APPENDIX. The jigsaw puzzle of the search for Durruti’s body[785]

When Antonio de Senillosa was a deputy for the Democratic Coalition, he submitted a motion in Congress to compel the government to give documents seized in Catalonia during the civil war to the Generalitat. At the time, the San Ambrosio Archive in Salamanca held these important historical resources. The Minister of Culture supported the motion and said the following: “I’m in a position to promise that this slice of Catalonia’s history will be housed in Catalonia shortly.” Today, fifteen years later, the archival material has been recovered. However, the history of Durruti and Ascaso’s lives is not only in the archives, but also scattered throughout Spain. Among other places, it is in Barcelona’s South-East Cemetery.

ERASING HISTORY

We will begin by identifying questions that must be asked to Barcelona’s city councilors and Mayor Pascual Maragall to find out where Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso’s remains are. The former was provisionally buried on November 22, 1936 in Small Grave number sixty-nine in the San Juan Bautista Way, Ninth Agrupación. The latter was buried (also provisionally) on July 21, 1936 in the rented wall tomb number 3,344, tier four, in Sin Vía.

We must first wonder about the absence of one thousand wall tombs in San Olegario Way, Division Five: the tombs go from one to 4,999 and then jump to 6,000. It is a strange coincidence that Domingo Ascaso Abadía, killed during events of May 1937, was buried in wall tomb 5,817, according to cemetery management. What should one think? Was there a deal to make those tombs vanish? Was there an attempt to erase history?

History can help us recover history: we will see the context that frames our inquiry.

As mentioned, Durruti was buried on November 22, 1936 in Small Grave number sixty-nine. This grave had been empty since 1905, when it was given to the Barcelona City Council. The City Council ceded it to the Catalan Militias, who would own it in perpetuity.

It is logical that the CNT and FAI buried Durruti and Ascaso in a mausoleum dedicated to their memories. The mausoleum was unveiled in November 1937 and the two were symbolically joined to Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, who had been executed in a ditch near the mausoleum on October 13, 1909. On November 23, 1937, Barcelona’s Solidaridad Obrera reported on the ceremony held in Durruti’s honor at his grave. The printed photo does not show Small Grave number sixty-nine but the mausoleum. On November 22, 1938, the same newspaper recorded a second public commemoration of Durruti’s legacy. Umbral magazine devoted two pages of text to the event and published several photos. One shows García Oliver and Ricardo Sanz; the latter, Lieutenant Colonel of the 26 ^th division (formerly the Durruti Column), is speaking to those gathered around the mausoleum. They are standing with their backs to the sea on the Igualdad esplanade of what was then known as the Civil Cemetery and today is called the San Carlos Way protestant grounds.

THE CONFUSION OF THE MAUSOLEUMS

One of the photos shows a funeral wreath interwoven with a banner inscribed “The 26 th Division to Durruti, 20-XI-1938.” The wreath rests on a triangle shaped wall, which was surely made of the same material as the tombs and on which there must have been an inscription etched in memory of the three men. Presently, as any visitor can see, the wall in question no longer exists and the three smooth tombs are quite anonymous. Civil or military authorities must have ordered the demolition of the wall after Barcelona’s occupation on January 26, 1939.

In 1966, after researching Durruti’s tomb, we learned that one could see a document in the cemetery office that ordered the management to do the following: “Erase anything from the graves of anarchist and Catalanist leaders that could attract people’s attention, especially from Buenaventura Durruti’s tomb, which is there. Security guards, appointed for this purpose, must prevent all visits to those graves and detain anyone who expresses the desire to see them.” Was the wall demolished then? Everything suggests that this was the case. And that is how we concluded the final chapter of our biography of Durruti.

Concluded? Perhaps a story was only beginning.

Several months ago, we set off for the South-East Cemetery and requested information about where Buenaventura Durruti and Francisco Ascaso are buried from cemetery management. An employee, with book in hand, was about to attend to us when another staff person entered the office and asked what we wanted to know. We repeated the question. He pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his overalls that contained typed information about Francesc Macià, Luis Companys, Buenaventura Durruti, and Francisco Ascaso.

EMPTY TOMBS

“The tombs that you’re looking for are in the San Carlos Way protestant grounds, toward the upper left. The three tombs are identical and have no markings. But Durruti, Ascaso, and Ferrer’s remains aren’t there... The tombs are empty.”

That is extremely strange, we thought.

“Why are you sending us there if they’re empty?”

“Those are our orders,” the employee responded without hesitation.

“Then where are their bodies?” we insisted.

“They told me that Durruti’s compañera took his remains when the war ended,” he said.

We knew that was false. Emilienne Morin, Durruti’s compañera, went to France in 1937 and hadn’t returned.

“Isn’t there any more information about Durruti or Ascaso?” we insisted again.

“There’s nothing more than what’s written in the book.” The employee reflected for a moment and then said: “What I’m doing with you today would have been impossible some years ago.”

The cemetery record book contains the following information:

Francisco Ascaso, buried on July 21, 1936 in the wall tomb number 3,344, tier four of Sin Vía. Owner not recorded. Transferred to Osario General on March 8, 1940.

Buenaventura Durruti, buried on November 22, 1936 in Small Tomb number sixty-nine of San Juan Bautista Way, Ninth Agrupación. Owner: The Catalan Militias. On July 15, 1947 Mrs. Clara Vicente Boada was buried in the tomb [Curiously, Durruti was born on July 14, 1896]. No body was present on the cited date.

The book says nothing about the whereabouts of Buenaventura Durruti’s remains.

In passing, we want to point out another strange coincidence: next to the Small Tomb there is wall tomb number fourteen, which the Alonso Cuevillas Carcaño family owns. Carcaño was a false name that Durruti used in 1925 when he fled to Buenos Aires while Chilean police were chasing him.

WHERE ARE THEY?

Durruti’s remains have disappeared: they are not in the so-called official tombs of the cemetery nor were they in the Small Tomb on July 15, 1947, when Mrs. Clara Vicente Boada was buried there. Then where is Durruti’s corpse? The Barcelona City Council has the power to order an investigation of the issue, which naturally would have to include the cemetery ditch where nameless victims of the repression fell... That is also part of history. If, as the record book states, Durruti was buried on November 22, 1936 and no later entries indicate that he was transferred—there are such entries for Francisco Ascaso—this would imply that Durruti’s cadaver is still in Small Tomb sixty-nine. Then why was Mrs. Clara Vicente Boada’s burial authorized? There is one of two possibilities: either the tomb was known to be empty or his body was removed. In the later case, where did it go? Or, if the tomb was empty, that could suggest that his remains were moved with Ascaso’s in November 1937 to the mausoleum. Then why does the cemetery employee say that they aren’t there?

A MYSTERY

Mystery lovers now have another one to enjoy, thanks to those that envelop Durruti’s death. We could call it “unburied corpse,” like the title of some dime-store horror story.

Afterword [786]

One hundred years have passed since the birth of José Buenaventura Durruti Domínguez. He is a principal figure of Spanish anarchism and thus the last 150 years of our history. Indeed, despite all the attempts to undervalue and dismiss the extensiveness, persistence, and deep-rootedness of anarchist ideas in our society, anyone who explores our most recent past will note the presence of men and women who have embraced libertarian ideas.

