The Village Against the World (6 page)

Spain is the only country in the world where anarchism ever became a mass movement. The anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the CNT, had over a million members in the pre-Civil War period, a situation which is entirely explicable given the country’s economic situation and desperate need for land redistribution. Beyond political context, there is even something anarchist-leaning about the Andalusian personality: individual freedom and mutual aid are both traits held in high esteem – your neighbour is born free to choose his or her own path, but equally, they should not be left to starve if the fates conspire against them.

While for Marx the urban proletariat was the vanguard of revolution, Bakunin’s philosophy focused more on a federated network of smaller communities and groups, a conception of communism that already chimed with the lived experience of Andalusian life: the village unit is a self-sustaining ecosystem which regulates itself, and does
so without the need for state enforcement, power hierarchies (elected or otherwise) or the desire for profit. For Bakunin, freedom could only come from absolute devolution of power until there was none left at the centre. The ‘right of secession’ he wrote of was already held to be integral to liberty in the Andalusian
pueblos
. Bakunin called for:

The internal reorganisation of each country on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes. Necessity of recognising the right of secession: every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation has the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish and repudiate their alliances without regard to so-called historic rights [rights consecrated by legal precedent] or the convenience of their neighbours.

Of course, the isolated ecosystem of any nineteenth-century peasant village, with its unique customs, assumptions and culture, could make for a challenging environment into which to evangelise. Bakunin warned that their resistance to politicisation would need working around – via a network, connecting the most ready, able, and revolutionary members of each peasant community to talk to one another: ‘We must at all costs breach these
hitherto impregnable communities and weld them together by the active current of thought, by the will, and by the revolutionary cause.’

Bakunin was writing about rural Russia, but ‘hitherto impregnable communities’ is the perfect description of the Andalusian
pueblos
of the nineteenth century. While they may have been somewhat culturally hermetic, some of their inhabitants did at least leave home, usually the men; thousands of workers were regularly compelled to travel great distances to find work, in order to survive. Most itinerant Andalusian day labourers migrated to the cities and emerging industries of the north, especially Catalunya and the Basque Country; others went elsewhere in rural Spain, or to France – wherever seasonal farm work was most plentiful. There, sleeping on barn floors for months at a time with scores of other poor labourers, revolutionary ideas were easily shared.

Among Spain’s many regions, anarchism thrived most of all in rural Andalusia (with a strong uptake in urban Catalunya, for different reasons). And yet, Andalusia is not the only poor part of Spain, far from it – parts of Extremadura and Castile, for example, have long been desperately poor. As Temma Kaplan writes in
Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903
, it is actually the contrasting wealth, not poverty in itself, which explains the region’s innate radicalism: ‘Where almost everyone is poor, the idea of revolutionary social changes might seem utopian, for if everything were equally divided, everyone would be
equally poor.’ It is the visible wealth inequalities in the south which have made it so susceptible to radical ideas.

‘Andalusia is not a poor country,’ wrote the authors of the Marinaleda hunger strike pamphlet in 1980, ‘it was made poor.’ Likewise, they argue, it was made revolutionary by the behaviour of outsiders. By seeking to impose a uniform Spanish culture on the regions, to create ‘one Spain’ under God and under the King, remote bourgeois centralism fomented the revolutionary atmosphere of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking back over Andalusian history, they write, ‘there are constants of oppression, and there are constants of struggle’. Positioned against the ordinary people of the
pueblos
were
gran propietaria
, big property, identified as the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church – with the Guardia Civil as their hired thugs and the corrupt
caciques
as their political representatives.
Gran propietaria
has a contemporary equivalent, as the nature of capitalist exploitation has changed: on demonstrations in 2013, the oppressors, when identified in one phrase, are
gran capital
, big business.

