The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  The promise of the pre-Civil War period dissolved in the relentless horrors of the conflict itself and the brutal vengeance of Franco’s White Terror that followed the fascist victory in 1939. It was a revolution not only delayed, but, by necessity, forgotten. The rallying cry of agrarian reform, the only solution to the volatility, hunger and misery of life for the landless labourers of Andalusia, went unheeded. After the Civil War, and for the best part of four decades of fascist dictatorship, the land surrounding the impoverished pueblos remained as it always had been, in the hands of the aristocratic houses of Infantado and Alba.

  By the time Franco died, during a period in which most of their European counterparts were enjoying the fruits of technological, social and cultural progress, the jornaleros of Andalusia could reasonably consider their lot and observe that it had barely improved in almost 200 years.

  Franco died in November 1975, at the age of eighty-two; his funeral was attended by such luminaries as General Pinochet and the Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer. Spain breathed a long-overdue sigh of relief and embarked upon la Transición, awkwardly loosening the chains of dictatorship. The words of the Franco-era Spanish national anthem, La Marcha Real, full of the patriotic bombast that characterises most national anthems, were removed in 1978. As a mark of the tense uncertainty of the period, nothing was put in their place – indeed, to this day, Spain’s national anthem is one of only two wordless anthems in the world.

  It was clearly going to take some time to recover from the brutality – indeed, the sheer abnormality of living in a fascist dictatorship for three decades after the end of World War Two. To make matters worse, Franco had also left the Spanish economy in a terrible mess. The south was particularly hard-hit. The little capital raised in Andalusia from farming, mining or fishing invariably ended up invested or hoarded elsewhere in the country, amid chronic underinvestment. Dictators do not have to worry about regions falling massively behind, especially when the citizens of those regions were on the wrong side in a civil war and had a history of anarchism and anticlericalism.

  ‘The famous centres of Francoist development were demagogic castles’, wrote the authors of Huelga de Hambre, ‘created to fill the pages of newspapers – and the pockets of a handful of speculators and political junkies of the regime.’ Andalusia was left lamentably under-developed. The land was mostly idle, industry was almost non-existent, and there were severe shortages of teachers and school places and high levels of illiteracy. It was only the new tourist developments on the Costa del Sol which offered any work in the construction industry – and even then, the profits rarely stayed in the region. The poverty in rural areas was so dire that, as late as the 1970s, children would frequently have to abandon their schooling to work in the fields, when there was work, or migrate with their parents to find seasonal work in other parts of Spain. There had been una riada humana, a human flood, away from the pueblos. So bad had the farming situation become that 3 million Andalusians emigrated in the 1960s.

  Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo was born in Marinaleda in February 1949 and was still in his mid-twenties when the struggle began. ‘When I was growing up,’ he told me, ‘it was a village of migrants. They would go to Germany or France; or for two months a year to the wheat fields in the north to look for work. Otherwise they were unemployed. There was utter destitution. The surroundings were all huge expanses of private land. Next to what is now the highway there’s the land of a Marquis. Then on the way to Seville there are other cortijos belonging to the Duchess of Alba.’ These are the latifundios, the mega-estates.

  The land itself, Sánchez Gordillo wrote in his 1980 book, Marinaleda: Andaluces, levantaos, is the centre of gravity in Andalusia, for ‘it is on the land that the future will be built’. He was fond of comparing the situation of Andalusian peasant towns to that of Native American reservations, where native tribes driven from the plains where once they dwelt and worked are contained in miserable isolation, surrounded by the land which belongs to them – producing and reproducing poverty, humiliation and cultural degradation. He records one fellow marinaleño approaching him ‘crying like a child’ in the late 1970s and telling him: ‘Juan Manuel, I’m not a beggar. I want a job, because I am fifty-four and ashamed to be anywhere else than working in the fields’.

  The demonstrations had begun before Franco died, as the increasingly desperate people of the south gained confidence – confidence in the absence of any hope of change from above. The familiar Andalusian dialectic of rebellion and repression intensified in the early 1970s, with huge construction industry demonstrations in Granada and strikes – which were still illegal – throughout the middle period of the decade, as well as sporadic crop burnings on the nobles’ estates. The Guardia Civil continued to exert the violence they had used in the nineteenth century and during the Civil War, and there were a number of deaths on demonstrations. For the impoverished Andalusian jornaleros, the death of el Generalísimo, though it did not itself guarantee the liberal democracy that would eventually follow – the first free general election was in 1977 – was a clear opportunity to raise the game. It was a classic crisis-opportunity.

  As the tensions of the constitutional Transition proceeded, Marinaleda began working on, and towards, its own definition of freedom. Before the land seizures, before the collective farm, before economic democracy, before the virtually free housing, before the assassination attempts, before the supermarket raids, before utopia – came organisation. The rage of the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s was bundled into the foundations of a movement. In 1976 the field workers’ union, the Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (SOC) was founded, and soon after the Marinaleda chapter formed in the garden of what is now Avenida de la Libertad. It was to be a union for day labourers, focusing on direct action, with a broadly anarchist philosophy. It was designed to be responsive to the precarity of the Andalusian peasant existence. At that time, Spanish union law prohibited voting in union elections until you had worked for the same employer for more than six months – ruling out 98 per cent of the 500,000 Andalusian field workers, severing an entire class from labour organisation.

