The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  The surviving Super-8 footage of the marches to occupy the Duke of Infantado’s land now look so hallowed, so other-worldly. Sepia is already naturally the colour of the earth around Marinaleda, and the grainy, flickering images seem to plunge the period much further back into the past. The people of Marinaleda wound their way the ten miles from the village to El Humoso, in a stream four or five people wide and several hundred long. The most striking difference in the way they looked back then is that their shirts were plainer, in the prelapsarian simplicity of life before t-shirts with brands and pictures and symbols. Their white cotton clothes are yellowed by the old film, topped with olive or brown berets, the women in blue floaty dresses holding children and stirring great cauldrons of potato stew, wearing white headscarves against the scorching summer sun.

  The flags they carried then were the Andalusian tricolour or an unadorned red flag. There is no Second Republic flag, and no custom-made utopia flag of Marinaleda yet: the badge of resistance was simply that of regional identity, or communism. Alongside the throng walks a younger, slimmer Sánchez Gordillo, his hair and beard black, still only in his early thirties, marshalling the marching column, rousing the troops with his megaphone, just as he does now. Back then, many were not confident of success – but in a sense they had little option but to persevere, and were continuously chivvied by the extraordinary persistence of the project and of its leader. ‘I believe that over time’, Sánchez Gordillo recalled recently, ‘the small victories made people believe it was possible.’

  Ever-present in that old footage are the cars of the Guardia Civil, who made sure to impede the villagers however they could. ‘Arrested twice in 24 hours’, read the front page of the now defunct Diario 16 newspaper, under a photograph of a marinaleña in a headscarf, shielding her apparently shamed face from the camera. The regional government in Seville would keep sending orders for their eviction, but sometimes it took months to get the court orders – so the marinaleños stayed for months, eating and sleeping in makeshift shelters. They were not, in fact, disrupting anything much, in the sense that the land was not being used for anything at all – precisely their complaint. They were idle and the land was idle: the resolution was obvious. On this 1,200-hectare estate the only things growing, for miles in every direction, were wheat and sunflowers – it required only three or four caretakers to tend to it.

  The Irish-Italian writer Michael Jacobs came across one of the farm occupations while researching his book Andalusia:

  On the long drive up to the cortijo I passed a group of villagers carrying hoes and rakes, the women dressed in black. They could have been straight out of a communist poster of the 1930s and this impression was reinforced by the political badges they were all wearing. In the middle of all this prowled the leonine and instantly recognisable figure of Sánchez Gordillo, wearing a Tolstoyan suit and a red sash. He addressed me in a slow solemn voice with no trace of a smile. I could not help feeling, confronted by such a manner and appearance, that I was in the presence of one of the Messianic figures who toured the Andalusian countryside in the nineteenth century.

  It was land reform from below, not above, delivered by direct action, and always pacifist: their rule was to leave when evicted (though this did not prevent countless lawsuits for trespassing, roadblocks and other related incidents). They fell into a routine whereby the Guardia Civil would evict them every day at the same time, around 5 or 6 pm, when they would go peacefully and walk back to the village. The following morning they would walk the ten miles back again, flags held high. In the summer of 1985, in the blistering heat, they made the journey every day for a month – taking only Sunday off. Astonishingly, they even developed some cordial relationships with their lifelong enemies in the gendarmerie, such was the familiarity of the routine both sides fell into. Things were not always so smooth – some of the marinaleños were arrested and imprisoned (leading to more hunger strikes in sympathy), and in one incident in 1985, a shot was fired at an Andalusian flag flying above the heads of the occupiers: ‘Fired by the same people who once did the same against Blas Infante, and with the same intention,’ as Gordillo put it, displaying the shell casing for the photographers.

  They carried out over 100 occupations of El Humoso during the 1980s, at one point camping in the property for ninety days and nights. As the 1992 Seville Universal Exposition approached, and the official rhetoric of civic excitement and pride intensified, Sánchez Gordillo was able to use his platform to contrast the hype ahead of the Expo with the ongoing deprivation in the Andalusian countryside, writing in 1989:

  This human disaster occurs when all the official grandiloquence teaches us 1992 will be the year that paradise begins – although it has not yet been clarified who for. 1992 is set before us as the new myth, in the hope we forget the ordeal we have been suffering. Indices of unemployment, emigration, illiteracy, and marginalisation of all kinds are higher and sadder here than anywhere in Europe.