1. Why a new edition

The republication of Abel Paz’s Durruti is both important and timely. The book first appeared in France nearly twenty-five years ago and, since then, readers around the world have enjoyed it in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese, and of course French. Today it is very difficult to find copies of the 1978 Spanish edition or even the revised version published eight years later. [787] For that reason alone, the release of a new edition is very laudable, particularly one that has been revised and contains an updated bibliography. The Spanish public will now have the same easy access to Paz’s book that readers in many other countries presently enjoy.

But there are at least two additional reasons why this new edition is so valuable: first, it will help us recover one of the most distinguished figures of Spanish anarchism; and, second, it will help us reframe historical debates about the 1930s in Spain.

Anarchists reject the cult of the leader and even the representation of their ideals. As Agustín García Calvo notes, anarchists warn against inciting people’s need for images and idols. While this biography is not an attempt to mythologize Durruti or elevate him to the pantheon of illustrious sons who died for the homeland or the revolution, there is no need to forget individuals who, due to their personal qualities or the particular circumstances in which they happened to live, can represent thousands of anonymous men and women and embody historical moments that merit recollection in opposition to the official history advanced by power. This has added significance in the present social context, when it is so important to defy the harassment of power structures that feel so sure of themselves, despite their feet of clay. As an instrument of struggle, as an element of resistance against the prevailing disinformation, this edition of Durruti in the Spanish Revolution appears. Buenaventura Durruti’s biography is not like the biography of a king or politician, who owes his place in peoples’ memories due to events that are distant from their daily lives. To use an example, today people remember Manuel Azaña more for his involvement in the assassination of peasants and his counterrevolutionary efforts during the 1936–1939 war than for his contributions to satisfying hopes for reform held by broad sectors of the population after the proclamation of the Second Republic or for pushing the social transformations experienced during the military conflict. There is a well-known anecdote about the Madrid politician’s disdain for the Aragón Defense Council, which included his old chauffeur. [788] Beyond the particular vicissitudes of his life, Durruti’s biography is the biography of countless revolutionary Spaniards who gave everything to the struggle for a more just society. By remembering Durruti, we recall all the others who are no less significant, even if unknown. This anarchist from León is not important because he was exceptional, but because he was one among many. That is precisely why the state was so devoted to manipulating his legacy—to betray all that he defended—and why his name figured in so many public scandals.

Abel Paz has divided his work into sections that reflect the stages the Spanish people passed through in their struggle emancipate themselves. First, there is the rebelliousness in the years following the First World War. After the economic explosion and the enrichment of Spain’s financial elites, these elites again demonstrated their egoism by failing to invest their enormous profits into modernizing the country’s productive capacity and by fighting unions that hoped to preserve the previous years’ labor victories. They did so with bands of pistoleros led by sinister men like Arlegui, Martínez Anido, Manuel Bravo Portillo, and Baron de Koning.

Durruti’s rebellion is the rebellion of the Spanish people who did not accept the peripheral role assigned to them. After being betrayed by politicians and Socialists in 1917, Primo de Rivera’s coup in 1923 put a limit on the public rebellion, but only a limit, because their resistance continued. The people were buried, exiled, and abandoned by their supposed class comrades like the Socialists, who even collaborated with the dictatorship. Despite everything, the rebellion continued. These were years of police harassment, unsuccessful uprisings, like the one in Vera de Bidasoa, and even the appearance of doubts among old militants like Angel Pestaña or Juan Peiró.

Contrary to expectations, the Spanish people’s radical spirit resurged powerfully after the proclamation of the Republic in April 1931. Like Durruti, the Spanish proletariat was becoming militant. Revolutionary organizations were reborn with dizzying speed, most notably the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). Its rebirth not only disrupted the Republicans and Socialists’ plans to set up a merely formal democratic regime, but also laid the foundations for the popular response to the 1936 military uprising.

The CNT illuminated the Republican regime’s failure to solve or even confront the country’s social and economic problems. It exposed the contradiction of a group of rulers brought to power to effect profound social reforms—in agriculture, religion, and military affairs, etc—but who were incapable of doing so and quickly resorted to the traditional methods of Spanish power—repression and exile—in reply to the resurgent anarcho-syndicalists.

Authorities treated social discontent as a criminal problem and cultural, religious, and psychological transformations as subversions of the “natural social order.” This caused the Republican regime to lose the support of most of the working class as well as the bourgeoisie. There were candidates during the very first Republican parliamentary elections in June 1931 who denounced the “official” parties’ betrayal of the Republican ideals of Jaca, of Fermín Galán and García Hernández.

The militant Durruti was among the thousands of CNT activists who kept anarchism alive, despite the failures and government oppression. It is thanks to their perseverance that Spanish libertarian organizations were able to transform what began as a military coup into a social revolution in 1936. When that occurred, Durruti and the other CNT members stopped being militants and became revolutionaries, dedicated to the construction of the new world that they carried in their hearts.

Durruti fought with thousands of anarchists in 1936 to ensure that nothing would be the same again. It is these revolutionaries who represent Durruti’s last months: the so-called “uncontrollables” who patrolled Spanish cities days before the coup, ready to confront the soldiers; those, later caricatured, who didn’t hesitate to go fight Franco’s troops and in many cases gave their lives; those who believed that utopia lived and never forgot it, despite defeat, torture, execution, and exile. Durruti’s biography is all of theirs. His death is theirs too. Durruti’s demise marked the disappearance of the revolutionary impulse of July 1936, embodied in the courageous militants who were isolated, attacked, and despised by so many, even parts of the CNT and FAI bureaucracy. And the obscure circumstances of his death are those of the dissolution of the revolutionary process: the replacement of the militias by a so-called Popular Army, the dismantlement of the new institutions of power and the reconstitution of the old governmental bodies, the eradication of the agrarian collectives and self-managed industries, and, finally, the replacement of revolutionary enthusiasm with the patient passivity of men subjected to war.

After a mass funeral, Durruti’s embalmed body escaped, just like the hopes of the thousands who accompanied him on his “final voyage.” Where did he go? Like the revolutionary hopes, no one knows. Are they waiting for better times to reappear? Perhaps, but such times do not emerge magically: rebels, militants, and revolutionaries are not born by immaculate conception. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution is not a book by a hired pen. Its author is both a protagonist of many of the events described and an independent, self-taught historian of them. And he isn’t a literary novice, nor was he when he began to write the work. He learned the writer’s trade from multiple angels, whether as a contributor to the libertarian press or as a typographical worker.

Far from literary or academic circles, he had to write Durruti without the comforts of the former or the amenities of the latter. Nonetheless, since it first appeared, this book has become an essential tool for comprehending and learning about Durruti as well as Spain in first third of the twentieth century. In fact, its influence has been so pervasive that Abel Paz can justly complain that “specialists” have taken information from his work without crediting the source.

Abel Paz’s biography is valuable not only because of the depth of his research, but also because of his ability to paint a historical fresco in which Buenaventura Durruti’s personality stands out in rich detail. This is possible because the author does not conceal his political convictions or try to hide behind a so-called historical “objectivity.” And yet his work is more “objective” than many that presume to be so on the basis of a false naturalism. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution enjoys an internal coherence that many university professors could only hope to imitate.

