The Mexican Suitcase, Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, will be part of the line-up of "Cine México" in Tucson, Arizona, later this month (February 29-March 4). All screenings and events are free and...
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Devastating op-ed in today's New York Times, on the judicial shenanigans in Spain here.
En castellano:
Los enemigos del Juez Baltasar Gárzón finalmente se han salido con la suya. El Tribunal Supremo esta semana declaró culpable al juez de aplicar mal las leyes españolas sobre la interceptación de comunicaciones y le han suspendido de los...
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"The secrets from a vault of moldy documents long covered in bat and rat droppings could soon help to put former top Guatemalan officials behind bars, years after the country's brutal civil war ended in 1996," Mica Rosenberg and Kieran Murray write for Reuters:
Clues found in the millions of police documents...
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In a statement just published, Judge Garzón has expressed his “frontal rejection” of the ruling by his country’s Supreme Court that has sentenced him to an 11-year disbarment. This rejection is based on his understanding that the ruling has been “unjust and predetermined,” employs spurious arguments, and lacking in evidence; he vows to use...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett covers the protest meeting in Madrid. More reports in the LA Times, the Daily Beast, the BBC, the New York Times, and the Associated Press. ""It looks like Garzón's enemies got what they wanted," HRW's Reed Brody told Tremlett, "… the criminal prosecution of...
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María Garzón, daughter of Baltasar Garzón, has published an open letter in response to the Supreme Court ruling that sentences her father to 11 years of disbarment:
This letter is addressed to all those who today break out the champagne to toast to the disbarment of Baltasar Garzón.
To you, who...
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Judge Garzón has been sentenced to an 11 year suspension and a 2,500 euro fine for prevarication in relation to his investigation of a wide-ranging corruption ring involving the Valencia branch of the ruling conservative Partido Popular. The Supreme Court tribunal judging the case voted unanimously to find the judge guilty. This is the...
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(Read the full press release here. En castellano.) On May 13, 2012, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives will present the Second ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, in the amount of $100,000, to Fredy Peccerelli, Executive Director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, and Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin...
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Jim Jump just sent us the latest issue (pdf) of the wonderful newsletter of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, featuring coverage of the 75 anniversary celebrations, a review of the IB musical by Karl Lewkowicz and Judith Johnson, book reviews, and more. Click here to access the newsletter in pdf.
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Many thought the day would never come. And yet this past week, a handful of aging victims of Francoist repression appeared before Spain's Supreme Court to tell the horrifying stories of how their parents or grandparents were dragged from their houses and shot by Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. In other...
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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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