The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  The children of Marinaleda have the pleasure to tell you about the situation in Andalusia and specifically, Marinaleda. A few days ago, our parents, in an open assembly, agreed to go on hunger strike. We are in solidarity with them. We have been on hunger strike for several days.

  Why are we on hunger strike? We are on hunger strike because our parents have already spent six months living on the alms of community employment. In our village people earn not even two hundred pesetas a day, because sometimes they only work two days a month. We live in such poverty that some families have to borrow money from their neighbours, because the shops no longer give them credit. Put yourself in our place and think: is it fair that while some children are on holiday with their parents and families, others don’t know if they will eat that night? Is it fair that while some children have private tutors, others can’t even attend state schools? Is it fair that while some waste large amounts of money on toys and luxuries, others have no shoes to wear and must go barefoot?

  We don’t think it is, and that is why we are on hunger strike. That is why we have gone several days without food, and we won’t stop until a solution arrives, because this situation is unbearable. It is even more unbearable in a land as rich as Andalusia.

  Friend: the problem in our land is serious, and so we are going to continue fighting alongside our parents. We will continue fighting because the problem is also ours; so please consider and answer these questions. What will become of us? Where is our future? Your future, we imagine, is already resolved, but what of ours? Who will resolve ours?

  This is not a fairy tale, but a real situation which you will never know … We ask you with all our hearts to stop and think, and perhaps you’ll feel anger or pity and you or your parents will give us some solution.

  Sorry if these words are strong, but our hunger is stronger. Greetings from your friends. Marinaleda.

  At the heart of this effort of undeniable collective energy, Mayor Sánchez Gordillo, still only thirty-one years old, was transforming into the person he would remain for decades. Notwithstanding his disapproval of leaders, he was more than a simple conduit for people power. Through his ineffable charisma he was leading the pueblo, as much as it was leading him. The people gathered for the general assembly were ‘almost religious in their silence’ when listening to Sánchez Gordillo, observed one visiting journalist – the only interruptions were outbursts of spontaneous applause. The assemblies closed with rousing shouts of ‘¡Viva Andalucía!’ before Sánchez Gordillo implored everyone to go home and rest.

  As the strike progressed, there were sympathy hunger strikes in neighbouring pueblos such as Osuna, Martín de la Jara, Aguadulce, Gilena and Los Corrales, as well as a general strike in Cabezas de San Juan. In Herrera, seven miles down the road, 200 workers locked themselves in the Chamber of Agriculture. As the days wore on, even more pueblos across Andalusia held assemblies to consider actions, occupations and demonstrations. The more desperate the situation got, the more its effects spiralled outwards – a truly successful expression of the anarchist tenet of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Spain’s minister of the interior returned from holiday; meetings were held, flimsy promises made, and still Marinaleda voted to continue the hunger strike.

  The political tension rose with the medical danger to its participants. By the final full day of the strike, 22 August, people were regularly fainting, and suffering hypoglycemia and crises of hypotension, while one man in his thirties was transferred to hospital in Seville.

  At last, Labour Minister Salvador Sánchez Terán and Seville’s civil governor, Isidro Pérez-Beneyto, effectively the leader of the region, returned from their holidays to address the crisis and, after numerous meetings, authorised a payment totalling 253 million pesetas for the Andalusian unemployed ‘to last until the December olive harvest’, as Marinaleda had demanded. While meeting the village’s request, the politicians complained to the press that the whole thing had been exaggerated and cynically orchestrated for the benefit of the SOC union. They also claimed, somewhat implausibly, that the strike had had no effect on their decision to issue the emergency payment.

  While the people of Marinaleda recovered, the unrest sparked by the hunger strike continued, with more hunger strikes elsewhere, pueblo-specific general strikes and occupations of government buildings – and solidarity demonstrations as far away as the Basque Country. Without the 253-million-peseta subsidy, it seems the hunger strike of 700 people in one small village could have spiralled into a full-blown regional uprising.