  On 4 December 1977 young Caparros was martyred, and the following January, the SOC began occupying the land. Early the following year, SOC’s Marinaleda chapter occupied a farm twenty miles away, near Osuna, for two days – the first time they had done so since the Second Republic. It ended when they were violently evicted by the Guardia Civil and several union leaders were jailed.

  Meanwhile in Madrid, a new democratic Constitution had been written. In Marinaleda they held a general assembly to discuss it, and an official position was decided on: they would abstain from voting in the referendum to approve the Constitution. Most of the pueblo were already involved in the occupations and strikes, and wished to continue focusing their democratic energies that way. (They have maintained this ambivalence: in the context of the current Spanish crisis, I have heard the Constitution described in Marinaleda as a ‘pact with the residues of Francoism’. In their propaganda, it is accused of being ‘useless in stopping the markets’ war against the people’.)

  They had chosen to ignore the new developments in Madrid, but Madrid had nonetheless noticed them. The Andalusian workers worried the Spanish bourgeoisie, a class largely composed of Francoists surreptitiously changing out of their uniforms. With some alarm, the Madrid newspapers quoted one of SOC’s founders as claiming that ‘the labourers, in essence, are anarchists at heart’. Suddenly, without the sanctions of Franco’s dictatorship to protect landed interests, the labourers’ union embodied a cathartic release of long-suppressed tension. Its philosophy was both radical and apparently disinterested in Soviet or Leninist dogma.

  From the outset the marinaleños ‘declared the sovereignty of food’, as Sánchez Gordillo explained it to me, asserting that ‘food was a right and not a business; that agriculture should be out of the World Trade Organisation; that natural resources should be at the service of the communities that work them, an
d who use them’. While he has long expressed global solidarity for any marginalised community, and a corollary hatred of Western imperialism and militarism, it is the local needs of the pueblo that matter most. From the outset, sovereignty of the crops, and sovereignty of the terrain to grow them in, was the central tenet of the Marinaleda philosophy. Land, went the slogan, is a gift of nature, like air or water.

  Then as now, Sánchez Gordillo had a gift for making the revolutionary sound like basic common sense. ‘Property’, he wrote in Andaluces, levantaos, ‘has no reason to exist when not serving a social purpose. To abolish property is not radicalism when that property produces hunger and scarcity for so many.’

  As a partner organisation to SOC, this burgeoning jornaleros movement established a political party, in 1979 forming the Colectivo de Unidad de los Trabajadores (CUT): an explicitly anti-capitalist political party, positioned to the left of the Communist Party of Spain. That year, the first free local elections since the Second Republic and the Civil War were held. The CUT won 76 per cent of the vote in Marinaleda (the centre-right coalition UCD the remaining 22 per cent), and thus nine of the eleven councillors for the village’s municipal council. They have maintained an absolute majority on the council ever since.

  The CUT is not a traditional communist party, according to any tradition understood outside the region. It is neither a regular Marxist-Leninist party, nor a Trotskyite or Maoist one. ‘Our union gathers people of many political stripes,’ Sánchez Gordillo explained to me, ‘but we carry the torch of anarchism’s direct action. Even the assembly is direct action.’ He went on to cite 5,000 years of Andalusian struggle for land as the psychic engine of his movement. This lineage is more important to the CUT and SOC philosophy than 1789, 1848 or 1917.

  Even while participating in the standard Spanish electoral processes, Marinaleda’s relationship with representative democracy is unique. ‘When we got to the city council we realised we had to transform power – that the power that had previously worked to oppress could not also work to liberate.’ He calls this ‘counter-power’, an inversion of the existing pyramid: ‘the power of poor people against the power of the rich. For this counter-power to be effective, we realised that participation was fundamental. This is why we organised everything around an assembly – an assembly that was open to all workers, regardless of political affinity.’

  For him, traditional power structures are incapable of helping the poor, as well as unwilling. One pueblo participating and reaching decisions together will make fewer mistakes than a single leader or group, Sánchez Gordillo told me – and even when they do, which they do, they are at least accountable to themselves. Their realisation in those early days, he wrote in 1985, had been that ‘laws, customs, officials, habits, budgets, regulations and standards of the Ayuntamiento’ were all instruments of power, ‘helpful to fascism, but useless as a tool of struggle and freedom for the people. That old machinery had to be destroyed.’

  The assemblies became the heart of village life in the 1980s, and as a consequence, the heart of the struggle. These days they are normally attended by an average of 200–400 marinaleños and take place sporadically throughout the year. There should be approximately one per week, but it depends on what needs discussing, and how pressing it is. This ‘direct democracy’, with simple ‘hands-up’ voting, is where a great deal is discussed and decided: the budget for the town council, local rates and taxes, the election of political posts within the town, and resolutions to mobilise for more direct action.

