The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  In a village where your political affinities (and their associated colour schemes, flags, heroes and icons) are held to be so important, election campaigns are periods of excitement, albeit rather one-sided excitement. The mayor’s face appears on posters plastered all over the village, hanging from people’s windows, and even strung as bunting across Avenida de la Libertad. It’s a context in which the only real decision is whether to continue with Sánchez Gordillo, and the CUT/IU, and the project, or not – and if you choose the latter, you don’t go around shouting about it. The old ladies of Marinaleda, some of the most loyal Gordillistas, have been known to approach newcomers to the village with a sweetly sincere explanation of how elections work, and have always worked: ‘You will vote for el alcalde, won’t you? You know you have to vote for el alcalde?’

  Elections are free and ultimately fair, but in practice, they are a time to reaffirm commitment to the project. Sánchez Gordillo delivers lengthy orations from platforms about what they have achieved through struggle over the years, and what they will achieve next, and is re-elected comfortably. The glossy sixty-four-page 2011 CUT/IU election booklet, given to me when I first met Sánchez Gordillo in January 2012, and whipped out again by Rafa the librarian when I told him I was looking into the history of the village, is a first-class piece of propaganda, not least because it succeeds in the main aim of all Sánchez Gordillo arguments and propaganda: to conflate the idea of his project with the village as a whole, as one indistinguishable entity. Marinaleda is the project, rather than the village in which it has unfolded.

  In those May 2011 elections, Sánchez Gordillo’s CUT/IU faced rumours the village might finally be slipping away to the PSOE – they had seen their vote fall from 71 per cent in 2003 to 61 per cent in 2007, and the PSOE claimed four of Marinaleda’s eleven council seats. ‘Alarm bells are ringing,’ wrote one supporter of Sánchez Gordillo at the time. Perhaps the young people of the village were fed up with this archaic communist rhetoric? Perhaps the PSOE could exploit a burgeoning desire to move on from the mayor’s obsession with working the land? The PSOE campaigned dirtily, using xenophobic populism, blaming illegal immigrants for the lack of work in Andalusia, and it failed spectacularly: CUT/IU won back their 9–2 majority on the council, winning 73 per cent.

  The project was emphatically re-endorsed – and the celebrations that followed were appropriately Cuban. ‘On election night, in the middle of the euphoria over the results,’ wrote one blogger, ‘… it was decided by popular acclaim not to work the next day, and continue the celebrations with a great feast, of olives from the land, salmorejo, ham and cold beer.’ This sounds like the end to every Asterix comic – the good side wins out, the village gathers as one, and the only thing missing is Cacofonix, tied to a tree. It’s a pretty unusual response to an election result in the twenty-first century, though.

  Until the mid 2000s, Marinaleda was surrounded by what was known as a cinturón de hierro, an ‘iron belt’ of PSOE control in the neighbouring towns of Estepa, Herrera, Écija and El Rubio. These villages were specially funnelled with investment from the Andalusian PSOE, who were determined to eradicate the embarrassing far-left anomaly in their midst. In this task they’ve failed, repeatedly – and yet, Marinaleda remains isolated. Beyond the boundaries of the pueblo, in the Sierra Sur region only Pedrera and Gilena maintain CUT majorities on their councils.

  If it really is a utopia, argued one right-wing blogger, how come its principles have not been imported by nearby towns? ‘Something must have failed in Marinaleda’s heavenly oasis. Perhaps it’s not an oasis after all, but an island disconnected from the rest of the world.’ It’s a fair point – it does raise questions that the people of neighbouring villages like El Rubio have never sought to emulate the experiment; but then every pueblo is composed of a unique tradition, personality and politics. It is not in the nature of Andalusian pueblos to follow the same paths as one another; they are more likely to define themselves by their difference from their neighbours than seek to emulate them.

