At a massive celebration of the International Human Rights Day, with performances by Sting and others, Baltasar Garzón received the Azucena Villaflor award--named after one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo--from Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. See BBC coverage here, and footage here and here.
Read more »
Lee Kutnick, former secretary of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away two weeks ago. From an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Lee worked tirelessly as a community and union organizer, devoting her life to making the world a better place for working people. She was Secretary...
Read more »
Robert Llopis reports on the inauguration of the "Parc Dels Internacionals," dedicated to the International Brigades, at Benissa this past October 30th as part of the Homage to the IB, in the presence of a representative of the City of Benissa, Irene Filip from the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (Archive of the Austrian Resistance,...
Read more »
Gert Hoffman writes with sad news:
This is to announce that Josef "Joschi" Eisenbauer, one of the three surviving Austrian brigadistas died on December 10. He was one of the more than 1400 Austrians who had gone to defend the Spanish Republic. He went to Spain in 1937, was a member of the XIIIth and XIth International Brigades, was wounded and taken to...
Read more »
Andy Worthington at The Public Record provides an extensive overview of the revelations of US pressure on Spain to curb torture investigations:
The cable reveals how US officials immediately began sounding out Spanish officials, and how, on April 15, an apparently unlikely figure for the Obama administration to embrace — Sen. Mel...
Read more »
In the English-language edition of El País this past Sunday, an overview by Carlos E. Cué of the WikiLeaks revelations in relation to Baltasar Garzón and the US attempts to influence the Spanish judiciary:
The American Embassy in Madrid has been keeping a close eye on the High Court, and...
Read more »
El País--with The Guardian one of the main recipients of the latest WikiLeaks dump--has dedicated an editorial to defending its role in making the thousands of diplomatic cables public:
The revelations show a seamy side of the political world, about which we all had well-grounded suspicions, but no clear certainty....
Read more »
Iskra announces:
The Belfast memorial to the courageous Irish volunteers who travelled to fight against Fascism and the forces of reaction in the Spanish Civil War will be rededicated in a ceremony on saturday, the 11th of December, at 12.30pm in Writers Square. The guest speaker will be Joe Bowers of the CPI who...
Read more »
The Guardian's Giles Tremlett reports:
A country palace given to Spain's former fascist dictator, General Francisco Franco, to use as his summer house is to be expropriated from his family and donated to the people of the country town of Sada, north-west Spain. Franco used it for his summer holidays, when he...
Read more »
The Guardian has continued to post Spain-related memos from the WikiLeaks cache; here a piece by Giles Tremlett; here a memo on Garzón's investigation of torture at Guantánamo; here one in which Garzón is dubbed "anti-American":
He clearly has an anti-American streak (as evidenced by occasional scathing editorials in...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
Read more »
My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
Read more »
Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
Read more »
LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
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
Search the Database