by Dan Hancox
Eventually Mariano pulled up, parked alongside us and got out, shaking hands with everyone, cautiously friendly, but formal. Then we got back in our cars, and followed him through the winding olive groves out of town. After fifteen minutes or so he indicated a turning, a rocky dirt track cut right into the middle of the groves – so narrow that I could have reached out the window and picked the olives off the trees. The path wound slowly and bumpily up a gentle incline, to a cottage located behind high wire mesh fences topped with barbed wire. ‘Wow. I guess this is the opposition compound?’ muttered Dave, only partially in jest, as three dogs jumped up to the gate. One was massive, two were almost comically tiny, which took the edge off the slight atmosphere of unease.
In the cottage, we sat down at the kitchen table, and Mariano rolled up one blind above the sink. We remained in this dim half-light for the couple of hours we sat there and talked. It was only a simulacrum, but we really felt like we were in hiding.
I had got the sense that Mariano Pradas is rather unfairly maligned in Marinaleda, where he is one of two elected Socialist Party (PSOE) councillors, alongside the nine of Sánchez Gordillo’s Izquierda Unida (IU). He tends to slink around town. On the night of Marinaleda’s February carnival, while I was having dinner with friends in one of the less popular (and thus conveniently emptier) village cafés, Mariano came in on his own, looked around slightly shiftily, had a quick, quiet conversation with the grumpy, boss-eyed owner, and crept off again. He and the other PSOE councillor, José Rodríguez Cobacho, rarely join in with any of the community’s cultural events: they say they don’t feel welcome. Crucially, neither of them actually live in Marinaleda itself; they’re both up the hill in Estepa.
To commence his victory speech after the local elections in 2012, Sánchez Gordillo announced to the waiting crowd, as if delivering the football scores, ‘Marinaleda 9, Estepa 2’ – and was met with enormous cheers. Little could better elucidate the incredible persistence of that key facet of Andalusian life: you are your pueblo, and as long as the PSOE representatives live in Estepa, their dedication to and understanding of the life of Marinaleda will be called into question.
Pradas would counter, fairly, that he was born in Marinaleda, he grew up there, and his family are from there. He remembers the bad old days, the daily struggle of life under the dictatorship, and his analysis of the dire state the village was in before the 1980s isn’t that different from Sánchez Gordillo’s – a desperately poor pueblo surrounded by latifundios, and a people heedlessly left to starve by a political elite with no interest in them.
I was curious to know how anyone from the PSOE, a nominally socialist party, would even begin to make a case against the jornaleros’ long, successful fight for the land. Sure enough, Pradas was careful not to dismiss the struggle, or the land occupations. ‘In part, it was a good thing,’ he said, in an I-hold-my-hands-up sort of way. ‘The jornaleros have some land now, and that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t provide everyone with as much work as they claim. There is not full employment here, not even close – the real problem is the lack of industry in Andalusia.’ The CUT/SAT fixation on winning the land was a myopic obsession, the way he told the story of the 1980s: ‘A lot of different things are necessary to make progress,’ he explained, ‘not just fields.’
What about the hunger strike, I asked. ‘The truth?’ He laughed a little, involuntarily: not derisive, or disrespectful, but an irreverent laugh, directed at the legend built up around it. ‘The truth is, it has been massively sentimentalised. The majority of people had nothing to do with it.’ He repeated Félix Talego’s analysis, that it was first and foremost a well-orchestrated media event, coordinated from the top by Sánchez Gordillo with the help of the union and the party.
‘Marinaleda is a divided pueblo. Sánchez Gordillo has worked hard to make sure it is divided, using the assemblies, the TV station, and so on. If you are not on his side, that puts you on the right, that makes you a fascist – and you are attacked, you are insulted, you are intimidated.’ Their first task, he said, if the PSOE won control of the village council, would be to restore freedom of thought, and let people make their own decisions, without the polarity of being either ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ the mayor. They would consider questions of how to run El Humoso, and all the other aspects of Sánchez Gordillo’s Marinaleda, after that.
