by Dan Hancox
Marinaleda had already proven, as far back as 1980, that the month of August was optimal for seizing the national media narrative in the name of the people. In 2012, they repeated the performance. With members of SAT from other villages – including Sánchez Gordillo’s partner in crime, the union’s national spokesman, Diego Cañamero – they occupied land belonging to the Ministry of Defence, a farm called Las Turquillas. This was, they argued, land in the public domain that did not serve the public. Over 200 jornaleros camped out for eighteen days, until violently evicted by the Guardia, and used the media attention to call for the land to be cultivated and given over to the unemployed.
It was the first time they had united their prelapsarian belief, that ‘the land belongs to those who work it’, with the new misery of the financial crisis. They were occupying, Sánchez Gordillo told El Mundo, on behalf of ’6 million unemployed, 12 million poor people, 1.7 million families with all members unemployed, and 30 per cent of Andalusian families living below the poverty line’. The land’s sole purpose, he explained, was to accrue EU subsidies for the Ministry of Defence, like the latifundios belonging to the aristocrats of the House of Alba and Infantado. Neither sets of subsidies were putting any bread on the tables of Andalusian jornaleros.
While the land was occupied, tents erected, and cooking rotas put into practice, and they had the press’s attention, SAT moved onto the next stage of their plan. It was to be an ingenious escalation.
Their targets were two major chain-store supermarkets in Andalusia, one a Carrefour in Arcos de la Frontera, near Cadiz, the other a branch of Mercadona in Écija, down the road from Marinaleda. Several hundred SAT activists showed up at each of the two supermarkets, and while the majority rallied outside, a small group went in, filled ten or so carts with basic foodstuffs – oil, sugar, chickpeas, rice, pasta, milk, biscuits and vegetables – and left without paying. There were some scuffles with a few of the supermarket employees, but in both cases, they emerged with the ‘expropriated’ goods to cheers from the rest of the crowd. The food was then donated to the Corrala Utopía in Seville, a series of apartment blocks occupied (with the help of the local 15-M) by homeless families evicted by their banks, and to civic centres in Cadiz, where it would be passed on to the unemployed. The message was impossible to misread: under capitalism – under la crisis – major supermarket chains make hundreds of millions of euros in profit for their shareholders from selling food, while hundreds of thousands around them go hungry.
It was both spontaneous and shocking, a deliberate and ostentatious act of Robin Hood–style redistribution; and yet it was well planned enough that they had a professional agency photographer and film crew inside the supermarkets with them, to get footage of the SAT activists loading up the trolleys. These photos, and pictures of Sánchez Gordillo declaiming on his megaphone outside Mercadona, swept the story onto the Spanish front pages, to the top slot in the evening news, and, via Reuters and the international news wires, across the world – not only in Europe and America, but India, Iran, Australia and China. ‘We want to expropriate the expropriators,’ Sánchez Gordillo declared. ‘By that we mean the landlords, banks and big supermarkets, which are making money from the economic crisis.’
The Spanish establishment panicked. The raids were immediately and aggressively condemned by the PP and the PSOE as wanton, despicable criminality – perpetrated by an elected member of the Andalusian parliament, no less. Even the IU leadership distanced itself from Sánchez Gordillo. José Antonio Griñán, the leader of the PSOE–IU coalition in the Andalusian parliament, called it ‘barbarism’. And yet, the Spanish right struggled to turn the popular mood against Sánchez Gordillo: whether you agreed with the stunt or not, the crisis was so widespread, as was dismay over its uneven effects on the poor, that even cynics understood the point. Popular sympathy seemed to be on their side. Fifty-four per cent of those polled by El Mundo, not a left-leaning newspaper by any stretch, supported the action.
Sánchez Gordillo’s success in spinning the raids was in part thanks to his refusal to self-aggrandise and blow them out of proportion. He did not pretend for a minute that expropriating ten trolleys’ worth of rice and chickpeas was an act of redistribution big enough to change any lives: yes, it was a stunt – but it was a vital one. The raids were, in fact, ‘propaganda of the deed’, as he explained to the media: ‘We are obliged to grab attention in this way so that somebody stops and thinks. They have to understand that people here are desperate.’