  Taking the fight to Seville itself, they were blasted with water cannons away from the offices of the Expo commissioner general. In focusing on this high-profile, highly expensive vanity project, with millions already spent and millions of tourists expected, they had finally broken the Andalusian government. After months of negotiations behind closed doors, in 1991 they were finally granted El Humoso’s 1,200 hectares, the Duke of Infantado was quietly paid off by the regional government, the Junta de Andalucía, and the people of Marinaleda finally became landlords. The Duke didn’t even put up much of a fight in the end, Sánchez Gordillo told me – he got compensation from the government and had barely even been using the land, which in any case was a tiny proportion of all that he owned. ‘Honestly, I think we did the Duke a favour,’ Sánchez Gordillo said, straight-faced.

  It was a historic victory. In Sánchez Gordillo’s reading – and he had once been a part-time history teacher in Marinaleda – it was the first time in 5,000 years that the Andalusian farm labourers had been given the land that was rightfully theirs.

  They didn’t rest on their laurels, but continued la lucha throughout the 1990s, campaigning for funds for cultural projects, for housing, or for their brethren across Andalusia: occupying the Bank of Spain, blocking the high-speed AVE trains, breaking into the international airports at Malaga and Seville, occupying the Palace of San Telmo, Canal Sur Radio, and launching yet more hunger strikes, demonstrations and blockades, in the Sierra Sur and in Seville.

  It’s not been without consequences: during the 1980s campaign for land, especially, there were constant arrests, beatings and trials. Even now, every time I visit Marinaleda, Sánchez Gordillo seems to be either facing court or just having left it, on charges relating to some protest or other – normally he only gets a fine. Was it true, I asked him in 2012, that he’d been in jail seven times and had fascist agitators try to kill him not once, but twice?

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, with a hint of a smile. You’re nobody if you haven’t survived an assassination attempt or two, right? ‘The first time was in the 1980s, at the beginning of our struggle. A man from Fuerza Nueva, an extreme-right party, sort of like Le Pen’s, shot at me. I was in the car, and the bullet went in one door and out the other.’ He mimed a bullet whizzing past him, eyes wide. ‘The other attempt happened when ETA killed a [Partido Popular] councillor in the Basque Country called Miguel Ángel Blanco. The same day one of the Guardia Civil said that since one of their side had been killed, they should shoot someone from the left. One of them came to my house with a gun, but I saw him in time and had him stopped.’ Sánchez Gordillo seemed calmly stoical about his own punishments. When you have thought about – and fought – power for as long as he has, you become almost zen about it.

  ‘I have been in jail many, many times and I have been harassed numerous times more. I believe in non-violence, and the community uses non-violent means to fight. Power uses violence when something of theirs is touched that they don’t want touched. The bourgeoisie is pro-democracy only as long as de
mocracy doesn’t hurt their pockets.’ And if it does? ‘If it does, they stop being democratic: they send the police, they start a war, they stage a coup. They have no scruples. Yes, they speak of peace. They speak of peace, but practise war.’

  * * *

  Back in the olive oil factory, Bigotes refused to lend his whiskers to any kind of complacency about Marinaleda’s remarkable achievements. And yet for him everything changed after 1991, when they won the land which stretched out before us:

  ‘We’ve now reached a level where utopia is a different idea. When we started, we were starving. We’ve been fighting for a long time, we’ve got the prizes we struggled for in Marinaleda: we have work, we have all these facilities, everything is cool now. We won. Now we are protesting to solve the crisis, which is a global problem.’

  He gestured towards the fields, and the hills of Estepa beyond. The mist rolled off the top of the olive groves of El Humoso, sweeping down over the Duchess of Alba’s land, south towards Marinaleda and El Rubio.

  ‘We’re fighting for another kind of utopia now: the future. The future is going to be very interesting.’

  * A cortijo is a prosperous farm, grange or ranch, its compound often enclosed by a wall.

  ** Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.

  4

  The Land Belongs to Those Who Work It

  For a part of the world which spends most of its life immersed in bright sunlight, Marinaleda is remarkably active in the dark: before the sun rises, and after sunset – not least in the devastating heat of the summer, when temperatures can reach forty-nine degrees, as they did in August 2012. You try and sweep the dust off your patio, one marinaleña told me, and find yourself dripping sweat straight onto the floor you’re supposed to be cleaning. It was scarcely worth doing anything before the sun went down, when temperatures declined to a more reasonable thirty-five degrees or so. It also made work of all kinds nearly impossible; but the Andalusians are used to it, and carry on regardless, slowly, with cold drinks and sun hats.

  In the darkness of a winter morning, between 6 and 7 am, Marinaleda’s workers are clustered around the counter of the orange-painted patisserie, Horno el Cedazo. Here they stand, knocking back strong, dark coffee accompanied by orange juice, pastries and pan con tomate: truly one of the world’s best breakfasts, a large hunk of toast served alongside a bottle of olive oil and a decanter of sweet, salty, pink tomato pulp. Pour on one, then the other, then a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and you are ready for a day in the fields. Those with stronger stomachs also knock back a shot of one of the lurid-coloured liquors arrayed on a high shelf behind the counter; the syrupy, pungent anís is the most popular of these coffee chasers.

  Tucked away in a corner of the bakery is a stand selling lottery tickets – phenomenally popular across Spain – with millionaire prizes called things like El Joker. The big advertisement behind the lottery desk is for EuroMillones, a colossal mega-lottery that runs across Europe, with a minimum prize of €15 million: the poster features a brown brick wall cut away to reveal a glimpse of a tropical paradise, clear blue seas, and a yacht sailing off into the sunset. The slogan, written in mock graffiti on top of the brickwork, says ‘LA LIBERTAD ES EL PREMIO’. Freedom is the prize. The troika, you feel, would approve of this kind of utopian dreaming, this consumerist vision of freedom.

  All work in the Marinaleda co-operative is shift work, depending on what needs harvesting, and how much of it there is. If there’s enough work for your group, then you will be told in advance, through the loudspeaker on the van that circles the village the previous evening. It’s a strange, quasi-Soviet experience, sitting at home and hearing the van drive past announcing ‘Work in the fields tomorrow for Group B’. The static-muffled announcements get louder and quieter as the van winds through the village’s narrow streets, like someone lost in a maze carrying a transistor radio.

  If you don’t have your own car to drive to El Humoso for work, then you get a lift: mutual aid and co-operation underscores a great deal of the town’s farming work, in practice as well as principle. Visiting the farm with a photographer friend during the annual olive harvest, without benefit of wheels, we were passed from favour to favour all day in a chain of instinctive, unthinking acts of kindness. We had been invited to a mid-morning breakfast at 10 am by Manolo, the jefe (boss) of the olive oil factory, and were struggling a bit trying to work out how to get there. In the 1980s, the marinaleño occupiers had walked those ten miles along the road every single morning in the summer heat; we, however, were rather hoping for a lift. But all of my friends in the village were busy or working elsewhere, and the people actually working in the fields had all set off at the crack of dawn.

  Eventually, after ringing around a bit, we were told: ‘Turn up at this address on Avenida de la Libertad and ring the doorbell, a guy called Pepe will take you.’ I’d never met Pepe before, but he was quite happy to give up half his morning to drive us out to the farm; he was a history buff, and delighted in telling us about the old days – he even showed us his blog before we set off. Once we arrived at the oil factory at the entrance to El Humoso it quickly became clear that Pepe knew Manolo, and José, and Bigotes – they’re all the same generation, all fifty-plus, all guys who were in the village since the project began; so Pepe joined us for breakfast, too.

