In dramatic news last month, Baltasar Garzón--the acclaimed Spanish lawyer and former judge who built his career on doggedly pursuing accountability for human rights crimes--agreed to head the legal defense team for Julian Assange in the Wikileaks publisher’s efforts to avoid extradition to the United States via Sweden. If there is such a thing as...
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The civil war in Spain stands at a crossroads in Europe’s “dark twentieth century”: that is, in the story of how, not so long ago, the mass killing of civilians became the brutal medium through which European societies came to terms with structure-shattering forms of change. The Spanish conflict was all about this. But...
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This spring, Público, Spain's most prominent progressive media venue, killed its print edition, announcing massive layoffs. Almost immediately, a core group of its journalists got together to found MásPúblico, a truly independent, cooperative media project. Berta del Río has the inside story.
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Spain is among the countries hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But, much like in 1936, it is also Spain that is seeing some of the most inspiring reactions to the crisis. Amidst the ruins, revolutionary initiatives flourish: new and not-so-new forms of economic and political organization. Jorge Gaupp, who has been involved with...
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(Version in English.) Los rumores crecían y el fantasma del cierre inminente planeaba sobre el periódico Público después de que el día 3 de enero de este año los accionistas hiciesen pública la suspensión de pagos. Los trabajadores del diario nacional español empezaron a buscar alternativas ante la avalancha de malas noticias que se sucedían...
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(English version.) Para Antonio Gamsci,  la crisis sistémica —orgánica, que decía él— consistía en “el hecho de que lo viejo no acaba de morir y lo nuevo no puede nacer”.(1) Sobre qué ocurre con “lo viejo” leemos algo en el periódico cada mañana y hablamos de ello con nuestros congéneres. Conversaciones que, en España,...
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(Versión en castellano aquí.) At the end of 2004 a good friend  of mine found, by chance, a piece of graffiti on a wall in the chapel of San Gregorio in the town of Aguaviva (Teruel). It had been written on Christmas Day 1937 by Edward Muscala, an American member of the International...
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Names matter. Paul Preston’s choice of The Spanish Holocaust, his latest and most ambitious account of the massive violence unleashed in the wake of the 1936 coup, is as polemical as it is well-pondered. It reflects a conscious attempt on Preston’s part to reframe how we think about the war in Spain and its...
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My interest in Guatemala began when I was a student, when I learned that in 1954, the United States had engineered a coup against Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, and installed a military dictator, beginning cycles of destruction and repression. A small guerrilla army grew up in the 1960s to challenge this repressive and...
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On July 18, 1936, at the age of 22, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) traveled to Barcelona, on assignment for the British magazine Life and Letters Today, to report on the People’s Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular). An anti-fascist alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, the popular games were canceled when the outbreak of the Spanish...
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