Sure, Pradas said, you have a secret ballot, and a free vote – but it’s the other aspects of life in the village which are undemocratic: people know if you are with Sánchez Gordillo or not. ‘If you’re not clearly a fanatic, people assume you are the other way.’ And the assemblies? ‘They are only a superficial expression of democracy. Those who are not Gordillistas would never bother going in the first place, and those who are, are mostly attending because they know it will help them get work in El Humoso.’ It is, he said, no different from the era of the caciques – the informal biases, the distribution of work and favours to people on ‘the right side’.
It is both known and noted whether you are participating in demonstrations and strikes. If you do, you’re in line for favours, and if you don’t, you’re a fascist.
‘Intimidation doesn’t have to be physical,’ he said, solemnly. ‘Many people have felt uncomfortable, and had to leave the village for Estepa or elsewhere.’
In the past, he said, his sister’s house in the village had had ‘fascist’ and ‘criminal’ daubed on the door. Pradas himself had been called a fascist by Sánchez Gordillo in council meetings; he’d had his car vandalised ‘for political reasons’. The accusations kept coming. During one episode of Línea Directa, his Saturday TV programme, the mayor said that anyone who wanted to celebrate semana santa with a procession was a fascist. ‘He thinks religious people must be fascists – you can’t be on the left and religious, apparently. He talks about freedom a lot, but where is the religious freedom? Personally, I don’t believe in much either, but I respect the tradition of semana santa.’
As with so many of the allegations and counter-allegations, unpicking the gossip from the facts is almost impossible. There are a few verified incidents: in November 1986, a group of fifty marinaleños broke the windows and scratched the bodywork of the regional PSOE leadership’s cars when they came to open a party headquarters in the village.
After the interview we climbed up on a rickety ladder to stand on Pradas’s roof and look out to the horizons. As we chatted and looked in vain for discernible landmarks amid the rolling hills, I noticed his consonants were being swallowed up in his round, slightly forlorn face: a word like después sinking into his cheeks and becoming ‘depweh’. He was a funny character, near but not quite at the end of his tether as the figurehead of ‘la oposición’. He alternated between slight exhaustion and faint amusement when recounting his arguments with the Gordillistas – essentially the same arguments they’d been having for decades. As was true in the time of the caciques, much of it came down to personal tensions between him and his opponent. I asked what he thought would have happened if Sánchez Gordillo had never got involved in politics: would someone else have picked up the same mantle? Will this project continue when he is no longer mayor?
‘Definitely not. Gordillismo without Gordillo is impossible,’ he said, without a moment’s reflection. ‘For me his politics aren’t even communism, it’s a politics very personal to him. After Sánchez Gordillo, business will flourish again. We can all move on.’
* * *
Over several decades of struggle, Sánchez Gordillo has established a firm narrative for the Marinaleda story, and you can read this narrative repeated online in countless articles, in many different languages, in near-identical form. They’ve been engaged in struggle long enough to attract journalists, activists, filmmakers and photographers from almost every country in Europe, and numerous places beyond. It’s only after staying for more than a short while, and probing around the edges of the locals’ superficial memories, that you start to realise how tightly bound and narrowly focused Sánchez Gordi
llo’s narrative is.
It’s not even that there’s any malevolent intent to this. Sánchez Gordillo is comparable to a veteran rock star, at the top of his field for decades, who has been compelled to do the same interview over and over again. It’s become a bit of a chore, but he can’t skip it, because that would be self-defeating, so he reels off the same lines again by rote, the same key points in the narrative: they formed a party and a trade union, went on hunger strike, occupied the fields, won the fields, and built a communist utopia free of crime, police or religion, that provides work, housing and leisure for all. With the best will in the world, it is inevitable that this simple, official narrative is economical with the truth. It’s also inevitable that Sánchez Gordillo’s critics have been quick to find the holes in it and shout about them.