  After a decade of strikes and burgeoning labourer organisation, one event took place that drew the world’s attention to Marinaleda for the first time and became the definitive event in establishing the village’s place in modern Spanish history. In August 1980, against a backdrop of strikes across the region, Marinaleda hosted the ‘hunger strike against hunger’ – una huelga de hambre contra el hambre, in which 700 people refused food for nine days.

  ‘Our struggle’, Gordillo said then, ‘arises in a time when the socioeconomic situation has reached unbearable extremes.’ The village was in a truly desperate state by the summer of 1980. In the first seven months of the year they had received an equivalent of 200 pesetas per family per day – less than two euros. At best, most of the jornaleros could afford to buy only lentils, rice, onions and tomatoes from the village shops. Going two days without food so the children could eat was common, as was community solidarity: where families could share their food with one another, they did.

  One story I’d heard, about a group of neighbours clubbing together to buy a gas cylinder for a family of nine to see them through the winter, was met with nods of recognition when I repeated it to other older marinaleños. That was just what you did. The week the hunger strike began, the Guardia Civil had taken nine men from Marinaleda to the police station after finding them foraging for sunflower seeds in the fields. When Sánchez Gordillo described the poverty among landless labourers in Andalusia as a ‘social holocaust’, this was the kind of thing he had in mind.

  Their demand upon launching the hunger strike was for an increase in ‘community employment funds’ (essentially, paid public-works projects for the unemployed) – but this was only a short-term solution, enough to sustain them until the olive harvest came in December. The community employment funds did nothing to address the root causes of the poverty, simply subsidising and stabilising a miserable status quo with humiliating, pointless work like cleaning ditches – which in any case could be done much faster by machines. What was needed was what had always been needed: substantial land reform.

  This, they argued, could be achieved through a change in the crop management of the 23,000 hectares of land between Herrera and Écija, which were planted with labour-light dry crops like corn and sunflowers. The Marinaleda proposal was to sow crops that created substantially more work, like tobacco, cotton or sugar beet, and to create secondary industries for processing them. This, they argued, would instantly lead to a 30 per cent reduction in unemployment in central Andalusia. They also proposed the reforestation of some of the village’s environs with almond and pine trees, and the construction of a dam on the Genil River to irrigate the 50,000 hectares of arid land around it.

  Their demands, and their actions, were discussed and ratified by daily general assemblies, with even the children voting – because some of them, too, had volunteered to take part in the hunger strike. As media interest grew and journalists began to flock towards Marinaleda, other solidarity actions broke out elsewhere, many of them organised by the SOC, including a church occupation in nearby Morón de la Frontera, while 200 fellow jornaleros established four roadblocks on the Malaga-Seville trunk road.

  ‘We will continue until they know there is hunger in Andalusia’, read the El País headline on 17 August 1980, a quote from Sánchez Gordillo. It was a revealing line. The concrete demand for funds was only part of the battle: what was vital was that the rest of Spain, even the rest of the world, should be made aware of the region’s plight.

  A hunger strike was both a brave and canny choice. The normal repression meted out by the Guardia Civil and the government would not work this time. You can’t arrest or beat someone for refusing food. Nothing could silence, in Sánchez Gordillo’s words, ‘the voice of hundreds of empty stomachs willing to continue, if necessary, until death’. The drama of the rhetoric reflected the desperation of the situation: Sánchez Gordillo spoke to the media in ominous tones, warning of outsiders who wished to make an example of Marinaleda, bourgeois caciques scared of these comunistas, people who dreamed of ‘turning Marinaleda into Casas Viejas’. The invocation of that tragedy was knowingly provocative, but it was justified, too.

  The hunger strike was launched in August, even though (or because) the heat would be at its most punishing, peaking above thirty-eight degrees every day. August, of course, is dead time for news, and the perfect opportunity to gain national media attention for systemic, ongoing stories like poverty via high-profile acts of v
anguardist protest like this one. It allowed Sánchez Gordillo to proclaim to the world that they had received ‘neither a telegram, nor a call, nor a promise’ from the out-of-touch politicians busy sunning themselves on the beach; he added that ‘the left too, are on vacation. They only come here for votes.’ The heat made it more dangerous – doctors were on hand at all times, just in case – but also all the more remarkable, that men, women and children were going without food. Every day they would meet at the assembly to decide whether to continue, and to discuss the various messages of support they had received, as well as the attempts to reach those in power.

  ‘We went out from the assembly very slowly,’ wrote Sánchez Gordillo in a diary he kept of the hunger strike. ‘Sweat has ravaged us. Some wring out their shirts – this is the sauna of the poor.’

  The participation of the children of the village seems especially striking – they could see how desperate their parents’ struggles for survival had become, and the total absence of work, and feel its effects on their households (and dinner plates). Going to bed hungry was a common occurrence. As one newspaper cartoon put it at the time: ‘700 on hunger strike in Marinaleda; the rest, just hungry.’

  On day six of the strike, some of the children sat down and together wrote a letter to Prince Felipe, son of King Juan Carlos, heir to the throne, and, at the time, twelve years old. It was published in several Spanish newspapers. As far as the official record is concerned there was little adult involvement in the letter, and either way, it is a remarkable piece of propaganda: