In the ensuing chaos of the dictator’s death, while his friends and enemies manoeuvred to address the power vacuum in Madrid, the small community of poor, mostly landless farm labourers in Marinaleda began to pursue their own unique version of la Transición. At the time, 90 per cent of landless day labourers, known in Spain as jornaleros, had to feed themselves and their families on only two months of work a year.
As Spain began its slow, careful transition from fascism to liberal democracy, the people of Marinaleda formed a political party and a trade union, and began fighting for land and freedom. There followed over a decade of unceasing struggle, in which they occupied airports, train stations, government buildings, farms and palaces; went on hunger strike, blocked roads, marched, picketed, went on hunger strike again; were beaten, arrested and tried countless times for their pains. Astonishingly, in 1991 they prevailed. The government, exhausted by their defiance, gave them 1,200 hectares of land belonging to the Duke of Infantado, head of one of Spain’s oldest and wealthiest aristocratic families.
From the very beginning, one man was at the forefront of this struggle. In 1979, at the age of thirty, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo became the first elected mayor of Marinaleda, a position he has held ever since – re-elected time after time with an overwhelming majority. However, holding official state-sanctioned positions of power was only a distraction from the serious business of la lucha – the struggle. In the intense heat of the summer of 1980, the village launched ‘a hunger strike against hunger’ which brought them national and even global recognition. Everything they have done since that summer has increased the notoriety of Sánchez Gordillo and his village, and added to their admirers and enemies across Spain.
Sánchez Gordillo’s philosophy, outlined in his 1980 book Andaluces, levantaos, and in countless speeches and interviews since, is one which is unique to him, though grounded firmly in the historic struggles and uprisings of the peasant pueblos of Andalusia, and their remarkably deep-seated tendency towards anarchism. These communities are striking for being not just anti-authoritarian, but against all authority. ‘I have never belonged to the Communist Party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or communitarian,’ Sánchez Gordillo clarified in an interview in 2011, adding that his political beliefs were drawn from a mixture of Christ, Gandhi, Marx, Lenin and Che.
In August 2012 he achieved a new level of notoriety for a string of actions that began, in forty-degree heat, with the occupation of military land, the seizure of an aristocrat’s palace, and a three-week march across the south in which he called on his fellow mayors not to repay their debts. Its peak saw Sánchez Gordillo lead a series of supermarket expropriations along with fellow members of the left-communist trade union SOC-SAT.{The old field-workers’ union, the Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (SOC), extended its scope to include urban sectors in 2007, giving rise to the Andalusian Workers’ Union, Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (SAT), within which the SOC maintains a degree of autonomy.} They marched into supermarkets and took bread, rice, olive oil and other basic supplies, and donated them to food banks for Andalusians who could not feed themselves. For this he became a superstar, appearing not only on the cover of the Spanish newspapers, but across the world’s media, as ‘the Robin Hood Mayor’, ‘The Don Quixote of the Spanish Crisis’, or ‘Spain’s William Wallace’, depending on which newspaper you read.
The first time I visited Marinaleda, it was January 2012, and a friend from Estepa had offered to help me get an interview with Sánchez Gordillo. This was arranged not through the usual network of aides and official channels, but through an informal, friendly sequence of favours I would soon learn was entirely typical. My friend Javi called his friend Ezequiel, who lived in the village; Ezequiel wasn’t home, so Javi asked Ezequiel’s mum, who said of course, she would speak to the mayor when she saw him, and tell him we were dropping by.
So we drove the fifteen minutes from Estepa to Marinaleda, down the hill through undulating olive groves, on a road almost completely free from traffic, around a junction pointing to Marinaleda; someone with delusions of grandeur had scrawled ‘ciudad’ (city) underneath the village name. We crossed the city limits, which are marked with a painted sign featuring a dove carrying an olive branch and the words ‘En lucha por la paz’, in struggle for peace. As we slowed down into the main road, we came to a halt at a red light: no one was crossing, and there was no other traffic – it certainly looked peaceful. At first glance, it was difficult to distinguish it from any other Spanish pueblo of this size. The idiosyncrasies don’t jump right out at you, but slowly appear and multiply before your eyes, like ants on a hot pavement. It was very quiet. It was very plain. There were no signs indicating multinational brands: no advertising hoardings or intrusions from modern capitalism.
The town hall car park had only a few cars parked in it, the muted sound of children playing drifted over from the nearby nursery, and there, gleaming in the afternoon sunshine, was the Ayuntamiento, the town hall. Next to it was the equally impressive Casa de Cultura, the cultural centre, with its ostentatious pillars painted a brilliant white, framing oblongs of soft blue light on the facade.
Two women were cleaning the steps of the Ayuntamiento, and informed Javi that no, sorry, ‘he’ is not here right now. A man of about twenty-five in smart jeans, black shirt, black jacket, black stubble and shades emerged, surveying the scene with the confidence unique to those with the good fortune to have both youth and power on their side. This was Sergio Gómez Reyes, one of the village’s eleven councillors – later, his face jumped out at us from a wall, on the Izquierda Unida (United Left, IU) election posters. ‘If he takes forever to turn up, I’ll call his mobile,’ Sergio said idly, fiddling with his sunglasses.
So we waited, and kicked our heels in the late afternoon warmth, dark clothes soaking up the dying light, as the shade-line crept diagonally up and over the Ayuntamiento. ‘That’s his house over there,’ Sergio explained, and we toyed with the idea of just knocking on his door. A huddle of women in tracksuit bottoms power-walked down the main road in front of us, gossiping away. In fact, the village is so small that twenty minutes later they were back, going in the same direction on their second lap.
It was so bright that, squinting up at the town hall, I didn’t even notice when a man sporting a polyester football jacket and a beard that could topple empires ambled quietly up to the entrance. It was Sánchez Gordillo.
We followed the scourge of Spanish capitalism inside. The lights were off in the foyer – Spanish interiors are often dark, the negative of the brightness outside – but a few posters were still visible on the slightly cracking paintwork: notices of a food bank for the unemployed of neighbouring villages, as well as more commonplace small-town activities like basketball tournaments, photography workshops, and a course on how to use new pesticides. It wasn’t exactly palatial – the ‘benign dictator’ notion perpetuated by more sceptical Spaniards I had met led me to wonder whether the town hall would be adorned with stuffed tigers and comically vulgar paintings.
In the mayor’s office the walls were lime green, and the floors cold grey marble: it was very clean, but not at all tidy. His desk was piled with papers and books, a jacket lay discarded on the chair, and scattered on the floor around the edges of the room were cardboard boxes and ring binders, while gifts honouring the town, mostly ceramics, sat proudly on modest bookcases. Where a picture of King Juan Carlos I might normally hang, there was a framed portrait of Che Guevara, declaiming from a podium. Behind Sánchez Gordillo’s desk, either side of a framed aerial photo of the town, were a trio of flags slumping dormant on their poles: one bearing the green and white of Andalusia, one the totemic purple, red and yellow of the Spanish Second Republic (the one Franco launched a coup against, and destroyed, in 1936), and one the green, white and red tricolour of Marinaleda itself.