The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  Estepa, Marinaleda’s nearest moderately-sized neighbour, with a population of 12,000, is famous for three things: biscuits, bandits and mass suicide. The biscuits in question are Christmas delicacies called mantecados, and every winter entire buses are chartered from Seville and Malaga, filled with people eager to stock up for the festive season. Mantecados (pronounced man-teh-cow in the impenetrable local accent) taste a bit like grenades of sugared dirt, and weigh about the same. And yet, it’s not Estepa’s confectionery that lingers longest in the stomach. In the year 208 BC, the residents of what was then a small but significant hilltop outpost of Carthage saw the Roman army in the distance, coming to seize the town. By the time the Romans arrived, every last citizen of Estepa was dead – the whole population had committed suicide rather than surrender. The town was later captured by Visigoths, and then by a series of rival Moorish caliphs, followed eventually by the Christian Reconquista.

  One day, Javi and I took a walk up Estepa’s San Cristóbal hill to look at its multicultural relics, our toes tensing to grip the harsh gradient, feeling the cobbles as we climbed through and above the town itself. The final stretch of the hill was so steep that my lungs took a beat to catch up, and even in the relative chill of January, tiny beads of sweat grew on my forehead, immediately turning cold in the breeze. There was no one at the top, and no wind either. The church tower was a fancy peach-coloured extravagance, a bohemian cake of a building drawn straight from an Aesop’s fable.

  The view from here is known as the Balcón de Andalucía, the Balcony of Andalusia. Here you can see Marinaleda to the north, on the gentle slope down towards the great Guadalquivir River that brings life to the otherwise parched region. The river was once the glittering conduit for masses of Spanish gold violently plundered from the New World. Estepa looked especially pretty, with its staggered cascade of white walls and red roofs falling away down the hill beneath us, poised delicately above the regiments of endless olive groves and rich green fields dulled by the orange pastel-dust.

  This land, the basin of the Guadalquivir, is often dry, but not unfertile: as with all of rural Andalusia, it is concentrated in very few hands – either the aristocratic families of old Castile, or the middle classes, who took the opportunity in the nineteenth century to buy up (at low cost) terrain that had previously been common or Church lands. ‘¡Corazón de Andalucía!’ proclaimed the signage of a disused hotel on the edge of Estepa, with the unselfconscious pride of a flamenco dancer flicking her castanets. This is indeed the heart of the region: you’re a pretty long way from anywhere, but you can see everywhere.

  We stood on a wooden viewing platform and watched the dark close out on Estepa below us. From here you can see three sub-regions of Andalusia – Seville, Cordoba and Granada – and amid the fields, the sparsely-scattered pueblos in the distance: El Rubio, Casariche, Herrera, and Marinaleda itself. Of course, at that distance these small farming communities all look the same. So much that is in them is the same: children kicking cheap footballs against stone walls worn down by the centuries, Cruzcampo umbrellas dozing gently outside tapas bars. And yet, like Asterix’s village in Gaul, impossibly holding out against the Romans, Marinaleda is surrounded by villages that lie in enemy hands.

  It’s an area which, because of its often desperate levels of poverty, has long given itself to people’s heroes, for good or ill. And before the anarchists and communists arrived, there were the bandoleros, the bandits – normally involved in smuggling, extortion, and highwayman-style hold-ups. Even the bandits, writes Kaplan, ‘were a friend of the poor and its champion against its oppressors … a safety-valve for popular discontent’. There are even tours celebrating this grisly part of local history – though where the likes of El Tempranillo, El Pernales or El Lero fit on a spectrum of malevolence from Robin Hood to Jack the Ripper depends on who you speak to. These weren’t true popular heroes, Javi explained to me. They were horrendous murderers, living in defiance of the law and using the masses as human shields against the authorities.

