The Village Against the World (2 page)

In one small village in Andalusia’s wild heart, there lies stability and order. Like Asterix’s village impossibly holding out against the Romans, in this tiny
pueblo
a great empire has met its match, in a ragtag army of boisterous upstarts yearning for liberty. The bout seems almost laughably unfair – Marinaleda’s population is 2,700, Spain’s is 47 million – and yet the empire has lost, time and time again.

Sixty miles east of the regional capital, Seville, ninety miles from Granada and its Alhambra, sixty-five miles inland from Malaga and the Costa del Sol, surrounded by endless expanses of farmland, sits Marinaleda. The nearest ‘big town’, with supermarkets and roundabouts and other such urban affectations, is Estepa, six miles away – and even its population is only 12,000. Marinaleda’s bus stop sees two buses a day, one going to Seville and one coming the other way, and there is no train route for miles around. But then Marinaleda is not really on the way to anywhere.

Nothing is known of any possible Roman, Carthaginian or Moorish forebears, although these peoples left quite a mark on the rest of the region. The first record of the village’s existence is in the early 1600s, as part of the Marquis of Estepa’s farmlands, when landless labourers toiling over the wheat and olive crops set up there to be
closer to their work, and to the water from the nearby Salado Creek.

Driving through the south, it can be hard to spot the signs of the crisis that is ravaging it. The olive plantations cover Andalusia in a sprawling camouflage, like those big nets army cadets have to crawl under, roughly stitched together and spread out like a blanket over the gentle undulations of the landscape. Occasional wheat fields and almond or orange trees interrupt the olive rows, along with some empty fields, lying fallow for four years or more while the soil replenishes itself. Sometimes a farmhouse nestles amid this pattern, many of which are ruins from another era, ceilings gone, half-crumbled walls adorned with chipped whitewash and graffiti.

Although Marinaleda is in a part of Andalusia known as the Sierra Sur, the southern highlands, here on the broad plain of the Genil River there is only one range of any significant elevation for miles around. High up one of these hills sits Estepa; if you climb up just a little from the town centre, you can see across whole regions. On my first visit to Estepa, I met a young woman from Oregon called Robyn, who was doing a year’s English teaching in Andalusia. With some Spanish friends we went for a walk up to the top, to look down on the fields and see if we could spot Marinaleda.

The air up there was packed with invisible dust. It tingled on the tongue and constantly assailed the skin – the dust in this part of the world is impossible to ignore,
especially if you’re not used to it. Robyn was more than familiar with it, but had just returned from a short holiday in the UK, and the sudden change from the all-pervasive London damp to Andalusia’s bone-dry winter air chapped her lips to the point that they were actually bleeding. She dabbed the blood away, but it just kept coming.

You have to go further south than the Sierra Sur before you encounter clear reminders that this land was once the Al-Andalus of the Moorish Caliphs. South, towards Granada and the coast, where some of the road signs are written in English and Arabic as well as Spanish, and there are advertisements for ferry tickets from Algeciras for Morocco, and North African restaurants and coffee houses. Even when Andalusia’s extraordinary history is concealed from view, a great deal has endured for centuries – in the day-to-day life and spirit of the people, and the attachment to the land.

Looking south across Marinaleda from my landlord Antonio’s whitewashed balcony, which is a heat trap even when the temperature peaks at sixteen degrees Celsius, as it normally does in winter, the only visible difference from a century ago are the spiky TV aerials, the spindly church weathervanes of this predominantly secular community. Otherwise, the residential part of the village appears the same as it ever was. The leaves on the orange trees stir reluctantly in the intermittent breeze, a chicken wanders past a man in blue overalls turning over the soil in his vegetable garden.

Little of the farming is actually done directly next to the village. El Humoso, the 1,200-hectare farm owned by the village co-operative, is several miles away. However, there is one olive oil processing plant in the village itself, providing a heavenly scent to counterbalance the exhaust fumes from the main road. And on the fringes of the village there are numerous big sheds and garages with dark, open interiors and clumsy, lethal-looking farm equipment. Tractors and trailers and things with big metal teeth and spikes – and occasionally sparks from the soldering iron. Then there is the sizeable vegetable processing and canning factory on the edge of the village, built to create more work for the co-operative in the 1990s, proudly adorned with massive paintings of pimentos and artichokes.