Although one may disagree with his views, no one can say that he manipulates the facts. He possesses an indisputable personal consistency, whether he is Diego Camacho, Ricardo Santany, Abel Paz, or using any of the other names that he has acquired during his life. He has written four autobiographical works that explore his own life up to the middle of the 1950s and I cannot resist extracting some brush strokes from them in order to help the reader get to know the author. [789]

2. From Diego Camacho to Abel Paz, passing through Ricardo Santany

Our author was born in Almería in the mid-August 1921 and named Diego Camacho. The child of workers, his infancy transpired in summer heats cooled with gazpacho drinks and countless hours spent pondering the sun and the stars. His first educational experiences occurred when stories were read to him near the fireplace and when an elderly shopkeeper taught him to read and write. Later, in Barcelona, he joined the Natura rationalist school. His adolescence unfolded while he received lessons there and also read in the library of the libertarian ateneo in the El Clot neighborhood. [790] He also attended the “school of life,” where the subjects were the libertarian insurrections of 1933, soccer matches, and visions of prostitutes at dusk in the Campo del Sidral. By fourteen, Diego was enjoying excursions with the Sol y Vida group and belonged to the CNT’s Manufacturing and Textile Workers’ Union and the clandestine Libertarian Youth of El Clot.

At 4:00 am on July 19, 1936, he heard hundreds of industrial sirens alert the city to the beginning of the military uprising and saw the barricades start to appear. Then there was gunfire, the horns sounding the rhythm “CNT, CNT, CNT,” an attack on a church, and the first burning of money. The revolution had been launch and the teenage Diego Camacho was squarely in its track. He slept peacefully at the end of that day of revolutionary festival and, when he awoke, contemplated the profound metamorphoses: in the means of production, which the factory committees had seized immediately; in the barricades dominating the city; and also in the people’s mentality. A few days later he joined the anarchist group Orto and worked with thousands of other Barcelona residents to build a new society.

Like many residents of El Clot, he learned of the creation of the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias when Federica Montseny explained it to them while she stood on a pile of bricks. At the time, he didn’t see the danger of the CNT and FAI committees working on their own. The important thing was to consolidate the revolution outside of Barcelona by filling the ranks of the militia columns that were preparing to go to Aragón; to occupy the seminary on Diputación Street for the Popular University; and organize the libertarian ateneo in his district. Everything in revolutionary Barcelona followed its own path. It was turbulent, but it worked. Nothing could obstruct the marvelous chaos in which—without orders or a pre-determined plan—transport functioned, food was distributed, and factory and workshop expropriations spread.

Diego Camacho and other youth formed a group dedicated to fighting what they saw as increasing reformism within the CNT. They called themselves the Quijotes del Ideal (Quixotes of the Ideal). Everything had gone so fast; the Quijotes felt overwhelmed by events, but not defeated. Diego will never forget his conversation with Ramón Juvé—an “old” anarchist of somewhat more than thirty years in age—around the time of Durruti’s funeral. The revolution, he explained, was more than Buenaventura, more than the CNT and the FAI: it was what the workers, anarchist or not, had done during the July days. To have lived through that was something marvelous that no one could ever take away from him.

The counterrevolution was operating at full speed by early 1937: the militias had been militarized, the Communists had initiated their methodological struggle against the anarchists, and the prolongation of the war started to wear on the population. In addition to being one of the revolution’s “uncontrollables,” Diego began an apprentice in a boilermakers’ workshop and matured personally during this time. He spent a week immersed in the “May days,” which occurred when the Stalinists decided to finally rid themselves of the troublesome Trotskyists and anarchists. When the conflict was over, Diego felt that the anarchists had been vanquished. He was arrested for the first time shortly afterwards. Although he was released without any problem, it was not a good time for a CNTista to fall into the police’s hands. In October 1937, when Líster’s Communist troops had already invaded the collectives in Aragón, our author set off for an agrarian collective in Cerviá, in the Lérida province. There he learned firsthand how the peasants had carried out the collectivizations, the mistrust they felt for city people, and how hard it is to gather olives. He also witnessed the changes in customs, how the collective regime transformed the agrarian mindset, the youths’ efforts to educate themselves, and the new role that women began to play. Diego Camacho stayed in this largely moneyless world until the spring of 1938. When he returned to Barcelona, he found an alien city and a libertarian movement descending into executivism. They were difficult times, of the “fall of the idols,” of retreat, hunger, and the advances of Franco’s troops. But they were also months of romance and evening cinema.

Defeat seemed inevitable in the beginning of 1939. Diego Camacho woke up in the early hours of January 21 to the news that Franco’s troops were about to enter the city. He raced around in chaos, burning documents and organizing the evacuation. The following day was hell. Franco’s air force dropped endless bombs. There was panic everywhere. At nightfall on January 25 our author boarded a truck requisitioned at gunpoint and set off for France with his compañera, mother, and two brothers.

The caravan heading toward the border was a poignant symbol. Soldiers and civilians mixed with one another, making it clear that the conflict had not been between two armies but between two social classes. Yet what began as a revolution had become a war. At the end of the month, Diego Camacho and thousands of others milled around the French border post in La Junquera, hoping that authorities would allow them to enter the country. When that occurred in early February, he faced a period of humiliations. Although no one had expected the French Popular Front government to welcome the avalanche of Spanish refugees with open arms, few imagined the treatment that authorities would dispense to them. As soon as they crossed the border, police separated the men from the women and children. They robbed them of their valuables and then interned them in concentration camps that were being constructed on nearby beaches.

They transferred Diego to the Saint Cyprien camp. He arrived after dark and spent his first night there on a bed of sand, with the sky as a blanket, and hundreds of lice as companions. Survival was possible in the camp, like later in Argelès-sur-Mer, because of the solidarity and mutual aid that existed among the internees. While much has been written about how the refugees suffered, there is little about their high level of solidarity. It was thanks to this that they had shelter and the capacity to stay informed about what was happening on the outside. This was how they learned that Franco had taken Madrid and that the war was about to end.

Although he had thought his time in the camp would be brief, days passed and nothing changed. Correspondence became vital, as a means of locating loved ones and also for expressing feelings and ideas. Authorities sent Diego Camacho to a new camp in May: Barcarès. There he received a package with clothes and toiletries and learned about the signing of the German-Russian Non-aggression Pact and the division of Poland between the two countries. After enduring Communist accusations that anarchists were traitors for so long, it was now time for the “Chinese,” as Communists were known by Spanish libertarians, to suffer the charge. A new worry soon cast a shadow over the future: with the beginning of hostilities in Europe, the French government initiated an increasingly aggressive policy of enrolling them in work companies or the Foreign Legion.

Diego was in the Bram camp in the Aude by late 1939. In February 1940, authorities compelled him and his friend Raúl Carballeira to labor as construction workers on a pipeline. Supplied with rubber boots and black raincoats, they traveled in a freight car to Chateau-Renault, a small town of Indre-Loire. There, thanks to the generosity of some old Spanish emigrants, he slept in a bed with clean sheets for the first time in more than a year. News arrived daily suggesting that the French army would be unable to hold back the Germans. He was not surprised when people fleeing the German advance inundated the road where he was working in the middle of June 1940. It was like Spain in January 1939. The difference was that they lacked an awareness of why they fleeing: all they knew was they faced a future of struggle. That was the case for Diego, either against the Germans or attempting to reenter Spain. He arrived in Bordeaux on June 26, two days before the Germans. Once again he lived a refugee’s life: sleeping outdoors and cooking over open air fires. Our author took on a French-sounding name to claim a subsidy given to refugees by the French government. This was the first time that Diego Camacho assumed a new identity: he was now Jacques Kamatscho. Coexistence with the German occupiers was not so bad at first: they were more interested in the Spaniards as a cheap source of labor than experienced enemies with nothing to lose. But he was living from hand to mouth, so it wasn’t difficult for his compañera to convince him to go to Boussais, in the Deux Sévres district, where her sisters lived.