  It was a Monday night in Palo Palo, back in December 2012, with León’s country rock CDs playing softly in the background, harmonicas and long verses of longing delivered in Spanish. Monday nights are always very quiet in Andalusia – everyone has spent most of Sunday eating, drinking and socialising, and many restaurants and bars don’t even open. There was a grand total of four of us in the bar: a businessman from Seville, delaying his journey home after visiting a friend, the landlord León, one other middle-aged local guy who often loiters around Palo, who called himself Michael, and me.

  There was a Seville—Valladolid football game on TV, but it was going nowhere in particular, and the music was drowning out the commentary, so I got out my Marinaleda – Huelga de Hambre Contra el Hambre pamphlet, the more obscure of the two books written in 1980 that dealt with the hunger strike. After a while, Michael, equally bored by the game, noticed I was reading something in Spanish and asked if he could see it. With his leather jacket, slightly sad, gormless expression, and punky rat-tail haircut, he looked like the kind of guy who had arrived at middle age suddenly, due to a clerical error, and the surprise had devastated him. ‘I’ve not seen this one before,’ he muttered, turning it over in his hands. ‘Man, that was a crazy year … We always have struggles here in Andalusia, but not usually like that. You know we were famous across the world? What a crazy summer.’

  He flipped the pages slowly, spotting some familiar faces in the few photos at the back. He kept flicking through, and then his small sharp eyes zeroed in on one particular passage. He smiled, the only time I’ve ever seen him do so. ‘I knew it!’ He beckoned me to lean in. ‘That’s me! That interview is with me, Cornelio! That’s my real name. I was only eleven.’ He called León over from the bar. ‘León, look – it’s me!’

  We read it together: he had been a strident young lad, resolute about joining the hunger strike and determined that the young people would remain as steadfast as their parents. ‘Isn’t this a lot to endure for an eleven-year-old?’ the interviewer had asked him. ‘We will endure it,’ he replied. ‘You haven’t eaten anything?’ ‘Just water. We’re going to carry on until they give us work. Or we’ll have to emigrate.’ Even at eleven he was ready to work, he told the incredulous interviewer – picking cotton, in a factory, anything.

  Michael sighed. ‘The situation is much better in Marinaleda now, of course,’ he said. ‘But we are still always fighting. Struggles, protests, demonstrations – here, in Seville, wherever.’ I asked if Prince Felipe had ever answered their letter. He rolled his eyes slightly. ‘What do you think?’ he said, handed the book back to me, and turned back to the football.

  In the mid-1990s, the Seville University anthropologist Félix Talego Vázquez lived in Marinaleda for a year, researching his doctoral thesis. This thesis was published as a controversial book – controversial in Marinaleda, anyway – whose title translates as Worker Culture, People Power and Messianic Leadership. Talego saw the relentless struggle of the early years as a vital part of the solidification of Sánchez Gordillo’s leadership, not least during the hunger strike. Characterising your political project, as Sánchez Gordillo did, as la voz de los sin voz – the voice of those without a voice – and embarking on something as psychologically and emotionally significant as a group hunger strike, strengthens the distinction between an authentic, popular ‘us’ and a distant, oppressive, hegemonic ‘them’. In view of Andalusia’s history, I’m not sure this is an idea which requires m
uch strengthening.

  The hunger strike certainly went a long way in granting the man with the megaphone – both literally and figuratively, there is always one man holding Marinaleda’s megaphone; he seems to carry the thing everywhere he goes – the right to speak for the pueblo. His older supporters in the village have told me that at a time when they had no voice, and had never had a voice throughout their history, they were happy that someone had a megáfono, and knew how to use it.

  After centuries of being ignored, marginalised and near-starved, Marinaleda’s skill at attracting the mass media was finally helping them address these problems. During the hunger strike, the village was inundated by the national press and TV along with the BBC, German TV, French, English, German and Catalan newspapers, and even famosos, celebrities like the Andalusian folk singer Carlos Cano. There was also an influx of leftist intellectuals, writers and politicians, clamouring to express their solidarity.

