Via the New York Times, Agence France-Presse reports:
Decades after President Salvador Allende died in a 1973 coup, Chile is preparing to exhume his body to determine once and for all whether he took his own life or was murdered by...
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I finally figured out how to upload to vimeo.com the video I made in 2004 about ALBA and the uses to which the archive was being put in the early 2000s. Many of the details contained in the video are by now obsolete: the number of surviving veterans has dramatically declined since 2004; the...
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The family of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who died during the 1973 Pinochet coup, is requesting that his body be exhumed in order to help determine the cause of death, Democracy Now! reports:
Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. His official cause of death was listed as suicide, but it has...
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Spain in/and the United States Screening and discussion of two documentaries about Spaniards in the US. NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and its King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, together with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Comisión de Archivos de La Nacional, are pleased to present filmmaker Luis Argeo, who...
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From the English edition of El País:
The ages of the men range from the late fifties to mid-sixties. At the drop of a hat, they have been taken back 33 years, the length of time they have been at liberty.
"Who are you?"
"We are former prisoners."
"No,...
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Today's papers feature another series of reactions to yesterday's news that the second Supreme Court trial against Garzón has been opened. Many commentators, including El País in an editorial, brand the obvious rush with which the presiding judge, Barreiro, is proceeding, opening the trial with several appeals pending, and denying Garzón and...
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Juan Salas was in Paris in March, alongside ALBA's Robert Coale, to present With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, the rediscovered film by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline (clip here), at Cinéma du Réel, the prestigous international documentary film festival. Here is an interview with Juan (in French) from the Festival...
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ALBA has just issued a press release (versión en español) with further details on the May 14 annual celebration, featuring ALBA/Puffin Awardee Baltasar Garzón:
A pre-event benefit will feature a question-and-answer session and the opportunity to meet Judge Garzón over a light lunch. Judge Garzón will be interviewed by Jonathan Turley,...
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A news item buried in yesterday's edition of the Spanish e-paper El Plural called attention to a little-known case pending in Spain's Constitutional Court, whose outcome could have definitive repercussions on two of Garzón's three cases.
There is an anomalous figure in Spanish law known as "acusación popular", which allows unharmed citizens to press...
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Some additional English-language coverage from the Associated Press:
In his latest altercation with the Spanish legal system, Garzon was probing a network of businesses that allegedly paid money and gifts to members of Spain's conservative opposition Popular Party in exchange for lucrative contracts in towns and regions governed by that party. As part...
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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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