He enjoyed a bucolic country life there until the end of July, when police arrested them and loaded them onto a train headed for Spain. He fled en route. He again began wandering around that “Court of Miracles” that was occupied Gironde. In October, the Germans sent him to work on the “wall of the Atlantic.” He was in a concentration camp again. After collecting his first payment, he gave the slip to the guards and boarded a train to Bordeaux.

He discarded all his papers on the way and decided that he would be Juan González from then on. With that name, he experienced the increasing German pressure on the Spanish refuges, particularly after the first assault against the occupying forces in early 1941.

In March, he went to Marseilles for the CNT on a mission to contact the comrades in the free zone. In the great Mediterranean port city, the CNT provided him with identity documents and some money by means of the Mexican embassy. Within a few days, he secured lodging in a house on the outskirts of the city where Mexicans sheltered Spanish refugees before they went to the Americas. In the beginning of summer 1941, he went to Grenoble to work as a builder. During this time, Hitler ended his alliance with Stalin and invaded Russia.

The work consisted of building a dam in the Isére River. There, in a cable car, he felt what it was like to fly for the first time. He was nearly twenty years old. Several months later he received a letter from his friend Raúl Carballeira. He was in the Argelès camp and feared that they were going to ship him to the Algerian desert to work on the Trans-Saharan railroad. He asked him for funds to help him escape. Diego immediately sent him money and a note saying: “I will be present at your sister’s wedding.” Both intended to cross the border and secretly reenter Spain.

He went back to Marseilles but authorities arrested him before he could leave for Spain. He began writing a semi-autobiographical novel while imprisoned in the Chavez jail in Ródano. It was a way to escape reality, to live as little as possible, to pass the time. In March 1942, he was tried and sentenced to three months in prison for falsifying official documents. When he finished his sentence, authorities interned him in a Center for Foreigners while waiting to send him to Mexico. However, in April they transferred him to a work company toiling in salt mines in Istres. It was actually an extermination camp and he escaped the very night of his arrival. He went back to Marseilles, where he reunited with his friends Raúl and Javier Prado. Together they went to Toulouse to finish organizing the trip to Spain. They met Francisco Ponzán there, who helped them with the border passage. He gave them two blank, Spanish safe-conduct passes and twenty-five pesetas. On June 1, 1942, Diego and Liberto Sarrau took off for the border, which they crossed the following day. They didn’t do so as Diego Camacho and Liberto Sarrau, but as Ricardo Santany Escámez and Víctor Fuente. The first of the two was twenty-one years old and had already spent more than three years in exile.

The first thing he noticed about Franco’s Spain was that you had to tip the Auxilio Social to eat in the cafes and that nobody walked arm-in-arm. His contacts in Barcelona told him about the pervasive repression and the terror that had overcome even the hardest militants. Diego and his friend felt that if their lives had been completely mad in France, Spain was more like Dante’s Inferno. Even the word had become an empty, mechanical gesture. An intense smell of moral and physical misery saturated everything. Four months later Ricardo (Diego) and Victor separated. Ricardo found a lover, got a job as a construction worker, and reunited with his family.

Authorities arrested him in December and he learned first-hand about the treatment generously doled out in Franco’s police stations. They charged him with disarming a night watchman and transferred him to the Modelo prison, where he joined the prison organization made up by the thousands of libertarian inmates there and learned how to play chess with pieces of bread. He went to trial in March 1942 and received a prison sentence of six years. He was one of the lucky ones: while incarcerated, he witnessed the execution of Joaquín Pallarés, Bernabé Argüelles, Esteban Pallarols, Justo Bueno Pérez, Luis Latorre, and many others. The beast was insatiable.

The months consisted of prison routines and punishments, compulsory mass, and bad food. But there were also small joys and, beginning in 1943, hopes for an allied victory. Those hopes faded when the victors made it clear that they would rather have the tranquility of Franco’s cemeteries than attempt to restore the Republic or even the monarchy, which would return Spain to the conflicts of 1936. In the summer of 1943, authorities transferred him to the Burgos penitentiary. One of his most difficult years in prison was 1945. The reality of Spain’s abandonment and six months of solitary confinement followed the excitement of the landing on Normandy. He was transferred to the Gerona prison in the middle of 1946. Prison officials assigned him to work in the offices there and, shortly afterwards, informed him that they had discovered an error in his file and that he was entitled to request parole.

He waited for parole throughout March 1947. It was a hard month: he had nightmares, anxiety attacks, and became a chronic smoker. He finally left prison on the afternoon of Sunday, April 13. He had entered at twenty-one and was nearly twenty-six when he got out. It was spring and, although they had robbed him of more than five years of his youth, Ricardo felt reborn. But he would not be free when he turned twenty-six: the prison gates again shut behind him only 114 days later. But before that happened, he spent time with some family members. He also spoke with a comrade who told him about the demoralization caused by the allies’ abandonment, explained the breakup of the CNT’s unions, and urged him to go into exile. But Ricardo wasn’t ready to leave Spain. He took on a new identity once more: a few days later, with the help of his friend Liberto Sarrau, he became the Falangist Luis García Escámez from Grenada. García soon left for Madrid, with the goal of filling a position in the Peninsular Committee of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL).

The Puerta del Sol was the first site he visited in the Spanish capital. He wanted to see the exterior of its old Casa de Correo. This was the General Office of Security at that time, whose cells he would eventually get to know. Afterwards, he met his Committee comrades: Juan Gómez Casas, José Pérez, and Juan Portales. He stayed temporarily in Portales’s home. He took on the mission of coordinating the production of propaganda on a press that they financed with counterfeit money brought in from France. The first issue of Juventud Libre as well as propaganda against the July 1947 referendum was printed on the machine. One day in June, he saw General Franco visiting the Velázquez Palace. He always regretted not having a pistol with him. Franco should not be allowed to die in bed. If he did, the spirit of resistance that inspired his opponents would also perish.

The Peninsular meetings of the FAI and FIJL took place in mid-July. There were reports of a treasure hidden in Barcelona and so off to Barcelona Ricardo Santany went at the end of the month. Police arrested him when he went to see the flat in which the money was supposedly hidden after a neighbor complained to authorities about the strange visits they were receiving.

The brief interval of freedom came to a close. They kept him in the Barcelona’s Police Headquarters for twelve days and then shipped him to the Modelo prison on August 17. He had turned twenty-six a few days earlier. It was another five years of incarceration: the prison routine, the meddling priests, and the many humiliations. But he also experienced the solidarity among the inmates again and the discussions about the course of the libertarian organizations. He will always remember June 26, 1948. Police shot down his friend Raúl Carballeira in Montjuich that day. These were years of watching the CNT decline. Its activity had diminished because the state had bled it with endless arrests, because it had failed to resolve the internal conflict between the moderates and radicals, and especially because it hadn’t advanced a strategy that was in tune with the times, in which a new generation of Spaniards who had not known the war was entering the arena.

