Jefferson Morley writes in Salon:
Kate Doyle’s job isn’t exactly journalism, though she’s nailed more big stories than many Pulitzer Prize winners. Her work does not quite qualify as law enforcement either, though a few bad guys living in confined quarters rue the day she came into their lives. “Human rights detective”...
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Lisa Mullens interviewed ALBA/Puffin Award winner Doyle on the Public Radio International program The World. Doyle discusses her work in Guatemala and Peru. You can listen to the full hour-long program, or just the interview with Kate, titled “Documenting Latin America’s Painful Past.” “Yes, it is scary to go up against human rights criminals," Doyle tells...
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Richard Bermack's photographs of the 2012 ALBA celebration in New York, including the ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony and the reception, can be viewed here.
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Len Tsou has posted his photographs from yesterday's annual ALBA celebration and ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony. View them here.
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CNN Latin America interviewed Kate Doyle and Fredy Peccerelli this morning about their 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, which was awarded to them yesterday in New York. Watch the video here.
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In a defeat for the principle of universal jurisdiction, El Salvador's Supreme Court will not honor an extradition request for thirteen former military officers accused of planning and ordering the killings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter during the country’s civil war, the New York Times reports:
The Salvadoran...
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ALBA Executive Director Marina Garde was interviewed live this morning on BronxNet TV about the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, which will be awarded this coming Sunday to Kate Doyle and Fredy Peccerelli. Watch the interview here.
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This past March 23, Vernon Bown, one of the last surviving US volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, passed away at the Veteran’s Administration Rehabilitation Center in Martinez, California. Vern Bown grew up in North-Western Wisconsin. After serving in Spain he joined the Merchant Marine during World War II. In the 1950s, he was...
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The British children's writer Leila Berg, who died late last month, was a staunch supporter of the Spanish Republic, Rosemary Stones writes in The Guardian. Two of her lovers dies fighting in the International Brigades. Read the full obituary here.
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Rob García, whose father was a Basque Republican child refugee in the UK, announces a series of events to commemorate the Guernica bombing and the evacuation of 4,000 Basque children to Great Britain, to be performed by the Na-mara duet ( Paul McNamara and García himself). More details here.
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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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