Our friends Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís report: Exactly one year after the release of our film Granito: How To Nail A Dictator at the Sundance Film Festival, the ex-dictator of Guatemala, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was brought up on charges of genocide in a Guatemalan court and placed under house arrest. The culmination...
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Spanish Supreme Court Judge Manuel Marchena, in charge of the third case pending against Garzón, concluded the investigative stage yesterday with a brief charging the Judge with “cohecho impropio,” that is, the appearance of bribery by accepting a gift from an interested party. Marchena has significantly downscaled the original charge of prevarication, or knowingly...
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Ivry sur Seine, a working class municipality on the southern outskirts of Paris, celebrated ten sons of the town who were killed in Spain fighting in the International Brigades yesterday when a plaque in their honor was unveiled. The ceremony was organized by the ACER (Asociation of Friends of Combattants in Republican Spain, for...
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The trial against Garzón "is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments," Dan Kaufman writes in today's New York Times, "and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes."
The Supreme Court’s zeal to try him has little legal basis; rather, it reflects...
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(En castellano.) If there were credit rating agencies devoted to evaluating the moral health of a country’s institutions, yesterday “Spain” would almost certainly have been downgraded to junk-bond status. Its Supreme Court opened the first of three trials against Judge Baltasar Garzón, thus initiating a three-pronged attack on judicial independence and offering...
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"A number of countries around the world have reason to be grateful for the unstinting efforts of a Spanish judge who finds himself on trial," The Guardian editorializes today,
Judge Baltasar Garzón's 1998 attempt to extradite General Pinochet from Britain to face charges of human rights abuses relating to the 1973 coup in
Judge Garzón's first trial before Spain's Supreme Court has started. Garzón is accused of knowingly going against the law ("prevarication") when ordering allegedly illegal wiretaps while investigating a corruption ring involving the regional leadership of the conservative--and now governing--Partido Popular. The trial, which is expected to last three days, involves seven magistrates from the...
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The international media are gearing up for the upcoming two trials of Judge Baltasar Garzón. "Is it Crash and Burn Time?" Daniel Woolls asks, writing for the Associated Press:
On Tuesday, Garzon goes on trial for allegedly ordering illegal jailhouse wiretaps in a domestic corruption probe. A week later he appears in...
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Garzón's successor at Spain's National Criminal Court, Judge Pablo Ruz, has sent the prosecutor a 19-page brief reactivating the investigation of human rights abuses and war crimes at the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, El País reports. Given the lack of judicial action on the part of the US and British authorities, Ruz...
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A group of prominent Spanish intellectuals including the poet Luis García Montero and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar have rallied to the support of Baltasar Garzón, the crusading Spanish magistrate who last year received the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. So have Human Rights organizations worldwide. In the next two weeks, Garzón will...
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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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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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After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
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Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
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Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
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Targeted by the far right, Rutgers historian Mark Bray and his family went into exile in October. Speaking with The Volunteer from Madrid, he reflects on the current political situation. “Fascism shamelessly takes over institutions that, under liberal norms, are supposed to remain neutral.”
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I. In the Beginning Second child, Bernard, born March 1, 1915 Older brother, my father, Jacob (Jack), born June 3, 1912 Younger sister, Roslyn, born (June 1, 1922) disabled, hospitalized, died February 10, 1942 Their father, Abraham, died March 21,1930 Their mother, Nettie, died April 29, 1953 Bernie Brilliant student, graduated High...
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The title of this new occasional feature of The Volunteer is the Esperanto word for “archive.” In it, we will present, translate, and contextualize iconic non-English language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.
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In recent years, citizen groups in Leipzig and Madrid have fought to preserve the buildings that were backdrops in two of Robert Capa’s best-known photographs. Their steadfast dedication has created two sites of historical memory whose significance extends far beyond Capa’s original images.
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On November 8, 1937, Salaria Kea, a 26-year-old African American nurse from Ohio, had been in Spain for seven months and one day. The country was in disarray. Half its territory was controlled by fascist rebels. Cities were being bombed, and civilians were killed by the thousands. Thousands more were forcibly displaced. But Kea...
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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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