All the major Spanish papers covered the news of Judge Baltasar Garzón's acceptance of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism yesterday in New York City, as well as his conversation with Professor Jonathan Turley: El País, ABC, El Mundo, Público, as well as El Diario in New York.
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"An effort to declassify American intelligence files on Argentina’s dictatorship failed in Congress on Friday in Washington, disappointing rights activists in Argentina who believe the secret documents could help them identify young people stolen as babies by the military junta," the Associate Press reports:
The amendment by Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat...
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The Spanish-language channel of CNN interviewed Judge Garzón this afternoon. View the video here:
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"In the 1930s some 2,800 Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and traveled to Spain to fight to defend democracy and defeat fascism after Gen. Francisco Franco’s right-wing coup," Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole writes in The Nation. "In 2011 the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the...
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Judge Garzón said yesterday that even if he is cleared of the charges brought against him in three pending cases before the Spanish Supreme Court, his ability to do his job at his post on the National Criminal Court (Audiencia Nacional) will be severely compromised, Reuters reports:
"Any interested party could use...
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Contrary to earlier indications, the Spanish government has decided not to exhume the remains of an estimated 30,000 victims from the Valley of the Fallen, the massive monument that also serves as the tomb to former dictator Francisco Franco, The Daily Telegraph reported last week, because it would be "impossible" to match bones to...
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Baltasar Garzón, in New York to receive the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism this Saturday, was interviewed this morning on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. View the interview at the Democracy Now website; listen to the half-hour interview here (mp3). (Translation by ALBA's Tony Geist.) Interested in meeting Judge Garzón? Some
In an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Baltasar Garzón has condemned the assassination of Osama bin Laden. "Not even the worst terrorist on earth deserves to be killed, especially when other options are still open," declared the Spanish judge, who is a staunch opponent of the death penalty. "If I do not...
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UC Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies has put a video online of the speech Baltasar Garzón gave there on April 27th, entitled "Universal Jurisdiction and International Justice." View the 1.5-hour clip here:
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Scott Horton's investigative piece on the suicides at the Guantánamo detention facility has just won the National Magazine Award. Horton, who writes for Harper's, has also been one of the most perceptive U.S. followers of Baltasar Garzón's work (see previous Volunteer coverage here). Guantánamo will be one of the topics covered by Prof. Jonathan...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Adrian Pole’s sharp-eyed and sensitive new book notices what so many historians have missed about the International Brigades: that this army was filled with Spanish recruits. Interactions with everyday Spaniards made up a substantial chunk of foreign soldiers’ days in the rearguard. Due to the high mortality of Brigade units, maintaining fighting readiness demanded...
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Amirah Inglis’s (1926-2015) collection of photographs assembled for her research on Australians in the Spanish Civil War (1987) is posted on JSTOR’s website. The collection includes 119 images varying from pamphlet covers, post cards, to photographs of volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic at home, and of volunteers who went to Spain. Inglis planned...
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After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
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Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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