The work done by ALBA/Puffin Award winner Fredy Peccerelli and his team is absolutely essential, says his colleague José Suasnavar of the Guatemalan Association of Forensic Anthropology (FAFG), EFE reports In an interview with the prestigious Latin American academic institution FLACSO, Suasnavar describes the Guatemalan exhumation process in detail. Read it
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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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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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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