  In the face of such danger, the Guardia Civil, or paramilitary police force, was founded in the mid-nineteenth century for the express purpose of tackling banditry in this part of Andalusia. The local landscape was the bandits’ friend. Late one cold February night, driving back towards Estepa from a pre-Lenten carnaval in another town, Javi and his friend Antonio explained that the tree-covered hills were considered too dangerous for exploring alone – there was a white dog in there that would eat you alive. This is presumably where the bandits used to hide, too, I asked – a slightly more realistic danger? ‘That’s right,’ said Javi. Antonio chuckled to himself from the back seat.

  ‘The bandoleros would probably still be there, too – but it’s so fucking cold, they had to come down the mountain and get jobs in Congress.’

  Spanish hills are usually concealing something, even if they have sometimes been sites of salvation: havens for rebel peasant leaders hiding from persecution, and for the Spanish maquis, the partisan guerrillas who didn’t give up on the dream, even after the fascists won the Civil War in 1939, and fought on against Franco. The partisans are the people’s heroes depicted in the Oscar-winning film Pan’s Labyrinth, a ragtag army refusing to be cowed by the greater power intent on destroying them, deployed in the three branches of the Spanish State: the military, the Church and the government.

  Like the bandits, anarchists in hiding from the authorities took cover in the Andalusian hills – sometimes for years on end, avoiding arrest and execution by the Guardia Civil. In fact, the different outlaws helped each other: the bandits concealed in the hill towns and the mountains made it easier for revolutionaries and fugitives, as well as cloth and tobacco smugglers, to move their intellectual or commercial wares in secrecy, sneaking on foot over narrow mountain ridges to the next town.

  When itinerant evangelical preachers were spreading anarchism through the countryside in the late nineteenth century, it was known simply and magnificently as ‘the idea’. The Andalusian river valleys became its conduits, carrying newspapers, people and ‘the idea’ from town to town – a red and black river through the blanched, dusty fields. It travelled with astonishing speed in Spain, ‘carried from one village to the next by Anarchist “apostles’ ”, writes Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth. They travelled light and cheap, ‘like tramps or ambulant bullfighters under the tarpaulins of goods wagons’, and received no pay or retainer, instead living ‘like mendicant friars on the hospitality of the more prosperous work-men’. Anarchists were poor: Bakunin himself couldn’t afford the train fare to Barcelona for the inaugural congress of his own branch of the International, but his lieutenants made up for their impecuniousness with fervour. The campaign was kept alive through newspapers such as El Socialismo and El Productor, often sold via the barber. El Productor even had local agricultural correspondents in the south, to report on the increasingly violent uprisings in the region.

  Fermín Salvochea, known as the ‘saint’ of Spanish anarchism, edited some of these papers, including El Socialismo, which helped bring Kropotkin’s ideas to the peasants of the south. A nineteenth-century Sánchez Gordillo, he later became an icon for the marinaleños. When he wasn’t busy being in jail or leading armed uprisings against the Spanish state, he served as mayor of Cadiz, in the late nineteenth century; even before universal suffrage, it was possible to get to the top in Andalusian local government while opposing the idea of hierarchical power. Fifty thousand people attended his funeral in 1907, an event worthy of the beatification of a more religious kind of saint. There is, of course, a street named after him in Marinaleda.

  More often than not, the struggles of the valiant sons and daughters of Andalusian workers’ rebellion resulted in failure. The repeated uprisings were crushed, thanks to the landowners’ military henchmen in the Guardia Civil. In 1884 seven peasants were executed in Jerez de la Frontera – 100 miles south-west of Marinaleda – for their alleged involvement in a secret group called La Mano Negra, The Black Hand, t
he infamous anarchist terrorist organisation whose existence may or may not have been entirely invented by the state. La Mano Negra had been blamed for a series of murders and acts of arson in the preceding years. As a result, whether the allegations were fictional or not, the anarchist press was banned and some of its leading lights forced into hiding.

  The mythology stuck around. ‘The shadow of La Mano Negra, the secret and righteous brotherhood of the last century, looms over the plazas of Andalusia’s villages and runs through its farms’, began an article in the generally sane national newspaper El País in 1981. The ostensible subject of the article, beyond reviving the far-left bogeymen of a century before, was the burgeoning activities of Sánchez Gordillo’s field-workers’ union, the SOC. Sensationalism aside, El País was at least correct to acknowledge the ‘common tradition’, and that Andalusian jornaleros ‘have not forgotten what constitutes their past, nor what they experienced, nor what has been handed down from father to son’. And what were they doing with that shared history of starvation, brutality, torture and repression? Working on revenge.