In March 1949, someone tried to assassinate Eduardo Quintela, the head of Barcelona’s Social-Political Squad. While conducting interrogations to find out who was responsible, authorities began to pull people out of prison, including our author. They brought him to Police Headquarters, questioned him, and threatened him with the “ ley de fugas.” One morning shortly afterwards they dragged him into a Barcelona field and simulated an execution. He never knew if the event had been a charade or if rivalries between Barcelona and Madrid police had saved his life. Whatever the case, Diego was renewed that day. They returned him to the Modelo prison later that month. Doctors soon diagnosed him with a “pulmonary injury”—tuberculoses— and remanded him to the prison infirmary until he was tried, sentenced, and shipped off to the prison anti-tuberculosis sanatorium in Cuéllar, in the Segovia province.

Christmas of 1950 was the most difficult of those that he spent in prison. In 1951, only news of the strikes in Barcelona lifted his spirits. But, still, nothing could change the fact that the workers’ organizations and guerrillas were exhausted. All that remained was desperation, and the hope that despair would somehow produce a conscious force that could take the struggle to its conclusion. At the end of the year, he learned that he could obtain parole if he acquired a guarantor. He had to get rid of a note in his file that indicated that he should be in government custody when released. In January 1952, he managed to have that damned document “misplaced.” He began another long wait, which ended on April 28. That Sunday, he left for Porcuna, Jaén, where he had found someone to sign for him. He was thirty-one years old and had spent his young adulthood in prison.

In Jaén, he was able to convince authorities to change his residence to Barcelona. It wasn’t easy for him to find work there at first, but CNT groups from the Food Workers’ Union helped him get a job in the Moritz beer factory and, later, with the publisher Sopena. The organization asked him to “stay in the shadows” so that he could carry out a “job.” In the meantime, he spent months reading and studying in the “Aurora” house. He met Carlos M. Rama during this period and watched the CNT continue to distance itself from the new generation born under Franco, while the Communists played a dual game of armed opposition and infiltration into the Confederación Nacional de Sindicatos, and also tried to recruit the “sons of the victors.” Spain was also beginning to see the economic benefits of tourism and immigration.

Ricardo Santany took on the responsibility of representing the CNT within Spain at the AIT Congress and the International Plenary of groups in exile held in Toulouse. He secretly left for France on June 25. He began using the name Luis García again and had some conflicts with the exiled CNT. The source of the dispute lay in the exiled comrades’ unrealistic view of the organization in Spain: they disregarded its decline as well as the need for a re-organization plan that would enable it to respond to the country’s new conditions.

During the AIT congress, he learned that Spanish police had requested his extradition for transporting explosives and thus he ruled out returning to Spain. He stayed in the CNT’s office in Toulouse, where he began to compile information about the underground life of Spanish libertarians and also write for CNT newspapers. In October 1953 he went to Brezolles in the Eure et Loire district, where the French police had established his residence. He began working as an unskilled laborer in a construction company there. In late November, the CNT asked him to go back to Barcelona to set up a printing press. He accepted and was in Spain by the beginning of December. He completed his task before the year was over, traveled to Madrid to speak with the CNT National Committee, and then returned to France.

Ricardo Santany disappeared in the fog during his exile. Years later Abel Paz was born, the author of Durruti in the Spanish Revolution and many other works, some published and others still unpublished. All his books focus on the libertarian world, just like the speeches he has given in countries like Italy, Australia, and Japan. All his efforts revolve around spreading the libertarian ideal. It is to swim against the tide, like the libertarian world in historical studies.

3. Anarcho-syndicalism in the history of the Second Republic and the 1936–1939 war

A significant portion of contemporary Spanish historical literature emerged from a specific moment—the 1970s and the establishment of the present regime [791] —and suffered from problems typical of the period, such as the lack of intellectual debate in the country and the poor organization of academic programs. [792] However, these difficulties did not stop an enormous number of works from being released, especially since the publishing activity of municipal and provincial bodies peaked. Although it is an important means of diffusion, works printed by these entities have not always achieved adequate distribution or quality.

Historians had a significant role to play during this time of accelerated change and when new social and political structures were being born: their task was to establish historical memory and set up standards of political legitimacy that would buttress the system being constructed. It is not accidental that studies of the workers’ movement predominated among the pieces released, although there were also significant works on electoral sociology, like those by Javier Tusell. It was during this period that many important studies appeared on one of the taboo subjects of Franco’s regime: the Second Republic and the so-called Civil War. [793]

Historians’ opinions were taken into account, and some actually participated in politics. Their job was to provide an intellectual justification for the emerging democracy in a society that had seen the dictator die in bed. It was necessary to replace the rancid, anti-liberal historiography characteristic of Franco’s regime with a new, social one. Researchers focused on two major topics: the role of Spanish society in the thirties (relevant as an example of the democracy that people now aspired toward) and the causes and course of the civil conflict (which had been the origin of the dictatorial regime).

As noted historian Julián Casanova indicated, there was a need for a new conceptual apparatus. [794] The discussion began in the second half of the 1970s and was bolstered by debates in other countries on topics such as the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the bourgeois revolutions. It was then that Marxist methodology lodged itself in Spanish historical studies. It was a Marxism more connected to the West, primarily to British Marxist historiography and the Annales school, than to the historical sciences in the officially Communist world. This fact is important to bear mind in order to understand the fate of Spanish anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism in the historical literature.

These overwhelmingly young and “progressive” historians enthusiastically set out to scrutinize the inner workings of the Republican regime, document the vicissitudes of the proletarian organizations, and analyze the trajectory of the armed conflict. It was during this time that what today are seen as historical truths emerged. They ended up establishing a consensus—another concept closely linked to the 1970s—that stressed the democratic role of the Republican government, as a promoter of the country’s modernization, and characterized the so-called Civil War as a conflict fought in defense of those bourgeois, democratic values.

Historians found the conclusion they were looking for: they argued that pressure from right and leftwing extremists prevented the Republican regime from instituting its reforms. This pressure inevitably resulted in the fratricidal struggle that stained the Iberian soil with blood for nearly three years and brought Spain into the long tunnel from which was just then beginning to emerge.

The 1936–1939 conflict was a perfect field for applying a schema that was very attractive at the time. Those we might call the bad guys of the film were perfectly drawn: a rightwing prepared for a coup—including the landowners, who opposed all economic rationalization and were dedicated to drinking sherry, courting young women, and increasing the use of wide brim hats and short jackets. And the anarcho-syndicalists, bad guys as well, who manipulated ignorant, millenarian peasants and launched revolutionary movements that had no chance of success.

In the 1970s and 1980s, like now, the memory of the 1936–1939 war served as an antidote to any attempt to question the new regime consolidating itself. The televised speech that Prime Minister Felipe González gave on the eve of the NATO referendum is a perfect example. His dualistic formulation, “either me or chaos,” revived the most bloody and familiar demons. Given the instability of times, it was useful to point to, and establish as a historical truth, the image of a moderate Republic destroyed by extremists. But by doing so, historians began to dig their own graves without realizing it: they were set aside once they accomplished their task, almost useless in a society destined to have a zombie, robotized culture.

