it), in short, there were very few personal freedoms.
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Both sides committed atrocities. The Republicans persecuted anybody who was Catholic. They burned churches (destroying, in the process, the first known paintings by El Greco), killed priests, rounded up middle class people and gunned them down outside their villages. There never has been any revolution anywhere in the world that was accompanied by so much anti-religious violence as the Spanish Civil War. Besides, within their own ranks, the Republicans did not refrain from violence either, with Stalinist secret agents killing off anarchists, for instance.

All of which is, of course, a bit off topic, but I always like to see two sides get the blame they both deserve, not one.
 
Hear hear!

And to wash off with comic relief, I highly recommend "The Great Dictator", by Charlie Chaplin (well, it's not that funny, but it's good); I also like the "speech" at the end. So true now, it sounds as if it were written not very many years ago.
 
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Just a stroke of luck. At the moment I am reading "The Spanish Civil War" by Hugh Thomas. And that was caused by the fact that I recently read that Robert Capa made his famous Civil War photographs (like his D-Day shots) with a Contax II. I then realised that the only thing I knew about the Spanish Civil War was, well, that it happened in the Thirties. So I figured I had some reading to do.
 
Anyway, tragedies aside, the could stand to be a little nicer to tourists.

And with regards to comic relief, my father's first recollection of th events of July 18, 1936 was a carriage full of gypsies barreling into La Coruna. Someone in the street asked what was going on, to which one of the fellows in the carriage shouted, " No se, pero estan matando Guardia Civiles!" No love lost there.
 
Hi ppl.
I must disagree with most of you. I do beleive that everything must go tthru X-ray. How hard can it be to put some C-4 in 8 or 9 cannisters that could blow a hole in a plane? Do you think that and inspection could detect that without openning the cannisters? If you show a bag with 10 cannisters to a law officer does him inspect then 1 by 1? I know that x-ray machine is not the holy grail of security but it helps.
In a perfect world none of this would be necessary but nowadays....
Just my 2 cents....
 
pedro.m.reis said:
If you show a bag with 10 cannisters to a law officer does him inspect then 1 by 1?
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Hi Pedro! In my experience here in the U.S. the answer to that question is yes. And with some of them they carefully twirl the film spool to see if the film starts to go into the cannister...

 
peter_n said:
Hi Pedro! In my experience here in the U.S. the answer to that question is yes. And with some of them they carefully twirl the film spool to see if the film starts to go into the cannister...

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Ok ... maybe i'm wrong. nice to ear that. In my travels i've no experience since i only travel with my DSLR and the few times i went with film, used Velvia 50 or disposable camera, forgot to ask hand inspection but everything went ok.
 
That's why some people carry it concealed where the sun don't shine, if ya know what I mean. Should we X-ray people all the time now? Again, common sense is a high commodity, and black and white rules may be a guarantee of safety, but without common sense, the cost is just too high and misplaced.
 
These days I use a compromise, the 100 ASA films go thru X-Ray, 400 up goes in a bag for hand check, works pretty well. By splitting the films you show them that your request is for a reason, you can always throw in a TMZ 3200, as it says on the box "Do not X-ray".

Sometimes one has to pay a certain price for this service as the rest of the carry on luggage gets a hand search included for free! So in Lisbon film was fine, but the collapsing 50/2 Summitar on a Leica II f kept the guard busy.

In Germany they may open the canisters themselves or ask you to open them yourself, sometimes they close them and apologize for the inconvience, sometimes they just rush off after checking.

Generally Heinemann machines are save even for pushed 400 speed films, so if they refuse to do it and I see it is a Heinemann, fairly common in Europe, I do not insist on a hand check.

For luggage checks I recommend Japan, they are very polite.

Wolfram
 
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