  The strike was regarded as a success, wrote Talego, not because they acquired the funds to keep them going until the black olive harvest later that year, but because of the Shockwaves they sent through the rest of Andalusia and Spain via the media: ‘The press were to the Marinaleda hunger strike what the bride is to the wedding.’ Sánchez Gordillo was certainly happy to see them, especially the foreign reporters from England and Germany: ‘They gather a lot of material’, he wrote in his hunger strike diary, ‘to throw in the faces of those trying to lie. Thank goodness, because otherwise, the bourgeoisie had mounted a slander with enough clout to destroy and discredit the heroic struggle of the Andalusian jornaleros.’

  It’s no overstatement to say that the village itself was changed by the hunger strike. They were flattered by the attention, and perhaps even became fascinated by their own reflection. ‘People were busy all morning reading the papers’, wrote Talego, ‘to find new stories in which they were the protagonists, to feel the almost magical thrill of seeing their friends and acquaintances displayed in pictures all through Andalusia and Spain.’ Talego concluded that in this case at least, the observed object got pretty used to being observed, and rather enjoyed the experience.

  From then on, reckons Talego, ‘it was evident that Juan Manuel was someone special, different from the rest of those who were also on strike.’ He’s not wrong; Sánchez Gordillo proved then, and has been proving ever since, that he has a keen eye for the media. But why were the press interested? Why were their readers interested? Why did the coverage succeed, ultimately, in swaying a recalcitrant government? Perhaps because people wanted to hear what was coming from Sánchez Gordillo’s megaphone.

  Matters didn’t stop there. In April 1981 there was another hunger strike over the continued lack of funds for community employment – futile work in any case, as Sánchez Gordillo said, which ‘robs us of our dignity’.

  This time, 315 workers went on hunger strike. In the first three months of 1981, the unemployed had only received funds to pay for two days of work per week, representing an income of 2,066 pesetas a week to support them and their families. It seems extraordinary now, but in that pre-internet world of communications, Marinaleda was so isolated that Pérez-Beneyto, the civil governor of Seville, thought he could get away with telling the newspapers that the hunger strike was not really happening. It would be a day or so before anyone would get there and be able to contradict him, which the newspapers duly did. What they reported did not make Pérez-Beneyto look any better.

  ‘One day, all Andalusia will go up in flames,’ one of Marinaleda’s jornaleros told the press, contemplating the mud and weeds in the gutters he was clearing in exchange for his derisory community employment pay.

  After a week on hunger strike, more cases of hypoglycemia, fainting and malnutrition were reported by the doctors, and one old woman fell into a semi-comatose state. Hunger in Andalusia, said Sánchez Gordillo, is not merely ‘a ghost running through the village. Hunger is a man of flesh and blood who has to support his children.’ Four hundred people locked themselves into the village Sindicato building, where the assemblies happen now; the weaker ones lay on mattresses. In the town of Teba, also on hunger strike, a man died from complications relating to malnutrition. On this occasion, they secured a guarantee of four-days-per-week community employment for those without work.

  But it was not enough. ‘Return our stolen dignity!’ demanded Sánchez Gordillo in a piece for El País in 1982, calling for ‘real work’, which could only come from redistribution of the land—not through community employment and stealing chickens.

  ‘What is needed in Andalusia’, he wrote, ‘is a profound transformation of agricultural structures that generate wealth for a minority of landowners, and poverty, unemployment and hopelessness for the vast numbers of peasant labourers.’

  And so they kept campaigning for changes to those agricultural structures, piece by piece. There were protests over the lack of water – for consumption, but also for irrigation – throughout the early 1980s. They were forced to share a well with the neighbouring towns of Gilena and El Rubio, and responded by occupying municipal buildings and scrawling ¡Queremos agua! (We want water!) on their election ballots. For twenty-three days they staged a symbolic ‘light strike’, turning off all electric lights from 8 pm, a reference to the limited three or four hours they were allowed access to the well each day.

  In fact, there was another well nearby, on the land of the Duke of Infantado. They tried to negotiate with him, hoping that El Rubio and Marinaleda could buy a certain amount of water every month. The Duke turned them down: he needed it to water his olive trees. The level of class hatred in this part of the world is difficult to grasp without these kinds of incidents in mind – it reads like a medieval struggle for basic sustenance, not Western Europe in the 1980s.