Press and TV demand grew throughout August, and the supermarket raids were the media’s main talking point for weeks: news programmes visited Andalusian food banks and soup kitchens, discussed rising food prices, foreclosures, and the impossibility of getting work. When he had finished all of his national (and international) TV spots, Sánchez Gordillo used the brouhaha to announce a three-week march across the Spanish south, in the middle of a devastating August heat wave, to highlight the crisis. The plan was to call upon his fellow small-town mayors along the way and try to persuade them to default on their debt repayments. The rural pueblos did not cause the crisis and should not be made to pay for them, he explained; it was an attempt to link up some of the chain of separate communities, to build solidarity. Little came of the march, ostensibly, but it kept the issues – and their iconic advocate, with the grey beard and the keffiyeh – in the headlines for an extra fortnight.
As the dust settled on Marinaleda’s month of notoriety, it became easier to see the expropriations as part of a wider pattern of behaviour. They were a spectacular addition to a growing armoury of acts of everyday anti-capitalist resistance, new (and not so new) coping behaviours brought on by necessity, in the face of the crisis. Barcelona-based sociologist Carlos Delclós identified the supermarket raids as a ‘public policy correction’, whereby the crisis of legitimacy at the heart of Spanish democracy, at the heart of capitalism, demanded a pro-active intervention from its subjects. ‘We should never forget that democracy means “people power,” ’ he wrote, ‘and that correcting a lack of democracy means exercising power from the bottom up, occupying the cracks in the architecture of repression, and breaking it open like rhizomic roots shattering concrete.’
Thousands of microcosmic acts of quotidian resistance were already taking place, Delclós observed: ‘citizens refusing to pay outrageous fees for public transportation and toll roads, doctors refusing to deny free health care to undocumented immigrants, and police refusing orders to assault protesters – while people all over the country are referring to taking a Robin Hood stance on shoplifting as “pulling a Gordillo” (via the hashtag #HazteUnGordillo)’. To this we can add the firefighters and locksmiths across Spain who have refused to evict families foreclosed by their banks, and even the widely recognised explosion in dinero negro, the black market; cash-in-hand work has ballooned since the crisis.
Of course, poverty in Spain was not invented by the crisis – even in the heyday of the economic miracle, there were people living on the streets and families struggling to feed their children. The crash catalysed an explosion of that misery across parts of the Spanish class system which had never before experienced it. According to a 2013 report by the FOESSA Foundation looking into social exclusion and the crisis, 380,000 Spanish households had been without a single employed member before the crisis: by the end of 2012 this number had more than quadrupled, to 1.8 million. The numbers continue to horrify, but they do so in the abstract. The great significance of Sánchez Gordillo’s latest intervention was that it highlighted what no one else in power would dare: ‘that the crisis has first and last names, faces and ID cards’.
I never encountered Schadenfreude in Marinaleda directed at the architects of the collapse, much less, of course, at its victims. The response of the villagers, like that of Sánchez Gordillo himself, was sombre and pessimistic: this is what capitalism does, this is what any kind of centralised power does. The Spanish people, who have suffered so much in the past, even the relatively recent pas
t, are now condemned to suffer again. One 15-M activist in Seville told me that one of the main reasons there had not already been a revolution was cultural: Spaniards were stoically resigned to the fact that their earthly life would be a ‘valley of tears’. And like the good Catholics they were, they would endure the pain.
By 2011, marinaleños were seeing the effects on their friends and relatives in neighbouring pueblos and farther afield: the girlfriend in Casariche whose business had folded; the friends in Estepa who could only get odd jobs, or a couple of months of seasonal work in the mantecados factories; the cousins in Valencia facing eviction from their home.