  The most recent Andalusian regional elections, in March 2012, provide an interesting insight into the level of pluralism in the village: 1,199 people voted for Sánchez Gordillós IU, 331 for the PSOE, 222 for the PP, and 24 for others – which actually represented a small swing to IU from the PSOE since 2008. Clearly, there are at least 500 people in Marinaleda who vote against the left, against Sánchez Gordillo – and 200 of those vote for the conservative PP. You hear little of their views in the bars, or in the official narrative of the village’s history – and yet, none of them have felt the need to flee for their own safety. Mostly they are the churchgoers, the smart dressers, probably with many friends among the colectivistas, the communists. They normally express their difference in the form of scepticism about their fellow villagers’ relationship with Sánchez Gordillo: I have more than once encountered a tendency to explain away the success of his project with the argument that ‘people are communist in name only, merely because they need work’.

  In the assembly hall at the back of the Sindicato bar, the atmosphere is one of genuine democratic inclusion and participation. Maybe it’s not as revolutionary as Sánchez Gordillo would have you believe, an inversion of the pyramid, an unprecedented novelty. After all, town hall meetings around the world, tenants’ associations, even the parochialism of the Neighbourhood Watch, incorporate some of this kind of localist democracy: anyone with the time and interest can turn up, anyone with the confidence to do so can say anything, anyone can get angry without fear of reprisal. It’s not solely Gordillistas who go to the general assemblies, although they are certainly a significant majority – not least because the discussion so often revolves around the development and management of El Humoso. PP or PSOE voters tend to dismiss it as a talking shop for members of the co-operative.

  Attempts to reach out to the non-believers in nearby pueblos have not always gone well.

  During the first of 2012’s two nationwide general strikes in March, Sánchez Gordillo and the SAT went picketing in neighbouring towns – there would be, of course, little point picketing in Marinaleda itself, since no one would dream of working. During these general strikes, there were firm if invisible picket lines drawn everywhere: working in any context meant you supported Rajoy, the PP, austerity and the establishment. Five minutes down the road from Marinaleda, in El Rubio, the roaming picket discovered that the local secondary school had not been closed down. Only one pupil had shown up, but sixteen teachers were sitting in the staff room.

  Sánchez Gordillo was in charge, directing what was theoretically an ‘informational picket’ with his megaphone. He was as ever standing at the front, saying clearly and repeatedly, ‘Don’t break the law, no fighting, no aggression’, calling for persuasion rather than violence in the attempt to shut workplaces down. Meanwhile some of the young men, around thirty in total, jumped the fence at the rear of the school and allegedly proceeded to tour the building classroom by classroom, shouting and banging menacingly on the doors. Later that day, all sixteen teachers filed complaints with the local Guardia Civil in Herrera, and cases are still pending against some SAT members. That same day there were accusations of aggressive picketing, scaring primary-school children in El Rubio, and thefts by those on strike totalling €500 during ‘forced closures’ of some businesses. A couple of times the Guardia were called, but by then the culprits had disappeared.

  ‘It was impossible to say whether Sánchez Gordillo quietly approved, with a nod and a wink, of what was going on,’ one of Marinaleda’s English residents told me. ‘Because he kept saying quite clearly, “Don’t break the law, no fighting” – but he was still kind of in charge.’ In one of the businesses they occupied, in Casariche, he’d been using his megaphone to say: ‘Have a coffee, but pay for it if you do.’ It’s a delicate ambiguity for him to maintain – though in the eyes of the Spanish press, and presumably the Guardia, Sánchez Gordillo’s culpability was pretty clear. They relished connecting him to the painting
of FASCISTA in big letters on the car of a strikebreaking teacher in another nearby village, Badolatosa.

  On every demonstration, on every picket, Sánchez Gordillo is always there with the megaphone. He is the human megaphone for the concerns of his people, and he is loved and hated for it in equal measure. The kind of forays into nearby pueblos they carried out during the general strike of March 2012 cut to the heart of why there’s genuine contempt towards Marinaleda from some of its neighbours. Another English marinaleña, Ali, recalls being practically assaulted by a random stranger in a supermarket in Écija, once she found out she’d come from Marinaleda. ‘How can you live there?!’ the woman had shouted. ‘Don’t you know they are communists?!’ Perhaps significantly, when it left the PSOE ‘iron belt’ in 2011, Écija became a PP town.