  As Sánchez Gordillo and a few others locked themselves in the council building once again, the rest of the village voted for a hunger strike. After a few days of this, a solution was found (one suggested by Sánchez Gordillo at the start, but rejected by the regional government), with Marinaleda and El Rubio allowed into a consortium to run a pipe from a well in Écija. A few months later, a fresh supply was discovered in Estepa and a new well was dug there. Upon its official opening, Sánchez Gordillo addressed the soon-to-be mayor of Seville, Manuel del Valle Arévalo:

  ‘We all know that soldiers fight, and generals just award themselves medals.’

  ‘Yes,’ del Valle replied, ‘but you are a general, too.’

  The people of Marinaleda fought on, winning one small victory at a time. But after several years they were still desperately poor, landless, and lacking in the autonomy they sought. They continued to involve themselves in every struggle going: farm and building occupations, strikes, lock-ins, marches, rallies. They went on hunger strike again over the arrest of fellow SOC jornaleros on demonstrations. They took another hunger strike to the Palacio de Monsalves in Seville, camping out outside the council of the Andalusian government, where some of their number proceeded to faint on the doorstep. Even what little work there was seemed under threat. In January 1983, seventy marinaleña women locked themselves in the village Sindicato in protest at the use of machinery in the olive harvest.

  Their protests were creative, mobile, and often symbolically connected to the demands in question. In 1984 they occupied the Cordobilla reservoir for a month (eating, sleeping and holding assemblies there) to call for the creation of a new dam which they said would irrigate 15,000 hectares of land in the Sierra Sur. Others occupied the Cañada Honda hill near Gilena, to call for its reforestation with fruit-bearing trees.

  They continued to incur the wrath of the political elites. When Prime Minister Felipe González, the supposedly socialist leader of the PSOE,** said in September 1983 that the farm labourers of Andalusia were using their community employment payments to buy cars, 600 marínatenos locked themselves in the Casa de Cultura in protest and began another hunger strike. The subsequent pattern followed a familiar path – silence from the politician
s, followed by catcalls from Sánchez Gordillo via the press, escalation of the propaganda war, and finally establishment capitulation. González was embarrassed into atoning for his jibe by calling Sánchez Gordillo on the phone, to hear him out. And such was the media attention that when Sánchez Gordillo sent him a pilot plan for employment across Andalusia, González was compelled to announce he had read and considered it.

  Sánchez Gordillo quickly became a media favourite; they described his ‘almost messianic gestures’, his trademark half-open shirt and prophet’s beard, and were clearly impressed by his youth, his persistence and his unwavering ability to get up the noses of the authorities in new and newsworthy ways. He was ‘perhaps the most charismatic character in the Andalusian countryside’, one commentator wrote in 1983.

  * * *

  In 1985, SOC labourers from Marinaleda and the nearby pueblos of Gilena and Utrera started to occupy the lands of the Duke of Infantado. He was four times over a Grande de España, a Spanish grandee, one of the most high-ranking members of the nobility, and owned 17,000 hectares in Andalusia. While the jornaleros engaged in cat-and-mouse occupations of the fields, chased off by the Guardia, Sánchez Gordillo was citing two feasibility studies which supported his recommendations for a dam of the Genil River that would allow the irrigation of 6,000 hectares and an expropriation of El Humoso’s 1,200 hectares which would provide 250 families with jobs. Much was made of the oft-quoted statistic that 50 per cent of land in Andalusia was owned by 2 per cent of the families. Unemployment was 65 per cent in Marinaleda at the time.

  ‘Why did you choose the Duke of Infantado’s land specifically, and not someone else’s?’ my American friend Paulette asked Sánchez Gordillo when we met him in 2012. It’s a fair question. If you’re establishing micro-communism, there are bound to be imperfections in the levelling-out process, since by definition only a tiny part of the country is going to be communised; it seems a bit arbitrary. ‘We chose his land because he was the one who had the most!’ Sánchez Gordillo replied bluntly. There’s something unscientific and pragmatic about this attitude which is quite refreshing.