If you stand in the right spot near La Bodega, the restaurant on the very edge of the village, the factory building blocks out Estepa, to the south, and you really could be in the only village in the world. The hills behind Estepa, once swarming with bandits, are the only bumps in the skyline you can see from Marinaleda, and even those are usually obscured when you’re in the midst of the village. If you head further out, towards and beyond Marinaleda’s cemetery, with its twelve-foot walls and centuries of resting Carmens and Antonios, and walk through the fields to the north, on the dirt tracks across slender, underwatered streams, you can see Estepa much better: the parent town sitting prettily on the balcony surveying the region, the basin below.

It may be a household name in Spain today, but it was not until the late twentieth century that Marinaleda gained any notoriety. The village’s first victories came during a different systemic crisis, one which exists in the living memory of many: the aftermath of a fascist dictatorship. In 1975, thirty-six years after his brutal victory in the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco finally passed away. He left Andalusia in a wretched state: aside from the embryonic construction and tourism industries on the Costa del Sol – the profits from which rarely enriched the locals – the region was bereft of industrial development, and of investment generally. As a region historically home to rebellious peasant farmers, scourges of the kind of central authority Franco embodied, and his enemies in the 1936–39 Civil War, he had been happy to let it rot.

In the ensuing chaos of the dictator’s death, while his friends and enemies manoeuvred to address the power vacuum in Madrid, the small community of poor, mostly landless farm labourers in Marinaleda began to pursue their own unique version of
la Transición
. At the time, 90 per cent of landless day labourers, known in Spain as
jornaleros
, had to feed themselves and their families on only two months of work a year.

As Spain began its slow, careful transition from fascism to liberal democracy, the people of Marinaleda formed a political party and a trade union, and began fighting for land and freedom. There followed over a decade of
unceasing struggle, in which they occupied airports, train stations, government buildings, farms and palaces; went on hunger strike, blocked roads, marched, picketed, went on hunger strike again; were beaten, arrested and tried countless times for their pains. Astonishingly, in 1991 they prevailed. The government, exhausted by their defiance, gave them 1,200 hectares of land belonging to the Duke of Infantado, head of one of Spain’s oldest and wealthiest aristocratic families.

From the very beginning, one man was at the forefront of this struggle. In 1979, at the age of thirty, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo became the first elected mayor of Marinaleda, a position he has held ever since – re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority. However, holding official state-sanctioned positions of power was only a distraction from the serious business of
la lucha –
the struggle. In the intense heat of the summer of 1980, the village launched ‘a hunger strike against hunger’ which brought them national and even global recognition. Everything they have done since that summer has increased the notoriety of Sánchez Gordillo and his village, and added to their admirers and enemies across Spain.

Sánchez Gordillo’s philosophy, outlined in his 1980 book
Andaluces, levantaos
, and in countless speeches and interviews since, is one which is unique to him, though grounded firmly in the historic struggles and uprisings of the peasant
pueblos
of Andalusia, and their remarkably
deep-seated tendency towards anarchism. These communities are striking for being not just anti-authoritarian, but against all authority. ‘I have never belonged to the Communist Party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or communitarian,’ Sánchez Gordillo clarified in an interview in 2011, adding that his political beliefs were drawn from a mixture of Christ, Gandhi, Marx, Lenin and Che.

In August 2012 he achieved a new level of notoriety for a string of actions that began, in forty-degree heat, with the occupation of military land, the seizure of an aristocrat’s palace, and a three-week march across the south in which he called on his fellow mayors not to repay their debts. Its peak saw Sánchez Gordillo lead a series of supermarket expropriations along with fellow members of the left-communist trade union SOC-SAT.
^*
They marched into supermarkets and took bread, rice, olive oil and other basic supplies, and donated them to food banks for Andalusians who could not feed themselves. For this he became a superstar, appearing not only on the cover of the Spanish newspapers, but across the world’s media, as ‘the Robin Hood Mayor’, ‘The Don Quixote of the Spanish Crisis’, or ‘Spain’s William Wallace’, depending on which newspaper you read.