  Of course, that immediate identification of an individual with their pueblo, however historically ingrained in Andalusian culture, does not give an accurate picture of any place. There are PP voters in Marinaleda. There are certainly communists in Écija, for that matter. As we saw in the previous chapter with regard to religious observation and practice in Marinaleda, the story rehashed to visiting journalists by Sánchez Gordillo omits plenty. No pueblo can ever be entirely united or consistent.

  When you’re living in an oasis, or a communist theme park, or any small village, really, it can get claustrophobic – and it’s always beneficial to get out for a while, for a bit of perspective. Back up on the balcony of Andalusia, in Estepa, I was glad to have a day or two to breathe the colder, drier air and let the oxygen go to work, processing utopia with the help of the salty local sherries.

  Among the estepeños I found a general sense of pride in their local curiosity down in the valley, but this pride was often tinged with scepticism. There is, some older estepeños thought, a gap between the village’s ideal and its reality. ‘The mayor is not perfect,’ they kept saying; ‘it is not perfect.’ One portly, well-read businessman in comfortable middle age, with a warm, solid handshake, was especially keen to talk to me (anonymously) about Marinaleda. He was amused and gratified that I had come such a long way to visit the Sierra Sur, and regarded Sánchez Gordillo with heavily caveated admiration – but admiration nonetheless. He showed me Félix Talego’s book, which, like several local history buffs I’d met, he had tracked down despite it being an obscure academic tome unknown even to ruthlessly thorough websites like Amazon.

  ‘Si la trabajas con tus manos y la riegas con tu sudor, tuya es la tierra, trabajador’, he recited, dusting off a part of his encyclopaedic brain and quoting Sánchez Gordillo’s 1980 book. The phrase translates somewhat less poetically as ‘If you work it with your hands and water it with your sweat, the land is yours, worker’ – but it is the Marinaleda philosophy encapsulated. After Franco’s death, the businessman told me, the Spanish people felt lost, suddenly deprived of a patriarch. It was a scary, fractious time, and while most of Spain ‘ran around like a headless chicken’, Sánchez Gordillo captivated the working class with declamations like the one above. That makes him sound a bit like a cynical opportunist, I said – is that how you see him? ‘No, don’t misunderstand me, I think the town is based on noble, wonderful ideals. But the reality is not so perfect.’

  Isn’t it a bit unreasonable to expect it to be perfect? Absolutely, he said, they shouldn’t be attacked for imperfection; things are hardly perfect in Estepa, either. ‘It’s just that you shouldn’t believe everything Sánchez Gordillo says. When someone quarrels with him, it becomes difficult for that person to continue to live in Marinaleda.’ There are of course no gulags, no Stasi-style holding cells, no show trials, but it becomes ‘difficult’ to live there. People gossip, he explained, and make your life hard in petty little ways. Perhaps that’s actually a small-town difficulty, rather than an ideological one? In pueblos of that size, when people talk, everyone talks. Sure, he said: ostracism and gossip are more of a danger than anything else – they are the only danger, in fact.

  I heard the same innuendoes a few times from estepeños, that opposing the mayor can lead to ‘problems’. One whom I met had more than just innuendo and insinuations – she had a tip-off about two Marinaleda ‘exiles’ living in Estepa. I took some details, made some phone calls, and eventually Javi helped me find the address of this allegedly dissident man and his wife. On a deathly quiet residential street in mid-afternoon, cobbles tumbling down the valley beneath us, we rang the doorbell, and a woman answered. She greeted us warmly – oh, an Englishman! – but when we explained our purpose, and mentioned the M-word, she retreated into the doorway a little.

  Careless talk doesn’t cost lives out here, but it can cost friendships. In the name of prudence, I stood at a distance, as Javi made earnest assurances that we would maintain her and her husband’s anonymity, that I could be trusted. ‘I’ll take your number in case my husband is willing to speak to you when he gets in,’ she said, with a look that seemed to add: ‘and he definitely, definitely won’t.’

  As we walked away from the house, Javi tried to account for this reluctance to speak. There is an expression in Spain, he told me, ‘no querer remover la mierda’; you don’t want to stir up the shit, because it smells worse. You let the bad things in your past lie dormant. It’s a phrase which sums up a lot about a nation which has spent three decades under theoretical observance of an official ‘pact of forgetting’ about their civil war and fascist dictatorship. Now, at last, some of the mass graves of those killed by Franco are being dug up, and the remains given proper burials. In left-wing communities like Marinaleda, they haven’t forgotten so easily: one programme on the radio station is called Without Memory, There Is no History.