By 2013, they were starting to notice the effects inside the village, too. In among my scrawled notes from the Marinaleda February carnaval, the pages in my notebook swollen by beer stains and dusted with loose threads of rolling tobacco, I found one sentence that stood out, underlined three times, from a middle-aged local called Pepe: ‘It’s a bad time for Marinaleda – but it might be a good time for the revolution.’
8
The End of Utopia?
In retrospect, things got a bit out of hand in August 2012. The supermarket expropriations and ensuing media mayhem, as well as the surrounding three-week march and land occupations, catapulted Sánchez Gordillo into the public eye. He was a major problem for Rajoy’s government and their allies – even for their parliamentary enemies in the PSOE – because he made it clear the crisis was not an unavoidable act of God, but a consequence of their economic and political system. Therefore it was something that could be contested, perhaps even defeated. With the Robin Hood mayor in the spotlight, more and more people were talking about Marinaleda, and what it stood for.
While the message that propelled him there had been deadly serious, the danger is, when you reach a certain level of recognition in contemporary pop culture, that the message canbe obscured by the spectacle. His fame reached its first peak of bathos in September that year, when the global youth clothing chain H&M created a Sánchez Gordillo t-shirt. Appropriately, the design was part of their new ‘Zeitgeist’ collection, and showed a hand grasping an ear of maize, accompanied by the words ‘Food to the people! No world hunger’ – Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo’. H&M withdrew the design within four days, issuing an official apology that they hadn’t intended ‘to take sides’ and were ‘sorry if any customers have felt offended’. It was a sign of how charged the supermarket raids were, in the context of capitalism’s crisis, that a message like ‘food to the people’ might be deemed controversial, or even offensive.
In the winter that followed, Sánchez Gordillo was to receive the ultimate accolade in Andalusian pop culture: he was honoured in a chirigota – a unique, phenomenally popular form of satirical folk song, emanating from the province of Cadiz. Traditionally, chirigota groups comprise around ten to fifteen people, who sing chorally in the streets and squares, in costume, performing a repertoire of self-composed songs about the state of the nation, the government, or society; sometimes pruriently, always laced with wit. Suppressed by Franco, they have made a huge comeback in recent decades, and the annual knockout competition for best chirigota group, as part of the Lenten carnival in Cadiz, has become a national cultural and TV event.
But Sánchez Gordillo wasn’t just the subject of a satirical song, as politicians often are – he was the model for a group’s entire repertoire: Los Gordillos, they called themselves. Every detail of their outfits was based on how he had looked in the news reports the previous August: twelve adult men dressed in white shorts, red check shirts, green keffiyehs, sun hats and desert boots, wearing bushy grey beards, and incorporating props like supermarket trolleys, Andalusian flags, and loud-hailers into their performance. They were one of the hits of the 2013 carnaval, reaching the quarter-final of the official competition and winning the hearts of many aficionados with songs about the supermarket raids performed in front of a giant Mercadona backdrop.
While his notoriety was skyrocketing and the media requests continued to flood in, the day-to-day operations of the village were not disturbed by this Sánchez Gordillo mania – Marinaleda was robust enough to withstand controversies over t-shirt slogans and irreverent comedy songs. They had endured worse. But the economic crisis was starting to have an impact on the village in less visible ways.
Two weeks after Spain’s second general strike of the year, on 30 November 2012, a three-day ‘march of the women’ from Marinaleda to Seville was due to arrive in the city’s historic Plaza de España for a rally, and to seek an audience with the regional government to discuss the crisis and its effect on farming communities. It was an expression of the sporadic feminist orientation of the village’s politics. ‘Everything we have won here, has been thanks to the women’, Sánchez Gordillo once told me, and although some aspects of Spain’s old-fashioned gender roles persist (especially when it comes to housework), women are over-represented on the village council and in general assemblies.