These rains brought mud. Contemporary Spanish historiography must accept responsibility for its role in the contemporary decline of the humanities. Its position toward the study of social movements in general, and reduction of history to a mere contingency in which utopia and skepticism disappear, makes it an accomplice in the present dilemma. Historians who embrace a historical perspective shaped by the needs of the Spanish transition are incapable of studying social movements coherently. To illustrate this, I will raise a series of questions related to libertarian ideas and organizations. Although it is not possible to address them fully here, they can serve as a point of departure for more extensive studies in the future.

Historians frequently forget, minimize, and even ridicule the significant presence of anarchists in Spain. They have applied labels such as “irrational,” “messianic,” “utopian” (in the pejorative sense), “terrorist,” and “criminal” to anarchist organizations and individuals. If urban anarcho-syndicalists were anachronistic in the context of the new industrial modes of production, the CNT’s peasant unions rested on a millenarian outlook based on forms of life that were disappearing.

It’s not so much that anarcho-syndicalism is unknown, but rather that historians have established falsehoods in the literature as truths, often on the basis of secondary works alone. For example, today, and increasingly so as ignorance of our history grows, anarcho-syndicalism appears either primarily in relation to Catalonia or as a mere datum in a chronicle of events. It is not that historians have ignored the anarchist presence in regions like Aragón or Levante, but they are methodologically mistaken when they portray an organization that was structured through a network of confederal relations as if it was centralized. In this context, the problems and dilemmas in Catalonia—the typical focus of studies on anarcho-syndicalism—need not correspond to those in Madrid, Aragón, or Andalusia.

If the libertarian project in general has suffered such dubious treatment, its locally specific experiences—which could help us understand the movement’s activity as a whole—have had equally troubling or worse fortunes. I would like to point to a recent example: the essay “Manuel Tuñón de Lara: Reforma Agraria y Andalucía” (“Manuel Tuñón de Lara: Agrarian Reform and Andalusia”) that Antonio-Miguel Bernal contributed to Manuel Tuñón de Lara. El compromiso con la historia, su vida y su obra ( Manuel Tuñón de Lara: The Engagement with history, his life and work).

This book pays homage to someone who is considered one of the fathers of Spanish social history, whatever differences one may have with his work. In his contribution, Antonio-Miguel Bernal intends to “note two issues” in the history of Andalusia related to the agrarian question, to which Tuñón had dedicated so much attention. One of these is known as the “incident of the bombs.” [795] Bernal frames this within “the relation between Sevilian anarcho-syndicalists and Azaña in the context of the agrarian reform law.” [796] I must first state that I value professor Bernal’s historical work highly: his lectures have always delighted me when I have had the opportunity to hear him speak. I share many of his ideas and, like numerous historians, regard his works on land ownership and agrarian struggles in Andalusia as essential reading. Nevertheless, in this case, my esteemed professor has made the mistake—certainly without the premeditation or malice found in other authors—of attributing actions to Andalusian anarcho-syndicalists for which they were not responsible. I believe that it is necessary to clarify the error, particularly because he has announced the publication of a work on “the bombs.” [797]

Bernal, misled by two apparently trustworthy witnesses whose claims he failed to verify, explained the incident of “the bombs” on the basis of an erroneous date: May 1933 instead of May 1932, which was when it occurred. From there, the careful thread of his analysis becomes completely lost. He trusts Sevillian CNT member José León when he says that Sevillian FAIistas considered killing the person primarily responsible for the assassinations in Casas Viejas, but that had nothing to do with the stockpile of bombs in the spring of 1932.

It is also not the case that these explosives were going to be used in “a new insurrectional attempt by the anarcho-syndicalists, like the unsuccessful one in January 1933.” [798] Surely they intended to use them in a revolutionary action, as Bernal says, but in 1932 and not to retaliate for the slaughter in Casas Viejas. The bombs of May 1932 could not be used to avenge crimes that still hadn’t been committed.

The problem for Bernal is that José León and Antonio Rosado López, another distinguished CNTista from 1930s, confuse the dates in their recollections. I do not know what information León gave Bernal, beyond the claims that appear in his published text. But Rosado’s testimony is accessible and he offers a detailed description of the explosion in Montellano on May 16, 1932. [799]

Bernal builds his explanation on these two unreliable sources. He could have avoided this mistake by doing some simple research in the archives or by consulting José Manuel Macarro Vera’s work on the Second Republic in Sevilla, which is otherwise biased against anarcho-syndicalism. [800] Or he could have remembered the pages about these events in Jacques Maurice’s book on anarchism in Andalusia, which he himself wrote the prologue to. [801] Indeed, Antonio-Miguel Bernal’s error is not so much a blunder as symptomatic of a certain attitude in the study of Spanish anarchism.

What was the chronological sequence of events? About the origin, purpose, and context of “the incident of the bombs,” there are documents that speak of a stockpile of explosives destined for use in an insurrection. There is no need to use Rosado’s memoirs to establish its existence. Pedro Vallina sent pieces to the local newspapers urging workers not to support the peasant strike and mentions “the treason ... of false comrades.” [802] A pamphlet [803] on this topic was published in June 1932, which tried to throw light on the debate in the CNT about the attitude of leading Sevillan militants during the bomb explosions and the May 1932 peasant strike.

But if there were insurrectional preparations, is it certain that there was a plan to assassinate Azaña? Around the time that authorities discovered the arsenal in Sevilla, Madrid’s press reported on attacks against important politicians. [804] Was Azaña among them? No, the papers mention those whom the CNT thought bore the greatest responsibility for its persecution: Miguel Maura and Santiago Casares Quiroga, interior ministers in the first Republican governments. [805]

The relation between these attacks and the “bombs of Sevilla” lay in the detention of a group of anarchists in Madrid, whom police accused of having organized the attacks but also of stealing explosives in Puertollano used to build the bombs. [806] Thus the police had been aware of the stockpile. The authorities admitted that they had the Madrid anarchists under control since the beginning of April, thanks to reports that they received from Sevilla’s Civil Governor. In the words of Vicente Sol himself, “the activity of Madrid’s police is not the result of police activity in Sevilla; it’s the other way around.” [807] The explosives had not been stockpiled in a very discreet way. “At thirty-six pesetas for a dozen bombs” wrote a Sevilla correspondent for the Madrid newspaper La Tierra, [808] who was surprised that the police had to wait for the Montellano explosion to discover what the whole city already knew. This makes it easier to understand the speed with which Civil Guard Captain Lisardo Doval Bravo discovered the arsenal. Doval had been well-known among CNT members since 1926, when he participated in breaking up what is known as the Puente de Vallecas plot, and later led the crackdown against the Asturian revolutionaries in October 1934. He was uniquely “skilled” at extracting rapid confessions, which deputies Eduardo Ortega Gasset and José Antonio Balbontín noted in Congress. [809]

In other words, Bernal’s conclusions about the existence of insurrectional preparations and the government’s utilization of the events coincide with reality. But they only coincide, since they rest on a false assumption. It is not possible that there was a plan to attack Azaña for the events in Casas Viejas in May 1932, six months before they took place. And it is also not the case, as Bernal states, that the Prime Minister insisted that the matter be concealed so as “not to intensify debates about his peasant policy after the experience of Casasviejas [sic].” [810] It still hadn’t occurred.