Electoral politics has rarely offered the poor labourers of Andalusia much hope of a solution. There was a pretence of democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, via the election of local
caciques –
normally a choice between two bourgeois men of means: a conservative or a nominal liberal; the latter distinguishable only by the mildest of anti-clericalism. Even when anarchism began to flourish in the south, the sheer desperation of the
landless labourers impelled them to keep voting for these men. The
caciques
looked after the interests of the landowners, and coercion, buying votes and electoral fraud were commonplace, as was intimidation from the local members of the Guardia Civil. The
caciques
’ men chose the shift workers from those assembled in the town square, and, quite simply, if you wanted the miserly amount of work on offer you had to vote the way they commanded.

The tension in Spain between the big central state and the miniature world of the
pueblo
preceded Franco, and even Primo de Rivera, the country’s proto-fascist dictator from 1923–30. There has long been a sense of a distant, imposing political class who do not understand the local ways and needs of each
pueblo
, in their many and varied forms. It’s the same rhetoric you might hear in American election races about Washington, D.C., the remoteness of power, both geographically and in terms of its comprehension of local realities. Centralism, wrote the
marinaleños
behind the hunger strike pamphlet, is ‘the origin of all our old problems, since the end of the nineteenth and across the twentieth century, and the cause of all our riots, our demands, and our revolutionary movements.’ Struggle, they continue, is the heritage of the Andalusian people –
un pueblo combativo
, a pugnacious people, and the methods (crop burnings, strikes, land occupations) have long been the same, as has the enemy on the ground, the Guardia Civil, with their ‘centuries in the service of the landowners’.

In the towns of Andalusia, wrote Gerald Brenan in his classic 1943 text
The Spanish Labyrinth
, ‘the atmosphere of hatred between classes has to be seen to be believed. Since the Republic came in, many landlords have been afraid to visit their estates. And the labourers are all Anarchists. What else can one expect under such conditions – miserable pay, idleness for half the year and semi-starvation for all of it?’ The
jornaleros
, the day labourers of villages like Marinaleda, lived without smallholdings or allotments to grow food for basic family subsistence during the six months they were without work. Without credit from the shops of the
pueblo
during the lean times, or the gift of a loaf of bread from one’s neighbours now and then, even more would have died of malnutrition.

While the
jornaleros
’ poverty was often fatal, hundreds of thousands of acres of the aristocratic-owned arable lands around them were left uncultivated, adding greater insult to the labourers’ injurious poverty. These lands were sometimes used for breeding bulls or horses, or in the case of a 56,000-acre tract of land west of Marinaleda, simply as a shooting estate. The class hatred flowing in one direction was matched only by the disinterest flowing in the other. Brenan records a visit in the 1930s by the Duke of Alba, father of Marinaleda’s nemesis, the current
duquesa
, to some of the vast lands he owned in Andalusia. He arrived, wrote Brenan, ‘with an equipment of lorries and tents, as though he were travelling in the centre of Africa’.
Meanwhile, starving labourers who attempted to plough the fallow land were beaten by the police.

Estepa, Marinaleda’s nearest moderately-sized neighbour, with a population of 12,000, is famous for three things: biscuits, bandits and mass suicide. The biscuits in question are Christmas delicacies called
mantecados
, and every winter entire buses are chartered from Seville and Malaga, filled with people eager to stock up for the festive season.
Mantecados
(pronounced
man-teh-cow
in the impenetrable local accent) taste a bit like grenades of sugared dirt, and weigh about the same. And yet, it’s not Estepa’s confectionery that lingers longest in the stomach. In the year 208 BC, the residents of what was then a small but significant hilltop outpost of Carthage saw the Roman army in the distance, coming to seize the town. By the time the Romans arrived, every last citizen of Estepa was dead – the whole population had committed suicide rather than surrender. The town was later captured by Visigoths, and then by a series of rival Moorish caliphs, followed eventually by the Christian
Reconquista
.

