The project was emphatically re-endorsed – and the celebrations that followed were appropriately Cuban. ‘On election night, in the middle of the euphoria over the results,’ wrote one blogger, ‘… it was decided by popular acclaim not to work the next day, and continue the celebrations with a great feast, of olives from the land, salmorejo, ham and cold beer.’ This sounds like the end to every Asterix comic – the good side wins out, the village gathers as one, and the only thing missing is Cacofonix, tied to a tree. It’s a pretty unusual response to an election result in the twenty-first century, though.
Until the mid 2000s, Marinaleda was surrounded by what was known as a cinturón de hierro, an ‘iron belt’ of PSOE control in the neighbouring towns of Estepa, Herrera, Écija and El Rubio. These villages were specially funnelled with investment from the Andalusian PSOE, who were determined to eradicate the embarrassing far-left anomaly in their midst. In this task they’ve failed, repeatedly – and yet, Marinaleda remains isolated. Beyond the boundaries of the pueblo, in the Sierra Sur region only Pedrera and Gilena maintain CUT majorities on their councils.
If it really is a utopia, argued one right-wing blogger, how come its principles have not been imported by nearby towns? ‘Something must have failed in Marinaleda’s heavenly oasis. Perhaps it’s not an oasis after all, but an island disconnected from the rest of the world.’ It’s a fair point – it does raise questions that the people of neighbouring villages like El Rubio have never sought to emulate the experiment; but then every pueblo is composed of a unique tradition, personality and politics. It is not in the nature of Andalusian pueblos to follow the same paths as one another; they are more likely to define themselves by their difference from their neighbours than seek to emulate them.
The most recent Andalusian regional elections, in March 2012, provide an interesting insight into the level of pluralism in the village: 1,199 people voted for Sánchez Gordillós IU, 331 for the PSOE, 222 for the PP, and 24 for others – which actually represented a small swing to IU from the PSOE since 2008. Clearly, there are at least 500 people in Marinaleda who vote against the left, against Sánchez Gordillo – and 200 of those vote for the conservative PP. You hear little of their views in the bars, or in the official narrative of the village’s history – and yet, none of them have felt the need to flee for their own safety. Mostly they are the churchgoers, the smart dressers, probably with many friends among the colectivistas, the communists. They normally express their difference in the form of scepticism about their fellow villagers’ relationship with Sánchez Gordillo: I have more than once encountered a tendency to explain away the success of his project with the argument that ‘people are communist in name only, merely because they need work’.
In the assembly hall at the back of the Sindicato bar, the atmosphere is one of genuine democratic inclusion and participation. Maybe it’s not as revolutionary as Sánchez Gordillo would have you believe, an inversion of the pyramid, an unprecedented novelty. After all, town hall meetings around the world, tenants’ associations, even the parochialism of the Neighbourhood Watch, incorporate some of this kind of localist democracy: anyone with the time and interest can turn up, anyone with the confidence to do so can say anything, anyone can get angry without fear of reprisal. It’s not solely Gordillistas who go to the general assemblies, although they are certainly a significant majority – not least because the discussion so often revolves around the development and management of El Humoso. PP or PSOE voters tend to dismiss it as a talking shop for members of the co-operative.
Attempts to reach out to the non-believers in nearby pueblos have not always gone well.
During the first of 2012’s two nationwide general strikes in March, Sánchez Gordillo and the SAT went picketing in neighbouring towns – there would be, of course, little point picketing in Marinaleda itself, since no one would dream of working. During these general strikes, there were firm if invisible picket lines drawn everywhere: working in any context meant you supported Rajoy, the PP, austerity and the establishment. Five minutes down the road from Marinaleda, in El Rubio, the roaming picket discovered that the local secondary school had not been closed down. Only one pupil had shown up, but sixteen teachers were sitting in the staff room.
Sánchez Gordillo was in charge, directing what was theoretically an ‘informational picket’ with his megaphone. He was as ever standing at the front, saying clearly and repeatedly, ‘Don’t break the law, no fighting, no aggression’, calling for persuasion rather than violence in the attempt to shut workplaces down. Meanwhile some of the young men, around thirty in total, jumped the fence at the rear of the school and allegedly proceeded to tour the building classroom by classroom, shouting and banging menacingly on the doors. Later that day, all sixteen teachers filed complaints with the local Guardia Civil in Herrera, and cases are still pending against some SAT members. That same day there were accusations of aggressive picketing, scaring primary-school children in El Rubio, and thefts by those on strike totalling €500 during ‘forced closures’ of some businesses. A couple of times the Guardia were called, but by then the culprits had disappeared.
‘It was impossible to say whether Sánchez Gordillo quietly approved, with a nod and a wink, of what was going on,’ one of Marinaleda’s English residents told me. ‘Because he kept saying quite clearly, “Don’t break the law, no fighting” – but he was still kind of in charge.’ In one of the businesses they occupied, in Casariche, he’d been using his megaphone to say: ‘Have a coffee, but pay for it if you do.’ It’s a delicate ambiguity for him to maintain – though in the eyes of the Spanish press, and presumably the Guardia, Sánchez Gordillo’s culpability was pretty clear. They relished connecting him to the painting of FASCISTA in big letters on the car of a strikebreaking teacher in another nearby village, Badolatosa.
On every demonstration, on every picket, Sánchez Gordillo is always there with the megaphone. He is the human megaphone for the concerns of his people, and he is loved and hated for it in equal measure. The kind of forays into nearby pueblos they carried out during the general strike of March 2012 cut to the heart of why there’s genuine contempt towards Marinaleda from some of its neighbours. Another English marinaleña, Ali, recalls being practically assaulted by a random stranger in a supermarket in Écija, once she found out she’d come from Marinaleda. ‘How can you live there?!’ the woman had shouted. ‘Don’t you know they are communists?!’ Perhaps significantly, when it left the PSOE ‘iron belt’ in 2011, Écija became a PP town.
Of course, that immediate identification of an individual with their pueblo, however historically ingrained in Andalusian culture, does not give an accurate picture of any place. There are PP voters in Marinaleda. There are certainly communists in Écija, for that matter. As we saw in the previous chapter with regard to religious observation and practice in Marinaleda, the story rehashed to visiting journalists by Sánchez Gordillo omits plenty. No pueblo can ever be entirely united or consistent.
When you’re living in an oasis, or a communist theme park, or any small village, really, it can get claustrophobic – and it’s always beneficial to get out for a while, for a bit of perspective. Back up on the balcony of Andalusia, in Estepa, I was glad to have a day or two to breathe the colder, drier air and let the oxygen go to work, processing utopia with the help of the salty local sherries.