Yesterday Mexican leftist politician and presidential runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced his decision to leave the country's Democratic Revolution Party. As the New York Times reports, López Obrador "was one of many political figures who abandoned the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1988 and was a popular Mexico City mayor before seeking...
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The words and deeds of the Lincoln Vets still Speak to a generation of present-day Spaniards. I received an email during the last week of August from Nacho Garcia, a young Spaniard from Burgos who maintains a blog, The Jaily News, named after the underground newspaper written by the International Brigade prisoners who...
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Helen Graham’s The War and Its Shadow, just out from Sussex Academic Press, is “a book concerned with what must now be considered the most important revisionist project in the study of world history, and that is the significance and truth of the Spanish Civil War”, writes Gary Raymond in the Wales Arts Review;...
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A judge in the Spanish city of Valencia has recently stripped former dictator Fransisco Franco of his title of ‘Honorary Mayor,’ awarded to him in May 1939. Compromis, a’s left-wing coalition, said that “To maintain this distinction for the top figure in the military uprising and subsequent dictatorship is a clear attack on the...
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A new 154-page report issued by Human Rights Watch details new cases of torture committed by US government representatives. From the press release:
The United States government during the Bush administration tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya, according to accounts by former detainees and recently uncovered...
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From our friends at NACLA: Today, members of the Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by journalist Javier Sicilia, arrived in New York City. The Caravan for Peace has spent the past month traveling across the United States in protest of failed drug war policies. During its visit, the Caravan and its...
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From September 21-29, British director Matt Richard's new film, entitled "To Say Goodbye," will premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival, in San Sebastian, Spain. According to El Público, the animated film tells the story of "4,000 Basque children who set sail on the Habana ship en route to the United Kingdom" during...
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An audio reportage courtesy of Free Speech Radio (listen here): Over the last few years, Europe has experienced a severe financial crisis, with countries like Greece and Spain facing skyrocketing debt and unemployment. More than a decade ago, a similar situation was unfolding in Argentina. In 2001, the country suffered a debilitating economic crisis...
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“Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague,” The Guardian reports, “and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war”: “The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain,” Tutu argues, “fabricated...
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The Spanish on-line paper El Plural is reporting a rather shocking story from Madrid. “The State Secretariat of Information has decided that the news conference planned for next week by the Circle of Foreign Correspondents in Spain with former judge Baltasar Garzón “is not appropriate” (“no es idóneo”), and it has denied permission for...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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