In London, I told him, big-state social democracy on the post-war model was increasingly seen as finished. The centre-left approach, of a compromise with capitalism, was kaput: apart from anything else, if someone won’t meet you halfway, it’s not a compromise anymore. Just like 15-M, the people at Occupy London and Occupy Wall Street were looking for alternative models wherever they could find them, however obscure the location. In fact, I explained, that’s kind of what brought me here. He nodded sympathetically.
‘People no longer care if it’s this party or another party, PP or PSOE; they want to change the system to one that isn’t capitalistic, with unions, parties and organisations that promote a different system, with human beings at the core. People are considered merchandise: while they’re profitable, they’re used, and when they’re no longer profitable, they’re discarded. We have to change these cruel and inhuman values. I have dedicated my entire life to this.’
He wrote ‘PP’ and ‘PSOE’ on the scrap paper in front of him, drew a circle around each, then one bigger circle around the outside. Stabbing the edge of this impromptu Venn diagram with the point of the pencil, he said simply: ‘It’s all capitalism.’
A few months later, Sánchez Gordillo had his contempt for ‘the capitalist parties’ and his sense of realpolitik tested, when he was unexpectedly given the chance to take some small parliamentary advantage of the crisis. Following the general election at the end of 2011, March 2012 saw elections to the regional parliament in Seville: the PP were the largest party by a sliver but did not win a majority, and the prospect of a PSOE–IU coalition emerged. During the weeks of coalition talks, Sánchez Gordillo was being widely mentioned as a possible minister in a hypothetical PSOE–IU government – something which would have required him to abandon the mayoralty, and abandon Marinaleda both politically and geographically. He had been a deputy while still living in the village, but he couldn’t be a minister and not move to Seville.
A compromise with the PSOE would have brought Sánchez Gordillo a great deal more power and influence, a bigger bully pulpit, and a voice in policy-making across Andalusia. Instead, he launched a revolt.
The PSOE, he announced, were a party without principle – and if they went into coalition with this ‘capitalist’ party, IU would be, too. ‘We cannot bring ourselves closer to the sinking ship’, Sánchez Gordillo told El Mundo, and warned in the strongest possible language that such a coalition would mean legitimising the PSOE and ushering in austerity-lite, while sending the left ‘to hell’ as a stooge of the capitalist parties. As it happened, IU split in two, the party leadership made a pact with the PSOE, and Sánchez Gordillo’s warnings about more austerity and cuts were almost immediately vindicated. It was an articulation of another of his maxims: if you can’t win the fight, at least keep faith with your principles.
The first time we met, I’d noticed how his gesticulations grew increasingly theatrical and effusive, and his trilled rrrr’s ever faster, ever raspier, the bigger the issues and ideas became. He was quite capable of working himself up into a revolutionary tumult, never mind anyone else. At the time I wondered if he was being wasted on such a small stage, as the mayor of a village of 2,700 people. What with his long-proven penchant for headline-grabbing actions, not to mention the three-hour declamations on Marinaleda TV, I wondered whether he, too, hankered for a bigger platform. Whether he wanted it or not, by August 2012, he would have it.
Marinaleda had already proven, as far back as 1980, that the month of August was optimal for seizing the national media narrative in the name of the people. In 2012, they repeated the performance. With members of SAT from other villages – including Sánchez Gordillo’s partner in crime, the union’s national spokesman, Diego Cañamero – they occupied land belonging to the Ministry of Defence, a farm called Las Turquillas. This was, they argued, land in the public domain that did not serve the public. Over 200 jornaleros camped out for eighteen days, until violently evicted by the Guardia, and used the media attention to call for the land to be cultivated and given over to the unemployed.
It was the first time they had united their prelapsarian belief, that ‘the land belongs to those who work it’, with the new misery of the financial crisis. They were occupying, Sánchez Gordillo told El Mundo, on behalf of ’6 million unemployed, 12 million poor people, 1.7 million families with all members unemployed, and 30 per cent of Andalusian families living below the poverty line’. The land’s sole purpose, he explained, was to accrue EU subsidies for the Ministry of Defence, like the latifundios belonging to the aristocrats of the House of Alba and Infantado. Neither sets of subsidies were putting any bread on the tables of Andalusian jornaleros.
While the land was occupied, tents erected, and cooking rotas put into practice, and they had the press’s attention, SAT moved onto the next stage of their plan. It was to be an ingenious escalation.
Their targets were two major chain-store supermarkets in Andalusia, one a Carrefour in Arcos de la Frontera, near Cadiz, the other a branch of Mercadona in Écija, down the road from Marinaleda. Several hundred SAT activists showed up at each of the two supermarkets, and while the majority rallied outside, a small group went in, filled ten or so carts with basic foodstuffs – oil, sugar, chickpeas, rice, pasta, milk, biscuits and vegetables – and left without paying. There were some scuffles with a few of the supermarket employees, but in both cases, they emerged with the ‘expropriated’ goods to cheers from the rest of the crowd. The food was then donated to the Corrala Utopía in Seville, a series of apartment blocks occupied (with the help of the local 15-M) by homeless families evicted by their banks, and to civic centres in Cadiz, where it would be passed on to the unemployed. The message was impossible to misread: under capitalism – under la crisis – major supermarket chains make hundreds of millions of euros in profit for their shareholders from selling food, while hundreds of thousands around them go hungry.
It was both spontaneous and shocking, a deliberate and ostentatious act of Robin Hood–style redistribution; and yet it was well planned enough that they had a professional agency photographer and film crew inside the supermarkets with them, to get footage of the SAT activists loading up the trolleys. These photos, and pictures of Sánchez Gordillo declaiming on his megaphone outside Mercadona, swept the story onto the Spanish front pages, to the top slot in the evening news, and, via Reuters and the international news wires, across the world – not only in Europe and America, but India, Iran, Australia and China. ‘We want to expropriate the expropriators,’ Sánchez Gordillo declared. ‘By that we mean the landlords, banks and big supermarkets, which are making money from the economic crisis.’