  In some kind of teleological mistake, we started at the end, not with hours of hard physical labour, but with the epic breakfast which ought to be its reward. In a small rec room off the main factory floor, on a shiny plastic tablecloth, were laid pieces of kitchen towel, and a single rugby-ball-shaped loaf of bread for each of us – the kind with orange-coloured crusts that are so hard they could probably be hurled, quarterback-style, across a factory floor and still remain intact. We were shown what to do next. You cut the loaf lengthways to create two giant half-moons of bread, then push your thumbs into the fluffy white dough to make some space, before taking the unmarked jug of olive oil and pouring its rich green contents into the cavity, so it seeps into the dough. You then devour these giant half moons of fruity olive oil bread with pieces of jamón from the leg clamped to its special stand, slices of manchego cheese, and chunks of peppery salchichón, hacked off and eaten in lumps. The oil was fresh out of the vats, yet to be bottled, and actually tasted of the aromatic air you smell deep in the olive groves.

  ‘Would you like a drink? Some coffee?’ offered Manolo. ‘Or wine?’ We laughed, and opted for coffee. It hadn’t been a joke. Manolo’s brother José, who manages the land, and whose overalls suggested he had done more that morning than I had all week, opted for wine. Manolo reached up to a box of white wine on a shelf behind the coffee machine, and held down the little tap until he had filled a decent-sized tumbler of the stuff.

  When we finished we gathered around the Huelga de Hambre pamphlet, and their faces lit up with that same mixture of slight bemusement, joy and poignancy I’d seen before in veterans of la lucha. They flicked to the pictures and started spotting old friends in among the wide-angle shots of various historic general assemblies and marches. It was a tad macabre. ‘He’s dead,’ said Manolo, as if commentating on a football match. ‘She’s dead, too.’ You remember all these events, I asked, even though it was thirty-three years ago? ‘Sure, of course. I was at that meeting, it went on for hours.’ He breathed deeply and handed the book over to his brother. ‘You must understand the connection’, he insisted, ‘between all that’ – he pointed to the yellowing pamphlet – ‘and all this. Everything here’, he said, casting his arm out at the factory around him, ‘comes from the struggle.’

  Manolo went on to tell me disdainfully about another book, a stupid book by someone who did not understand all this history, who did not understand the suffering and deprivation of the old days. It was, of course, the Félix Talego book. Talego is an anthropologist, not a right-wing critic out to destroy the village, but since the title of the book included the phrase ‘messianic leadership’, it’s not h
ard to see why the members of the co-operative, supporters of Sánchez Gordillo, took against him. I feigned ignorance of Talego, not wanting to associate myself with another suspicious outsider who asked a lot of questions – and chose the wrong answers.

  As breakfast was tidied away, my photographer friend Dave showed them some of the photos he’d taken of the olive oil factory, flicking the wheel around on the back of his digital camera. As he reached the end of the selection of pictures of El Humoso, he accidentally flicked onto some portraits he had taken the previous day of Mariano Pradas, the village’s PSOE leader and long-standing enemy of Sánchez Gordillo, which he hadn’t got around to deleting from the memory card. There was a sharp intake of breath from the workmen. ‘Oh,’ said Manolo. ‘The opposition.’ And made a face.

  The solidarity of struggle binds people together in an almost ineffable way through a shared experience, a shared goal, shared risks and hardships. ‘Solidarity’, when practised over decades by one community fighting a distant, hated other, becomes a psychological state. Combine this with the comradeship of working together every day, on a project which is the spoils of your struggle, and you have a kind of loyalty greater even than the sum of those two parts. You feel it in the way the older marinaleños talk about the old days in general, but it comes across even more powerfully from that generation when they talk about el alcalde, the mayor, and his enemies: these guys were with Sánchez Gordillo since the beginning.

  * * *

  As soon as the 1,200-hectare farm was won in 1991, cultivation began. The new Marinaleda co-operative selected crops that would need the greatest amount of human labour, to create as much work as possible. In addition to the ubiquitous olives and the oil processing factory, they planted peppers of various kinds, artichokes, fava beans, green beans, broccoli: crops that could be processed, canned, and jarred, to justify the creation of a processing factory which provided a secondary industry back in the village, and thus more employment. ‘Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs,’ Sánchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on ‘efficiency’ – a word which has been elevated to almost holy status in the neoliberal lexicon, but in reality has become a shameful euphemism for the sacrifice of human dignity at the altar of share prices.