"An effort to declassify American intelligence files on Argentina’s dictatorship failed in Congress on Friday in Washington, disappointing rights activists in Argentina who believe the secret documents could help them identify young people stolen as babies by the military junta," the Associate Press reports:
The amendment by Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat...
Read more »
The Spanish-language channel of CNN interviewed Judge Garzón this afternoon. View the video here:
Read more »
"In the 1930s some 2,800 Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and traveled to Spain to fight to defend democracy and defeat fascism after Gen. Francisco Franco’s right-wing coup," Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole writes in The Nation. "In 2011 the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the...
Read more »
Judge Garzón said yesterday that even if he is cleared of the charges brought against him in three pending cases before the Spanish Supreme Court, his ability to do his job at his post on the National Criminal Court (Audiencia Nacional) will be severely compromised, Reuters reports:
"Any interested party could use...
Read more »
Baltasar Garzón, in New York to receive the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism this Saturday, was interviewed this morning on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. View the interview at the Democracy Now website; listen to the half-hour interview here (mp3). (Translation by ALBA's Tony Geist.) Interested in meeting Judge Garzón? Some
In an interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Baltasar Garzón has condemned the assassination of Osama bin Laden. "Not even the worst terrorist on earth deserves to be killed, especially when other options are still open," declared the Spanish judge, who is a staunch opponent of the death penalty. "If I do not...
Read more »
UC Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies has put a video online of the speech Baltasar Garzón gave there on April 27th, entitled "Universal Jurisdiction and International Justice." View the 1.5-hour clip here:
Read more »
Scott Horton's investigative piece on the suicides at the Guantánamo detention facility has just won the National Magazine Award. Horton, who writes for Harper's, has also been one of the most perceptive U.S. followers of Baltasar Garzón's work (see previous Volunteer coverage here). Guantánamo will be one of the topics covered by Prof. Jonathan...
Read more »
"Judge Garzón is a personal hero," Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School writes on his blog today:
For civil libertarians, there are few heroes who can match Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and later worked to identify human...
Read more »
High-school and college teachers interested in bringing their classes to ALBA's annual celebration this coming Saturday May 14 in New York City may contact Marina Garde at mgarde@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398 for special group discounts.
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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
Search the Database