  3

  La Lucha

  We want peace. The people always wanted peace. But be clear that we do not want the peace of the last forty years of gazpacho, lice and cortijos,* or all that which is preached by the Pharisees of the old established disorder.

  Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, ‘Hunger and Peace’,

  El País, 1982

  We arrived at El Humoso and parked the car. It was a mild, misty January day, the sunlight gleaming through the hanging mist. The air tasted as clean as water, and the only sounds disrupting this rural idyll were the odd rooster in the background and a dog barking at nothing in particular. On one side of the car park was a large olive oil processing factory, on the other a freshly painted white farm administration building, adorned with a red roof, its windowsills and columns picked out in green. It looked like a mansion house from America’s old South, détourné by its paint job in the Marinaleda colour scheme. To the side stood large greenhouses for tomatoes, spinach and lettuces, supplementary crops to be sold in the town’s grocery shops. The entrance to the fields was marked by a giant single-wall facade plastered with two substantial political murals.

  ‘Este cortijo es para los jornaleros en paro de Marinaleda’ (this farm is for the unemployed labourers of Marinaleda) was written in massive capital letters along one stretch of wall, punctuated with a painting of the village’s iconic tricolour flag. On the other side was a giant socialist-realist painting of two fifteen-foot tall jornaleros emerging proudly, tired, from their work in the fields, with TIERRA UTOPIA written underneath.

  A family lives on the El Humoso farm as caretakers, running the day-to-day operations; but they are neither bosses nor owners – this is a co-operative, my guide stressed. This is the co-operative, in fact: the symbolic and actual cornerstone of Marinaleda’s utopian achievement – a 1,200-hectare farm won through thirteen years of relentless struggle. In 1991 the land was expropriated from the Duke of Infantado (in exchange for an undisclosed sum in compensation) and awarded by the Andalusian regional government to the people of Marinaleda.

  We walked over to the farm’s olive oil processing plant, where four or five men in blue overalls were operating the machinery. The olives are stripped from any twigs by the first machines, then cleaned by blasts of water, then smashed into pulp. From this mash the gooey oil is siphoned off, then filtered, and filtered again. The collective produces 300,000 litres of olive oil a year. Scattered around the gleaming pipes and machinery were boxes stamped with the Marinaleda Cortijo El Humoso logo, in red, white and green, and a stamp of the same tierra utopia painting from the farm.

  The stock room felt like an ersatz version of big-C Communism: identical piles of boxes, stacked high, all bearing the farm logo; a colour-coded livery of plenty. Before it’s bottled, the olive oil is stored in giant cylindrical silos, and even there the Marinaleda aesthetic is evident: the floor is green, the walls are white, the measuring sticks on the side of each silo are red. Outside, the factory walls themselves, and even the little pavement around the edge of the building are painted in the tricolour: the ubiquity of the colour scheme makes the farm and the oil factory feel like a sports stadium complex – indeed, it makes fidelity to the village, and the project, feel like supporting a football team.

  Antonio Sánchez actually looked like a character from Asterix – tall, broad and fit despite his advancing years, with a big bushy moustache. At times it feels like every third person in Marinaleda is called Antonio, and so he is known as El Bigotes, ‘the whiskers’. He has worked in the oil factory for all of its twelve years in existence, and before that was a town hall employee for twenty years – ever since the struggle began in 1979. He’s been close to Sánchez Gordillo since the beginning. He briefly lived in Cordoba in the 1970s, migrating to the city for work like so many others, but returned when the struggle began.

  Those first few years, Antonio recalled with a big grin that disturbed his moustache, were a red-hot period, a boiling point. Diving back into those formative memories, he transmitted a similar excitement to that I’ve seen on the faces of young members of Spain’s indignados: the intense thrill that comes from determinedly standing together against the status quo and announcing you are going to make something new. The ineffable, irrepressible subjectivity of solidarity.