I believe this example illustrates a carelessness that is common among academic historians who study Spanish anarchism. Their negligence often becomes manipulation in works on the 1930s, the Second Republic, and the war of 1936–1939.

Spain’s Second Republic emerged with enthusiastic popular support and the widespread hope that the new regime would institute the changes that its leaders had promised. Historian Santos Juliá described it as a popular revolution in which the progressive, enlightened bourgeoisie tried to transform Spanish society by changing the political regime. [811] It relied on the workers in the Socialist Party and the UGT to do so, whose support was ratified in the August 1930 Pact of San Sebastián.

The fall of the Bourbon monarchy not only produced a formal regime change, but also a subversion of dominant social norms. To an extent, the fear of the master, of the cacique, and of religion disappeared. The popular classes demanded their signs of identity, society entered into a process of secularization, and customs relaxed. The workers’ movement demonstrated that it had its own identity, which it expressed in multiple activities, and in which anarchists had a very strong presence. The nearly destroyed CNT became a force again and its reorganization, characterized by a strong pragmatism, guaranteed its expansion. The rebel anarcho-syndicalism of the 1920s reappeared and declared its desire to militantly transform society. The new rulers would have to take this into account.

But the rulers did not, and were unable to carry out their promises and resolve the country’s social and economic problems. This ultimately destroyed them. [812] In this sense, when historians say that the CNT is a revolutionary organization, they also mean that it subjected the Republican regime to devastating pressure, implying that the 1936–1939 war was a consequence of right and leftwing extremists who made an intermediate path impossible. But this is a half-truth. During the first year of Republic, from April 1931 to May 1932, it is inaccurate to characterize the CNT as a revolutionary organization.

One conflict often cited as an example of the CNT’s revolutionary antagonism toward the Republic is the Telephone Workers’ strike, although that is mistaken: the battle was about forcing the Republicans and Socialists to fulfill promises they had made before taking power. Indeed, in 1930 Indalecio Prieto even protested that the telephone company’s situation was colonial in nature. However, after the proclamation of the Republic, their pledges went on to better pastures. When the recently created CNT Telephone Workers’ Union called a strike in July 1931 over economic issues and, especially, for union recognition, the government responded as if it was facing a revolutionary threat, despite the workers’ peaceful disposition during the beginning of the dispute. Why?

In the first place, it did so in the interest of its foreign policy, which required that it offer a reassuring image to foreign capitalists; and, second, because it was obsessed with erasing anarcho-syndicalism from the map. The Socialists worried as they saw the CNT remake itself and gain ground among workers that the UGT had previously controlled, like telephone and railway workers. Socialist ministers mounted an aggressive anti-CNT policy, particularly Largo Caballero, head of the Ministry of Labor. And, finally, the government did so because of the limits of its reformism, which enabled it to quickly forget that its ability to institute real reforms was what justified its existence.

The Republicans were incapable of solving the problems that the people expected to them solve. Certainly they were significant: there was a galloping financial crisis that affected important sectors of the economy, such as heavy industry and foreign trade; there was a critical situation in agriculture; and finally there was the employer’s outspoken opposition to the new government. But of course its criminalization of the CNT and the conflicts in which it participated did not help matters. Instead of satisfying the transformative expectations, they merely tried to silence their critics with the same coercive methods that the monarchy had used (like deportation and imprisonment). There were also highly radicalized groups that didn’t hesitate to call into doubt the state’s monopoly on the use of violence.

A key element of the conflict between the CNT and the Republican-Socialist leaders was the contradiction between the CNT’s strategy of direct action and Socialists’ commitment to mediating class conflicts with legislation. To prevent the CNT from growing, the government transformed any dispute in which it participated into a problem of public order, while it also imposed interventionist legislation designed to uproot the CNT’s anti-statist syndicalism. Direct action meant rejecting state mediation of clashes between workers and bosses. In fact, the Socialist’s obligatory Mixed Juries—a modified version of Primo de Rivera’s Parity Committees—were an attack on the foundation of the CNT’s syndicalism.

Casas Viejas, one of the violent events in the Republican-CNT confrontation, caused both the collapse of the public’s faith in the Republicans’ reformist capacity and the beginning of the center-right offensive. The Republic began to lose worker support and to weaken the few improvements that the proletariat had won in recent months. Politically speaking, it also paved the way for increasingly rightwing governments after the November elections.

After the Socialists’ departure from government and the defeat of the CNT’s insurrections in 1933, the two strategies that had defined the labor movement up until then began to sink into discredit. Spanish Socialists felt betrayed after their expulsion from government and adopted a more radical posture. Largo Caballero was the most well-known representative of this tendency and his most dramatic act was the failed uprising in October 1934. For its part, the CNT was struggling to survive as an organization and voices began to arise within it that questioned its insurrectional strategy.

An element appeared on the horizon in late 1933 that would have great importance for 1936–1939 conflict: a feeling of unity among the working class. Until then the Communists had championed the slogan of workers’ unity, but their sectarianism and dependency on orders from the Third International prevented their propaganda from becoming more than rhetoric. Now workers’ unity appeared as the element that could help militants overcome the “ impasse” produced by the failure of the CNT’s insurrectionary tactics as well as the Socialists’ collaborationism. This occurred at a time when the rightwing offensive—the radical euphoria, as it was known then—threatened to annul the improvements of the first biennium and elicit a vengefulness after the recuperation of conservative confidence. These factors transformed the workers’ organizations: a sector of the Socialists turned leftward; heterodox, minority communist groups and dissidents within the CNT created the Alianzas Obrera in December 1933; and the Communist Party abandoned the ultra-revolutionism that had characterized it until then. The CNT’s strategy also changed. The CNT collaborated with the UGT in labor conflicts on numerous occasions in 1934. This occurred in Madrid, Salamanca, Santander, Zaragoza, and in Sevilla during the UGT’s national peasant strike. The CNT and UGT signed an accord in Sevilla that became the model for widespread local agreements in succeeding years. Finally, the May CNT congress in Zaragoza approved some foundations of a CNT-UGT pact. The repression unleashed after the revolutionary events in October 1934 forced workers’ and left Republican organizations underground. The government persecuted the anarcho-syndicalists as if they were responsible for the uprising and they also had to endure harassment from the Socialists and Communists, who accused them of betrayal because they hadn’t participated in the events. This was not true, but the slander had a certain propagandistic impact. Nonetheless, the anarcho-syndicalists were able to silence those who accused them of treachery and regain the initiative. After the Popular Front victory in February 1936, the CNT began to surpass the UGT in its traditional strongholds like Madrid. Its proposal for a Revolutionary Workers’ Alliance at the Zaragoza congress made it seem like the promoter of proletarian unity.

It was the anarcho-syndicalists’ ability to adapt to the Republican juncture, while not forgetting their revolutionary aims, that enabled them to reorganize so powerfully in 1936, after near dissolution for the greater part of 1935. It also explains how they were able to articulate a coherent response to the military uprising. In various parts of the country, they crushed the rebels and transcended the Republican political “revolution” with a social revolution. In this sense, the Spanish War of 1936–1939 was more of a social war than a civil confrontation. It was the last attempt, up to the present, to build a more just society on European soil. Hiding this fact has been a constant in the historical studies for the last sixty years.

