A former Guatemalan soldier has been convicted to more than 6,000 years in prison for his role in a massacre of more than 200 people during the Internal Conflict, the BBC reports. Yesterday, also for the BBC, Paula Dear covered the story of the country's quest for justice.
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Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen are among the members of the Honorary Committee inviting you to join us at the annual event in New York City honoring the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Guernica bombing, and supporting the fight for human rights. Tickets for the event...
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Giles Tremlett, correspondent of The Guardian in Madrid, and author of Ghosts of Spain, reviews Paul Preston’s latest book about terrorism and its legacy in Franco’s Spain. “Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from “looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest...
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The Biblioteca Afro-Americana Madrid (BAAM), directed by Mireia Sentís, has just published Spanish translations of James Yates' Spanish Civil War memoir From Mississippi to Madrid and a collection of Spanish dispatches from Langston Hughes. Xavier Montanyà reviews both of them in La Vanguardia (pdf):
Both books are of great interest to experts...
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Granito finally made it to Guatemala. The documentary by Pam Yates and Paco de Onís about the quest to indict the Guatemalan military responsible for massive murder during the Civil War, which ALBA screened at its Human Rights Film Festival last fall, and which features this year's winners of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human...
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Laurie Levinger and Anna Moccia-Field have launched a new website with testimonies from Maya survivors of the civil war in Guatemala. Laurie, niece of Lincoln vet Sam Levinger, has been interviewing survivors for more than six years. Her book, What War? Testimonies of Maya Survivors / ¿Cuál guerra? Testimonios de sobrevivientes...
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I have just read the writ with which the presiding judge dismisses, on the grounds of an expired statute of limitations, the so-called “New York” case against Baltasar Garzón. In this writ of dismissal, as well as in his previous writ of indictment, the judge claims that New York University has concealed or fudged...
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Arturo Conde, writing for Univisión, praises James D. Fernández's exhibit of Spanish immigrants in New York, currently on display in Asturias, Spain:
Fernández’s exhibit, “The Colony: A Photographic Album of Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945,” which has just made its way from New York to Spain on tour, points out that,...
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Given recent events in Spain, Helen Graham writes in today's Independent "Paul Preston's monumental, rigorous and unflinching study" of repression in the Spanish Civil War has become "important and opportune in ways that reach far beyond the purely academic." Preston's The Spanish Holocaust, which will be released in the US next month, traces "the...
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Another hurdle has been cleared in the fight against impunity in Guatemala, in which the winners of this year's ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award have played a seminal role. This morning the Associated Press reports:
A former U.S.-backed dictator who presided over one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala’s civil war has no...
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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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