The plaintiffs in the case against Franco's repression that is being handled by the Argentine courts (see previous Volunteer coverage here) have requested that the judge, María Servini de Cubría, travel to Spain to interview victims of Franco's repression, allowing them to testify. The plaintiffs have also presented a response to the report issued...
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October 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades. To properly honor the brave men and women who fought to save the Spanish Republic, programs of appreciation and remembrance will take place for a full week in different parts of Spain.
ALBA will be joining the official program of activities in...
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In today's Times, Kathryn Sikkink, a Minnesota political scientist, makes the case for the kinds of human rights persecutions that Baltasar Garzón helped institute:
My research shows that transitional countries — those moving from authoritarian governments to democracy or from civil war to peace — where human rights prosecutions have taken place...
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Justice, Spanish Style
According to today's issue of Público:
1. Judge Baltasar Garzón initiates an investigation into the forced disappearance and/or assasination of 113,000 Spaniards by Francoist forces.
2. Judge Baltasar Garzón is accused of judicial malfeasance (prevaricación) for having initiated that investigation, and is suspended from his post as a Judge.
3. An Argentine judge, invoking...
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The AP reports:
Spanish prosecutors are investigating 849 cases of newborn children stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for profit, the country's attorney general said Friday. Candido Conde-Pumpido said 162 cases had already been referred for trial and only 38 have been dropped for a lack of evidence. It is well...
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For me, as for so many others throughout the world, the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade are an example of courage and solidarity… They were the kind of people who fight against the worst cancer of humanity: indifference. It is our duty to carry this idea of solidarity forward. —Judge Baltasar Garzón, on receiving...
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The First Annual ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism attracted widespread interest among the media in Europe and the Americas. Among the highlights: David Cole in The Nation; Dan Kaufman in The New Yorker; Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!. All the major Spanish papers featured the event prominently as well, as...
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The 75th Bay Area reunion, held in Berkeley, California, on Memorial Day, was graced with a surprise guest. Looking spry and mobile at age 95, Delmer Berg, one of the five surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, took the floor. The Columbia, California, resident advised the audience to keep up the good fight...
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The legal route for the investigation and persecution of crimes committed by the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War seemed to have reached a dead end with the suspension of Judge Baltasar Garzón last year. Yet this week an organization of Italian residents in Barcelona will being a suit for crimes against...
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Now available for online viewing: the speech that Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA, gave on Saturday May 14 in New York City on the occasion of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award for Judge Baltasar Garzón:
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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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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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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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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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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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