The square was almost deserted at midday on a Thursday out of season, with just a few tourists inspecting the mosaics and an ice-cream seller in a daydream, untroubled by custom. Into this tranquillity arrived SAT and the marinaleños: a couple of hundred marchers, most of them women, accompanied by two large, slow-crawling vans with numerous speakers strapped to their rooves. Chants about revolution and the bankers rang out into the empty plaza as they parked up outside the Andalusian regional government offices.
Their march over, packed lunches were distributed: mortadella sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and cartons of orange juice. A local TV news crew and a couple of regional newspapers arrived. There were a lot of keffiyehs, a lot of SAT flags, a lot of sensible walking clothes, and smiles all round – ordinary people who are used to struggle as a way of life. A woman wheeled a buggy past me, and it took me a moment to notice it was being used to transport a bundle of Andalusian flags. When you routinely go on three-day marches to make a point about farm subsidies, it’s fair to say it comes with a uniquely intense attitude to political engagement, to the way politics sits in your everyday life.
The speeches began, and Diego Cañamero proceeded to explain – in as fiery manner as is possible, given the subject matter – why it was necessary to abolish the peonadas, the daily record-keeping system by which jornaleros receive social security payments. ‘We must eliminate the rural employment plan, and eliminate capitalism,’ he continued. With his SAT t-shirt and jeans, cropped silver hair, and reddish-brown skin, clean-shaven and weathered like old leather, he always makes a good partner to Sánchez Gordillo.
I hadn’t noticed el alcalde at first: he did not seem to be one of the four speakers on the podium, and I thought perhaps he had skipped a march for once. Then I spotted him deep in the crowd, about halfway back – an unusually modest position for a man who is normally always at the forefront, in good times and bad. He was not talking, but listening; not giving, but receiving instruction and inspiration. The scene looked slightly askew.
After the revelation that no, no one from the government was going to come out and talk to them, they held a ceremonial burning of the peonada forms for the cameras, accompanied by a chant of contra el paro, lucha obrera (against unemployment, worker’s struggle), followed by a rendition of Andaluces, levantaos, the Andaluz hymn, sung powerfully and slowly, right fists raised high.
As the crowd mingled and dispersed, and Cañamero did a few interviews, Sánchez Gordillo just seemed to slink off quietly. Some of the SAT trade unionists from outside the pueblo, who hadn’t met him before, asked to have their photo taken with him. He graciously agreed to each request in turn, shook hands and kissed cheeks, smiling a little wearily, but content to hear their expressions of admiration. He carried the aspect of a jet-lagged celebrity being whisked through a mob of fans to his hotel. And before I could approach him myself, he was gone.
The Plan de Empleo Rural (PER), the rural employment plan, is a government social security scheme introduced in the 1980s, designed to subsidise the lack of work in
the fields outside of harvest time and prevent another mass exodus from Spain’s rural areas. Jornaleros who have worked in the field at least thirty-five days, and thus picked up thirty-five peonadas, are entitled to six months’ social security payment of €400 per month. The olive harvest had been particularly bad that year, however, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for some people to meet that thirty-five-day minimum, and thus, to survive.
The spectre of the early 1980s, and rural families going hungry, was returning with a vengeance. Even the Andalusian PSOE joined SAT and the marinaleños in a call on the government to address Andalusian rural poverty and reform the PER, instead of, as Andalusian PSOE number two Mario Jiménez put it, just ‘asking the saints and virgins’ for salvation.
Eventually, in January 2013, they lowered the qualification for the subsidy to twenty peonadas per person. But even that was not enough; and again, it was not just SAT saying so. Spain’s biggest union, the CCOO, was also convinced many would not be able to put food on the table. The peonadas became the only discussion topic at a number of general assemblies in Marinaleda at the start of 2013. The mayor’s CUT colleagues from the local council explained they could fight, and perhaps they should fight – but they must be prepared for the fact that they might not win this one. Calling for across-the-board welfare payments for all poor Andalusian jornaleros, irrespective of whether they’d met the twenty days quota, was ideologically and practically necessary; but they could see how bad government finances were – the trend was to make swingeing cuts to social security, not expand it – and the mood in the village was not optimistic.