  We talked about the land seizures, the hunger strikes, the arrests, the tireless years of struggle which at last earned them the farmland that stretched beyond our view for miles. This was a struggle that brought not just work to the people of Marinaleda, but life to 1,200 hectares (close to five square miles) of idle fields. Antonio seemed quite pleased to talk about the old days; unlike Sánchez Gordillo, his job does not regularly involve recounting tales of yesteryear, certainly not to foreign journalists. It was never as simple as just one occupation, he explained; in fact they had to occupy these very fields over and over again – the marinaleños would be arrested, sometimes imprisoned or beaten, and then they’d regroup and start over again.

  ‘The Guardia Civil would be here, defending the Duke. Look at the trees,’ he gestured, his arm casting a long shadow beneath the low-lying winter sun. There was a line of leafless, sorry-looking trees lining the path from the main road into El Humoso, which appeared to have been not so much pruned as amputated. ‘When we first came here to protest it was the summer, and very, very hot. The Guardia Civil cut the tree branches off, so we would have no shelter.’ With normal summer temperatures around forty degrees, removing the only natural source of shade in sight is evil genius worthy of a cartoon villain. He shook his head; the memory still burned through. ‘They wanted us to give up and go home.’

  In those early days, to work on ‘the project’ together, trying to create utopia from scratch after decades of dictatorship and centuries of poverty, was the only option. It was, the veterans say now, necessary just to survive. For all that la lucha was bred out of misery and hopelessness, it fired their synapses, it was thrilling – a release of that unique kind of energy you can only get from knowing you are fighting for a just cause. And that maybe – just maybe – you might win.

  Before tracing la lucha itself, it’s worth recapitulating the historical background: the Spanish left had had a democracy – even a revolution, perhaps – snatched away from them. In 1931’s general election, left-wing parties of all varieties thrived, the monarchy was banished, and on 14 April that year, the Spanish Second Republic was declared. But in rural areas this was a victory without gains – it did not in itself herald a new era of the one thing that could stabilise rural Spain and feed its people: agrarian reform, and land redistribution.

  The prospect of land and freedom suddenly appeared tantalisingly close, and yet the reality was still sorely lacking. As a result, rural Spain witnessed intense, frequent peasant mobilisations, land seizures, clashes and strikes. In Gilena, a pueblo ten miles from Marinaleda and about the same size, there had been no voting,
because the socialists had been barred from standing by a corrupt cacique who was also a landowner. Increasingly disgruntled as the summer wore on, in October 1931 the infamous Gilena Events took place. What began with a general strike quickly degenerated into confusion, a heavy-handed response, stand-offs, a stolen gun, rapid escalations on both sides: the upshot was one dead Guardia, five dead workers, and fifty injured.

  It was not the only such tragedy, or even the worst. Casas Viejas was yet another Andalusian pueblo the size of Marinaleda, with the same composition of desperate, landless labourers, further inflamed by their new anarchist faith. In January 1933 there were anarchist uprisings in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia, which were quickly suppressed, but news of their failure did not reach Casas Viejas in time. Believing the revolution had finally arrived, armed workers surrounded the local Guardia Civil barracks; there was an exchange of fire, and two of the guards were killed. Reinforcements were sent in, the village was occupied, and a massacre ensued. The beatings, reprisals, and a siege-via-fire resulted in a total of twenty-eight deaths over the following forty-eight hours.

  As with Gilena, the tragic events of Casas Viejas prompted soul-searching and recriminations on a national scale – but while they were shocking, they were neither isolated nor, in retrospect, surprising. There were 238 strikes in Seville province between the declaration of the Second Republic in 1931 and the outbreak of the Civil War with Franco’s coup in 1936. The anarchist trade union, the CNT, called their actions in this period ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. And like all gymnastics, the flexibility, strength and spontaneity of the workers’ uprisings were only possible thanks to long periods of training.