The Spanish right are fond of describing Marinaleda as a ‘communist theme park’, a miniature Cuba or North Korea; a failed micro-state, with Che’s face painted over the cracks in its democracy. The land occupations have been described as ‘Mugabe-esque’, and the leader as an absolutist who does what all communists do: erase individual potential and talent, mowing down the tall poppies with the sickle and bashing the rest of them with the hammer. Apart from anything else, to attack Marinaleda for being a miniature Soviet satellite is to completely ignore the history of the region, and the kind of politics its people have been drawn towards: individual freedom has always been paramount, and so it remains today in the village. It’s worth reiterating that Marinaleda follows Spanish electoral law to the letter, yet breaks national laws by having no police force. In a number of the village bars, Spain’s smoking ban is simply ignored, and ashtrays sit on the tables. For better or worse, this is anything but a controlling or authoritarian state.
The murals, in their varied litany of global causes, certainly have a Cuban feel to them. They are an expression of a political identity, or range of identities, to locals and visitors alike. They are also, as one critic argued, a secular catechism – a litany of faith to the believers, and a consciously provocative statement to outsiders and infidels. In that five-minute walk down Avenida de la Libertad, you are given a visual summary of the Sánchez Gordillo doctrine: only agrarian reform will end rural poverty; capitalist TV is propaganda; peace cannot come from militarism; Marinaleda remains true to the Spanish Second Republic, opposes fascism everywhere, and struggles in solidarity with the people of the Basque Country, Catalunya, various parts of South and Central America, Western Sahara, and Palestine.
Some critics of nineteenth-century Andalusian anarchism identified in it a millenarian streak, a replacement of their historical Christian faith with an all-consuming belief that only an inevitable workers’ revolution would bring about the new world previously promised to them by the Catholic Church. Arguably a part of that tendency still lingers. You can choose to see this symbolism in the imagery on the village crest and in some of the murals, which depict Marinaleda as a utopian idyll of green fields and clean white houses under a golden sun, a world born anew from the revivifying acts of workers’ struggle. But is this imagery really evidence of a messianic, millenarian communism? The fields are mostly green, the houses are mostly white and the sun is relentless, and undeniably yellow.
In an interview with the Diario de Sevilla newspaper in November 2011, Sánchez Gordillo said: ‘I am a spiritual leader, if you want to call it that.’ Certainly, as he said on that occasion, his ‘flock’ trusts him. The flock has a powerful devotion to the leader, and, when the situation calls for it, a willingness to take physical risks (fighting the Spanish police, for example) to defend the creed he espouses. But this is to stretch a point: Gordillismo is not a cult, much less a millenarian one. Even the criticism of the wall of murals as sinisterly ‘Cuban’ needs unpacking: they are contributions from all over the world, and not commissioned by the town hall. If this is a catechism, it is an open-source catechism, rather than one dictated from the top.
The Cuban-ness of the mayor’s office is perhaps more robustly expressed in that facility that surely every small village needs: its own radio and TV station. They were established in the 1980s and 1990s respectively to provide an alternative to what Sánchez Gordillo calls ‘the voice of the master’, filtering in from the capitalist media outside.
The Marinaleda media hub is housed between the wall of murals and the Ayuntamiento in the impressive Casa de Cultura, and consists of a few rooms of production desks and edit suites, as well as two dedicated studios. Enlivened with footage of local activities and festivities, demonstrations and rallies, Sánchez Gordillo’s topical phone-in show airs every week for an hour and a half. Looming above the banks of dials in the edit suite on my first visit there, the TV screens were all displaying freeze-frame close-ups of the mayor, disrupted in full flow. It was a slightly eye-watering image, the lurid reds and greens in the studio backdrop clashing noisily with Gordillo’s bold orange jacket.
