Voices from the guerrilla del monte: Interview with Two Spanish maquis

Voices from the guerrilla del monte: Interview with Two Spanish maquis This interview aims to contribute to the recovery of the history of the Spanish maquis by bringing forward the stories of Florian GarcÃ-a Velasco and Remedios Montero MartÃ-nez, two veterans oÃ- the guerrilla del monte. I met with Florian and Reme at their home in Valencia, Spain in May, 2003. At the time of the interview , Florian was eighty-six years old and Reme was seventy -seven. Both are deeply engaged politically and our conversation ranged from the United States invasion of Iraq, contemporaneous with the interview, to their memories of living in Prague during Czechoslovakia's Spring of 1968. Most of my questions, however, were about their years as maquis. In Spain, the term maquis usually refers to fighters that waged guerrilla warfare against Franco after his victory in the Spanish Civil War. A great number of Spain's guerrilleros actually began their struggle much earlier, some as early as 1936. After Franco's quick victory in significant sections of Spanish territory—particularly Andalusia, Galicia, Asturias, and Leon—many Republicans, trade unionists, and radicals were forced to flee into the mountains .1 With the end of the war in 1939, some, like Florian and Reme, remained in Spain while others fled to France, joining with the French Resistance in order to fight fascism on another front.2 Toward the end of World War II, many of the Spanish maquis returned to Spain, bringing with them, at least temporarily, the enthusiasm gained from their victory against the Nazis. The reality of fighting the increasingly entrenched Franco regime proved to be more Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 8 8 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies difficult. The guerrilh lasted in some mountainous regions until the early '50s, while the urban struggle lingered into the early '60s. When the military rebelled against the Spanish Republic in 1936, Florian was nineteen years old and already a veteran of the workers movement in Madrid. He remembers with pride spending his sixteenth birthday in jail due to his active role in the fight for the eight-hour day. Shortly after enlisting in the columna Galan in 1936, he suffered a gunshot wound to one of his lungs. As the war came to an end, Florian made his way to the last corner of Spain not taken by Franco, Alicante, only to learn that there were no ships to pick him or his comrades up and take them to safety. After his capture by the Nationalists, Florian spent two years in concentration camps. After his release, he spent five more years attempting to organize clandestinely as a propagandist for the Spanish Communist Party (PCE). In 1946, he was sent to Valencia by the PCE to revive the organization in the capital city. The parry, however, quickly realized that the project was too dangerous so Florian fled into the mountains. Standing at a diminutive 5'2", Florian had been known as "El peque," but for the next six years, as he moved around the interior of Valencia and Aragon as a commander of the Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante y Aragon (AGLA), he came to be affectionately known by his comrades as "El grande." The communist-dominated AGLA is considered one of the most successful of the anti-Franco guerrilla groups. As a ten-year-old, Remedios was too young to participate in the Civil War. Nevertheless , because she came from a Republican household, she sympathized from the start with los del monte. In 1946, around age twenty and using the code name "Celia," she began helping the guerrilleros by serving as a punto de apoyo, a person who secretly helped to facilitate food, supplies, and information as to the activities of the Guardia Civil and the contrapartidas? Reme's account reveals a great deal about the heroic and largely unsung role of the puntos de apoyo as well as about other aspects of the struggle against Franco. As the interview progresses, Reme speaks of lost family members and of her own experience in Franco's prisons. Even though the content of much of Reme's story was intensely personal...