One day, Javi and I took a walk up Estepa’s San Cristóbal hill to look at its multicultural relics, our toes tensing to grip the harsh gradient, feeling the cobbles as we climbed through and above the town itself. The final stretch of the hill was so steep that my lungs took a beat to catch up, and even in the relative chill of January, tiny beads of sweat grew on my forehead, immediately turning cold in the
breeze. There was no one at the top, and no wind either. The church tower was a fancy peach-coloured extravagance, a bohemian cake of a building drawn straight from an Aesop’s fable.

The view from here is known as the
Balcón de Andalucía
, the Balcony of Andalusia. Here you can see Marinaleda to the north, on the gentle slope down towards the great Guadalquivir River that brings life to the otherwise parched region. The river was once the glittering conduit for masses of Spanish gold violently plundered from the New World. Estepa looked especially pretty, with its staggered cascade of white walls and red roofs falling away down the hill beneath us, poised delicately above the regiments of endless olive groves and rich green fields dulled by the orange pastel-dust.

This land, the basin of the Guadalquivir, is often dry, but not unfertile: as with all of rural Andalusia, it is concentrated in very few hands – either the aristocratic families of old Castile, or the middle classes, who took the opportunity in the nineteenth century to buy up (at low cost) terrain that had previously been common or Church lands. ‘
¡Corazón de Andalucía!
’ proclaimed the signage of a disused hotel on the edge of Estepa, with the unselfconscious pride of a flamenco dancer flicking her castanets. This is indeed the heart of the region: you’re a pretty long way from anywhere, but you can see
everywhere
.

We stood on a wooden viewing platform and watched the dark close out on Estepa below us. From here you can see three sub-regions of Andalusia – Seville, Cordoba and Granada – and amid the fields, the sparsely-scattered
pueblos
in the distance: El Rubio, Casariche, Herrera, and Marinaleda itself. Of course, at that distance these small farming communities all look the same. So much that is in them
is
the same: children kicking cheap footballs against stone walls worn down by the centuries, Cruzcampo umbrellas dozing gently outside tapas bars. And yet, like Asterix’s village in Gaul, impossibly holding out against the Romans, Marinaleda is surrounded by villages that lie in enemy hands.

It’s an area which, because of its often desperate levels of poverty, has long given itself to people’s heroes, for good or ill. And before the anarchists and communists arrived, there were the
bandoleros
, the bandits – normally involved in smuggling, extortion, and highwayman-style hold-ups. Even the bandits, writes Kaplan, ‘were a friend of the poor and its champion against its oppressors … a safety-valve for popular discontent’. There are even tours celebrating this grisly part of local history – though where the likes of El Tempranillo, El Pernales or El Lero fit on a spectrum of malevolence from Robin Hood to Jack the Ripper depends on who you speak to. These weren’t true popular heroes, Javi explained to me. They were horrendous murderers, living in defiance of the law and using the masses as human shields against the authorities.

In the face of such danger, the Guardia Civil, or paramilitary police force, was founded in the mid-nineteenth century for the express purpose of tackling banditry in this part of Andalusia. The local landscape was the bandits’ friend. Late one cold February night, driving back towards Estepa from a pre-Lenten
carnaval
in another town, Javi and his friend Antonio explained that the tree-covered hills were considered too dangerous for exploring alone – there was a white dog in there that would eat you alive. This is presumably where the bandits used to hide, too, I asked – a slightly more realistic danger? ‘That’s right,’ said Javi. Antonio chuckled to himself from the back seat.

‘The
bandoleros
would probably still be there, too – but it’s so fucking cold, they had to come down the mountain and get jobs in Congress.’

Spanish hills are usually concealing something, even if they have sometimes been sites of salvation: havens for rebel peasant leaders hiding from persecution, and for the Spanish
maquis
, the partisan guerrillas who didn’t give up on the dream, even after the fascists won the Civil War in 1939, and fought on against Franco. The partisans are the people’s heroes depicted in the Oscar-winning film
Pan’s Labyrinth
, a ragtag army refusing to be cowed by the greater power intent on destroying them, deployed in the three branches of the Spanish State: the military, the Church and the government.