Pelai Pagés has pointed out that the shortcomings in the historical work on the Spanish war in Catalonia are, as a whole, typical of those in works on the rest of the “Republican zone.”[813] One of the more conspicuous failings pertains to the changes in political and power relations as well as social and economic transformations. Although there is extensive literature on the conflict, it focuses principally on politico-military themes and hardly treats certain problems and aspects of social reality. The weakness of local histories has ensured the perseverance of significant historical “deserts.” One of the most striking is the failure to acknowledge the revolutionary social and economic transformations that occurred.

These are relative and partisan “deserts.” This year, two decades have passed since the death of the victor of 1936–1939 war. The mass media in Spain and elsewhere have run endless analyzes and criticisms of the Spanish “transition,” all focused on establishing the “historical truth” about the country’s recent decades. Most commentaries depict contemporary Spain as the happy consequence of the resolution of the problems that caused the “civil” war. According to this theory, the present 1979 constitution marks the definitive end of the fratricidal confrontation.

These formulations assume that the Spanish conflict was a struggle between “brothers,” whose tensions were exasperated by the Second Republic, the uniquely conflicted European 1930s, “primitive” influences like anarchism, and the country’s “delayed” modernization. One cannot forget that international public opinion received the Spanish conflict with great excitement because it was considered the first act in an increasingly more certain conflict with fascism. Nevertheless, its existence as a “social war” has been forgotten, when not deliberately concealed; a conflict in which those fighting one another were not brothers, parents, or cousins but rather partisans of distinct visions of social life. Indeed, many historians also forget that thousands of Europeans and Americans saw the events in Spain as a struggle for genuine social transformation.

One can argue that it was such a struggle until the “events of May 1937.” The Spaniards who confronted the military rebels in July 1936 were not trying to stop German fascism or settle old family grudges, but to create a system of social relations distinct from the “Old Regime” and the Republicans’ “formal democracy.” Curiously, on this point, liberal as well as Marxist historians coincide in concealing the revolutionary implications of the Spanish war, despite the fact that the publications on the issue are so numerous that it has become one of the “star” subjects of the twentieth century. The Communists and fascists also coincided, in that order, in destroying the so-called “utopian constructions” that emerged in Aragón in 1936 and 1937. [814] From my perspective, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution is a useful tool for redefining the Spanish war, for throwing light on the conflict’s least-known aspects, for clearing the way for the study of contemporary revolutionary movements, and, finally, for situating the Spanish conflict as the last, up until now, of the deep attempts at social transformation that have occurred on European soil. It was perhaps in Aragón where the revolutionary changes achieved their greatest depth and where historians have studied them most thoroughly. [815] There, the reply to the uprising took advantage of the absence and paralyzes of government authorities. The collectivizing impulse spread throughout rural Aragón and structured itself by county. This is how collective modes of consumption, production, local trade, and municipal services were established in the villages and small cities, and a web of societies inspired by libertarian communism took shape.

This has been ignored by historians to such an extent that if it were not for the testimonies of journalists and eyewitness observers, it would only be real to those who lived through the events and a few others. [816] Alejandro Díez Torre and Graham Kelsey have pointed to this and other significant instances of concealment in the studies of the Spanish revolution. [817] Among them, there is the disappearance of the documents produced by the revolutionary organizations. They were not eaten by moths or hidden: on the contrary, the cited authors show that their enemies simply destroyed the material evidence of the existence of these organizations. In this context, it is worth emphasizing that the first great “documentary failure” did not occur after the fascist victory but during the forced dissolution of the Aragonian collectives carried out by Republican forces under the Communist Líster.

Likewise, historians have disparaged and dismissed eyewitness accounts. They have qualified them as “foreign witnesses,” “muddled,” or “uncritical and superficial.” The existence of an anarchist historical record constituted by eyewitness has even been spoken of as if it lacks legitimacy, while Communist testimonies are accepted. For example, Alejandro Díez Torre notes that historian “Julián Casanova gives precedence to the top regional Communist leader José Duque Cuadrado ... who when the conflict was already over ... wrote a very personal and ... self-serving testimony.” Casanova believes that this is “the only thorough study—errors and groundless accusations against the libertarians aside—of events in Aragón after the military uprising and before the dissolution of the Council.” Díez Torre asserts that his work is not even “minimally resistant to verification against other primary sources.” [818]

The result is that many historians accept the idea—which therefore becomes “truth”—that the collectivizations in Aragón and, by implication those elsewhere, were not as deep nor did they affect as much of the population as claimed. Some also suggest that they rested on coercion from anarcho-syndicalist militias and that they did not last long enough to permit an evaluation of their economic results.

From my point of view, it is important not only to dissect the facts of revolutionary Spain, but also to dismantle theoretical frameworks that reduce historical interpretation to schemata. Such frameworks—under the mask of “rigor,” of having a “real historical debate,” of “overcoming description and entering into reflection,” or “expanding the objects of attention”—go too far in the historical studies of the libertarian movement. [819] While we mustn’t avoid difficult questions or write hagiographies, we also cannot stop questioning frameworks that conceal what is most meaningful about the Spanish conflict in the 1930s: its revolutionary achievements.

These are not good times for social transformations, but the rebel, the non-conformist, and the revolutionary will exist as long as there is social injustice. What is important is not to look backward to anarchism’s “golden age” but to analyze and comprehend those events in such a way that they can help us form a scientific construction that understands that making history a mere contingency, in which utopia disappears and that serves the needs of the dominant regime, not only impedes the study of social movements but also makes historians dig the grave of their own influence: once they accomplish their mission, they are excluded, almost without a purpose. Debates about the Spanish war reflect larger discussions about the relevance of the “classical” revolutionary formulations represented by anarchism and communism. This occurs, above all, because of the collapse of Soviet “socialism” and the contemporary crisis of thought and structured alternatives among the groups that do not accept Fukuyama’s “end of history” or the dictatorship of the info-technocratic revolution.

Historians would have to challenge those intellectuals who are more attentive to subsidies, grants, and soirees than their role in society. The path, I think, is that of their own honesty. Perhaps it is obsolete to speak of ethics in these times, but all researchers know that scientific rigor requires honesty. Today, historical reflection cannot base itself on a questionable honesty that transforms itself into an elaborate intellectualism with lethal anesthetic effects. Its task is to suggest, propose, and even speculate in search of a certainty, a true critique that implicates not only objectivity but also subjectivity and the capacity to discern. That path requires the ethical coherence of the historian.

José Luis Gutiérrez Molina

[820]The infantry soldiers felt disfavored by government policies and organized themselves into clandestine Military Defense Councils, which a Central Council led by Colonel Márquez coordinated. Their demands centered on salaries and promotions. The government imprisoned the members of the Central Council in late May, 1917. On June 1, the Military Councils published a manifesto, which gave the government twenty-four hours to satisfy their demands and release the arrestees. This provoked a governmental crisis and Eduardo Dato took the reigns.

The Spanish state formally recognized its powers in 1932.

The standardization of the Catalan language, a certain neoclassicism, and the desire for order and practical achievements ... were the main characteristics of noucentisme, whose influence on Catalonia was little affected by new avantgarde trends.” Albert Balcells, Catalan Nationalism: Past and Present, trans. by Jacqueline Hall (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 82.