In an important victory for transitional justice after 36 years, a court in northern Argentina has sentenced eight ex-army officers to life in jail for killing unarmed activists in the town of Margarita Belén during the military dictatorship, the BBC reports:
Twenty-two people, mostly members of the Montoneros rebel group, were tortured and killed...
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Before Judge Baltasar Garzón received the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism this past Saturday May 14 in New York, he was interviewed by Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School. The whole interview (appr. 1h15m) was filmed by David Schwittek and can now be viewed here:
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Len and Nancy Tsou send their slideshow of the ALBA's 2011 New York City celebration and the ceremony for the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Click here to see the images.
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Earlier today, Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School summarized the main points of his two-hour conversation with ALBA/Puffin awardee Baltasar Garzón:
Garzón stated that the Obama Administration’s use of the “just following orders” defense as well as the protection of lawyers involved in the torture program violated the Nuremberg...
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All the major Spanish papers covered the news of Judge Baltasar Garzón's acceptance of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism yesterday in New York City, as well as his conversation with Professor Jonathan Turley: El País, ABC, El Mundo, Público, as well as El Diario in New York.
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Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of ALBA, representatives of the Puffin Foundation, authorities, amigas y amigos:
Seventy-five years ago in my country, Spain, one of the darkest and saddest chapters in the history of humanity began. It lasted more than forty years and even today, after 34 years of democracy, it has not...
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"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...
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The Spanish-language channel of CNN interviewed Judge Garzón this afternoon. View the video here:
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"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...
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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...
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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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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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