  There is of course no equivalence here, between a Spanish elite that connived in covering up the mass murder and torture of Franco’s White Terror, and a village mayor who has simplified the narrative of his people’s struggle a little, and perhaps overlooked the odd act of intimidation carried out by comrades. But while the Gordillistas rightly chide the nation around it for shrinking away from awkward questions about recent Spanish history, it’s a shame that some of the village’s own imperfections are brushed under the carpet.

  Unsurprisingly, the exile never called me back.

  7

  The Village Against the Crisis

  March 2013: driving west along the Andalusian coast road, from Malaga towards Jerez, the deep, layered, tree-lined hills facing the sea are disfigured by the marks of what the locals call the ‘brick crisis’. For once, the Costa del Sol looks like it’s never seen the sol in its life: swathed in dense fog, and the kind of rain that is so light yet so all-pervasive you’re not sure if it’s mist, precipitation, or sea-spray. Under portentous slate-grey skies, the hills have an almost mystical aspect. Here and there, concrete construction frames are cut arbitrarily into the rock. Some of these housing projects are barely started, just Meccano frames, steel girders slowly breaking out in rust. There are others which are further along the construction process: whole rows of houses, painted, rooved, but still without windows. Some are finished, and empty.

  It’s as if the wind changed suddenly, and the new weather front froze everything where it stood. The numbers are unsurprisingly hard to pin down, but respectable estimates put the number of vacant properties in Spain at 4 million, of which 900,000 are new-builds. Altogether, 16 per cent of the country’s entire housing stock is empty. A staggering 400,000 families have been evicted by their mortgage lenders since the crash, over 20,000 people are on the streets (double the number in 2008), and uncountable numbers are now squatting. Some Spanish estate agents have been reluctant to put up ‘For Sale’ signs on vacant properties, for fear that doing so will attract squatters.

  When you’ve grown up somewhere as cluttered and crowded as London, with its green belt tied tight around a swollen waistline, it’s difficult to conceive just how much vacant space there is for building in Spain. The country’s land mass is twice the size of the UK, with a smaller population. There’s space e
verywhere. So they built, everywhere.

  The unsustainable fetish for growth that created the crisis was – like everything else in Spain – a physical act. Where the rest of Europe would content itself with a metaphor, Spain just had to be literal: it built its prosperity on unsure foundations, never thinking about the future. And now there’s no money to finish the job, only stagnation and decay. Everyone I’ve met across Andalusia in the last few years knows people who’ve lost jobs in the construction industry, not to mention the related professions that suffered the knock-on effects – glaziers, roofers, clerks, surveyors, and of course, the vital business of housing, feeding and cosseting expatriates and tourists. Spain’s empty patios now echo, hollow. In the space which traditionally hosted the sociable tumult of Spanish family life, there are only dried-up fountains, the stillness of a nation’s enforced inertia.

  These ruins of late capitalism scar the Spanish landscape. Spain has long had a grimly fascinating number of ghost towns: from the Civil War, when villagers fled for their lives, never to return, and from the 1950s and 1960s, when people escaped rural poverty in search of work. While Marinaleda’s population declined by 30 per cent during the 1960s for this reason, some small hamlets were abandoned altogether, and never repopulated.

  The trend for dramatic, mesmerising photographs of Detroit’s burned-out factories and abandoned homes has coined the term ‘ruin porn’. The Spanish equivalent is speculation porn, exemplified by photo-spreads in the newspapers of entire new Madrid suburbs built on the assumption of relentless growth and completed just before the crash. These modern ghost towns are haunted by a different mortal terror to Detroit’s: not the decay of previously thriving communities, but the folly of baseless expansion, of urban spaces that have never been used and may never be used. An architect’s impression, a blueprint of blind optimism, sketched out in three dimensions and now abandoned: rust sleeping on the gates, tumbleweed in the gardens, lamps illuminating empty streets, brand new street signs pointing nowhere. Permanent vacancy.