Part of this centrepiece phone-in show, Línea Directa, is dedicated to local issues, and the rest to the bigger picture: it might be events in Andalusia, or a discussion of Palestine. The inspiration sometimes cited is Aló Presidente, the late Hugo Chávez’s unscripted talk show, in which he addressed the Venezuelan people at length. In the studio itself, there were chairs set out for the studio audience – although the programme is not the most visual of feasts, usually confined to a static camera on Sánchez Gordillo. Initially the programme lasted three hours, and the production team had to carefully explain to him that this might need cutting down a bit. Sometimes Sánchez Gordillo reads his poetry directly to the camera, intercut with footage of El Humoso’s pastoral idyll. The poetry embroiders familiar themes; indeed, he has got into trouble with his critics for lines like ‘the right is verily Satan in flesh and blood’.
In my residence the TV was almost always on in the living room, and my host Antonio would occasionally let me flick over from his heavy diet of comically overblown Latin American telenovelas to watch a bit of Marinaleda TV. It was usually a series of short clips of recent activities, protests, or information about upcoming sporting activities – register for next month’s youth table tennis tournament! That kind of thing. If you live in Marinaleda, you can’t really avoid being on TV – if you go on demos, or out during festivals, you’ll be filmed.
One fifteen-minute segment recorded the visit of a blue-haired Argentinian hippy, who had come to give the village pensioners a session of New Age dance and physical interaction in the pavilion. Soft music played as she encouraged them to awkwardly stroke each other’s faces. This programme sticks in my memory because of Antonio’s helpless laughter at the evident discomfort of the participants, his friends and neighbours. Next was a short segment about the recent occupation of empty government farms in Somonte – a big story for SAT, and hence for Marinaleda, accompanied by a medley of Spanish punk and funk. Finally, they filled time with a montage of some women in the vegetable processing factory impassively piling up roasted peppers, de-seeding them, and generally working the production line, accompanied by the blissed-out reggae of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. It was more than a little surreal. When they ran out of material for the day, the channel synced up with the sepia-tinged broadcasts of Cubavisión Internacional, the international offshoot of Cuban state TV.
As propaganda it’s pretty small-scale, low-impact stuff, although the range is about fifty kilometres, potentially reaching 60,000 viewers including Estepa, Écija and Osuna. They don’t have any viewing figures for inside or outside the village, however. The station is often regarded with irritation in neighbouring villages for blocking other channels; on more than one occasion Spanish state prosecutors have begun legal proceedings because of the station’s signal-squatting, piggy-backing on the frequencies owned by other, bigger stations, including, rumour has it, the Disney Channel.
There’s an informational function to some of the output. The radio and TV stations are used to mobilise for upcoming demonstrations and land occupations, a
long with the union website, telephone chains, and neighbourly word-of-mouth. But for the most part, the content consists of trailers for life in the village, reminders of what ‘we’ stand for – which hits at that same issue of plurality in the village, or the lack of it. Paco Martos, the bright young guy I’d met on the coach to Malaga, one of the media hub’s few full-time employees, was unapologetic about the fact they share a world-view with Marinaleda’s Ayuntamiento: they may agree, but the significant thing is, he insisted, they don’t take instruction from them.
There is, and has always been, one overwhelming problem for right-wing or liberal depictions of Marinaleda as a grotesque, demagogic dictatorship: Sánchez Gordillo keeps on winning elections. Again, and again, and again. He does so neither by slender, contestable margins, nor by margins so implausible that you’d be minded to send in UN election observers. As the crisis slowly saps all remaining credibility from the major parties, the rightist Popular Party (PP) and PSOE, Marinaleda is a jewel in the crown for IU, the coalition of left parties to which the CUT and Sánchez Gordillo belong.
Spanish local council elections are decided via a proportional share of the vote and use a party-list system, where you put your chosen party’s piece of paper in an envelope, and that envelope in the ballot box: so the more votes IU receives, the more people on its list of candidates get elected. During the March 2012 local election, as the count proceeded in the Centro de Adultos, they would dramatically unfurl each anonymous ballot one by one, the Gordillistas in the room cheering each vote for IU. The mayor’s supporters would dash out of the small classroom into the courtyard whenever IU had amassed enough votes for another councillor – ‘We’ve got seven!’ ‘Now we’ve got eight!’ – to huge cheers each time.