The first time I visited Marinaleda, it was January 2012, and a friend from Estepa had offered to help me get an interview with Sánchez Gordillo. This was arranged not through the usual network of aides and official channels, but through an informal, friendly sequence of favours I would soon learn was entirely typical. My friend Javi called his friend Ezequiel, who lived in the village; Ezequiel wasn’t home, so Javi asked Ezequiel’s mum, who said of course, she would speak to the mayor when she saw him, and tell him we were dropping by.

So we drove the fifteen minutes from Estepa to Marinaleda, down the hill through undulating olive groves, on a road almost completely free from traffic, around a junction pointing to Marinaleda; someone with delusions of grandeur had scrawled ‘
ciudad
’ (city) underneath the village name. We crossed the city limits, which are marked with a painted sign featuring a dove carrying an olive branch and the words ‘
En lucha por la paz
’, in struggle for peace. As we slowed down into the main road, we came to a halt at a red light: no one was crossing, and there was no other traffic – it certainly looked peaceful. At first glance, it was difficult to distinguish it from any other Spanish
pueblo
of this size. The idiosyncrasies don’t jump right out at you, but slowly appear and multiply before your eyes, like ants on a hot pavement. It was very quiet. It was very plain. There were no signs indicating multinational brands: no advertising hoardings or intrusions from modern capitalism.

The town hall car park had only a few cars parked in it, the muted sound of children playing drifted over from the nearby nursery, and there, gleaming in the afternoon sunshine, was the Ayuntamiento, the town hall. Next to it was the equally impressive Casa de Cultura, the cultural centre, with its ostentatious pillars painted a brilliant white, framing oblongs of soft blue light on the facade.

Two women were cleaning the steps of the Ayuntamiento, and informed Javi that no, sorry, ‘he’ is not here right now. A man of about twenty-five in smart jeans, black shirt, black jacket, black stubble and shades emerged, surveying the scene with the confidence unique to those with the good fortune to have both youth and power on their side. This was Sergio Gómez Reyes, one of the village’s eleven councillors – later, his face jumped out at us from a wall, on the Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) election posters. ‘If he takes forever to turn up, I’ll call his mobile,’ Sergio said idly, fiddling with his sunglasses.

So we waited, and kicked our heels in the late afternoon warmth, dark clothes soaking up the dying light, as the shade-line crept diagonally up and over the Ayuntamiento. ‘That’s his house over there,’ Sergio explained, and we toyed with the idea of just knocking on his door. A huddle of women in tracksuit bottoms power-walked down the main road in front of us, gossiping away. In fact, the village is so small that twenty minutes later they were back, going in the same direction on their second lap.

It was so bright that, squinting up at the town hall, I didn’t even notice when a man sporting a polyester football jacket and a beard that could topple empires ambled quietly up to the entrance. It was Sánchez Gordillo.

We followed the scourge of Spanish capitalism inside. The lights were off in the foyer – Spanish interiors are often dark, the negative of the brightness outside – but a few posters were still visible on the slightly cracking paintwork: notices of a food bank for the unemployed of neighbouring villages, as well as more commonplace small-town activities like basketball tournaments, photography workshops, and a course on how to use new pesticides. It wasn’t exactly palatial – the ‘benign dictator’ notion perpetuated by more sceptical Spaniards I had met led me to wonder whether the town hall would be adorned with stuffed tigers and comically vulgar paintings.

In the mayor’s office the walls were lime green, and the floors cold grey marble: it was very clean, but not at all tidy. His desk was piled with papers and books, a jacket lay discarded on the chair, and scattered on the floor around the edges of the room were cardboard boxes and ring binders, while gifts honouring the town, mostly ceramics, sat proudly on modest bookcases. Where a picture of King Juan Carlos I might normally hang, there was a framed portrait of Che Guevara, declaiming from a podium. Behind Sánchez Gordillo’s desk, either side of a framed aerial photo of the town, were a trio of flags slumping dormant on their poles: one bearing the green and white of
Andalusia, one the totemic purple, red and yellow of the Spanish Second Republic (the one Franco launched a coup against, and destroyed, in 1936), and one the green, white and red tricolour of Marinaleda itself.