The Village Against the World (10 page)

It’s no overstatement to say that the village itself was changed by the hunger strike. They were flattered by the attention, and perhaps even became fascinated by their own reflection. ‘People were busy all morning reading the papers’, wrote Talego, ‘to find new stories in which they
were the protagonists, to feel the almost magical thrill of seeing their friends and acquaintances displayed in pictures all through Andalusia and Spain.’ Talego concluded that in this case at least, the observed object got pretty used to being observed, and rather enjoyed the experience.

From then on, reckons Talego, ‘it was evident that Juan Manuel was someone special, different from the rest of those who were also on strike.’ He’s not wrong; Sánchez Gordillo proved then, and has been proving ever since, that he has a keen eye for the media. But why were the press interested? Why were their readers interested? Why did the coverage succeed, ultimately, in swaying a recalcitrant government? Perhaps because people wanted to hear what was coming from Sánchez Gordillo’s megaphone.

Matters didn’t stop there. In April 1981 there was another hunger strike over the continued lack of funds for community employment – futile work in any case, as Sánchez Gordillo said, which ‘robs us of our dignity’.

This time, 315 workers went on hunger strike. In the first three months of 1981, the unemployed had only received funds to pay for two days of work per week, representing an income of 2,066 pesetas a week to support them and their families. It seems extraordinary now, but in that pre-internet world of communications, Marinaleda was so isolated that Pérez-Beneyto, the civil governor of Seville, thought he could get away with telling the newspapers that the hunger strike was not really happening. It would be a day or so
before anyone would get there and be able to contradict him, which the newspapers duly did. What they reported did not make Pérez-Beneyto look any better.

‘One day, all Andalusia will go up in flames,’ one of Marinaleda’s
jornaleros
told the press, contemplating the mud and weeds in the gutters he was clearing in exchange for his derisory community employment pay.

After a week on hunger strike, more cases of hypoglycemia, fainting and malnutrition were reported by the doctors, and one old woman fell into a semi-comatose state. Hunger in Andalusia, said Sánchez Gordillo, is not merely ‘a ghost running through the village. Hunger is a man of flesh and blood who has to support his children.’ Four hundred people locked themselves into the village Sindicato building, where the assemblies happen now; the weaker ones lay on mattresses. In the town of Teba, also on hunger strike, a man died from complications relating to malnutrition. On this occasion, they secured a guarantee of four-days-per-week community employment for those without work.

But it was not enough. ‘Return our stolen dignity!’ demanded Sánchez Gordillo in a piece for
El País
in 1982, calling for ‘real work’, which could only come from redistribution of the land—not through community employment and stealing chickens.

‘What is needed in Andalusia’, he wrote, ‘is a profound transformation of agricultural structures that generate wealth for a minority of landowners, and poverty,
unemployment and hopelessness for the vast numbers of peasant labourers.’

And so they kept campaigning for changes to those agricultural structures, piece by piece. There were protests over the lack of water – for consumption, but also for irrigation – throughout the early 1980s. They were forced to share a well with the neighbouring towns of Gilena and El Rubio, and responded by occupying municipal buildings and scrawling
¡Queremos agua!
(We want water!) on their election ballots. For twenty-three days they staged a symbolic ‘light strike’, turning off all electric lights from 8 pm, a reference to the limited three or four hours they were allowed access to the well each day.

In fact, there was another well nearby, on the land of the Duke of Infantado. They tried to negotiate with him, hoping that El Rubio and Marinaleda could buy a certain amount of water every month. The Duke turned them down: he needed it to water his olive trees. The level of class hatred in this part of the world is difficult to grasp without these kinds of incidents in mind – it reads like a medieval struggle for basic sustenance, not Western Europe in the 1980s.

As Sánchez Gordillo and a few others locked themselves in the council building once again, the rest of the village voted for a hunger strike. After a few days of this, a solution was found (one suggested by Sánchez Gordillo at the start, but rejected by the regional government), with Marinaleda and El Rubio allowed into a consortium to run
a pipe from a well in Écija. A few months later, a fresh supply was discovered in Estepa and a new well was dug there. Upon its official opening, Sánchez Gordillo addressed the soon-to-be mayor of Seville, Manuel del Valle Arévalo:

‘We all know that soldiers fight, and generals just award themselves medals.’

‘Yes,’ del Valle replied, ‘but you are a general, too.’

The people of Marinaleda fought on, winning one small victory at a time. But after several years they were still desperately poor, landless, and lacking in the autonomy they sought. They continued to involve themselves in every struggle going: farm and building occupations, strikes, lock-ins, marches, rallies. They went on hunger strike again over the arrest of fellow SOC
jornaleros
on demonstrations. They took another hunger strike to the Palacio de Monsalves in Seville, camping out outside the council of the Andalusian government, where some of their number proceeded to faint on the doorstep. Even what little work there was seemed under threat. In January 1983, seventy
marinaleña
women locked themselves in the village Sindicato in protest at the use of machinery in the olive harvest.

Their protests were creative, mobile, and often symbolically connected to the demands in question. In 1984 they occupied the Cordobilla reservoir for a month (eating, sleeping and holding assemblies there) to call for the creation of a new dam which they said would irrigate 15,000 hectares of land in the Sierra Sur. Others occupied the
Cañada Honda hill near Gilena, to call for its reforestation with fruit-bearing trees.

They continued to incur the wrath of the political elites. When Prime Minister Felipe González, the supposedly socialist leader of the PSOE,
^**
said in September 1983 that the farm labourers of Andalusia were using their community employment payments to buy cars, 600
marínatenos
locked themselves in the Casa de Cultura in protest and began another hunger strike. The subsequent pattern followed a familiar path – silence from the politicians, followed by catcalls from Sánchez Gordillo via the press, escalation of the propaganda war, and finally establishment capitulation. González was embarrassed into atoning for his jibe by calling Sánchez Gordillo on the phone, to hear him out. And such was the media attention that when Sánchez Gordillo sent him a pilot plan for employment across Andalusia, González was compelled to announce he had read and considered it.

Sánchez Gordillo quickly became a media favourite; they described his ‘almost messianic gestures’, his trademark half-open shirt and prophet’s beard, and were clearly impressed by his youth, his persistence and his unwavering ability to get up the noses of the authorities in new and newsworthy ways. He was ‘perhaps the most charismatic character in the Andalusian countryside’, one commentator wrote in 1983.

*   *   *

In 1985, SOC labourers from Marinaleda and the nearby
pueblos
of Gilena and Utrera started to occupy the lands of the Duke of Infantado. He was four times over a
Grande de España
, a Spanish grandee, one of the most high-ranking members of the nobility, and owned 17,000 hectares in Andalusia. While the
jornaleros
engaged in cat-and-mouse occupations of the fields, chased off by the Guardia, Sánchez Gordillo was citing two feasibility studies which supported his recommendations for a dam of the Genil River that would allow the irrigation of 6,000 hectares and an expropriation of El Humoso’s 1,200 hectares which would provide 250 families with jobs. Much was made of the oft-quoted statistic that 50 per cent of land in Andalusia was owned by 2 per cent of the families. Unemployment was 65 per cent in Marinaleda at the time.

‘Why did you choose the Duke of Infantado’s land specifically, and not someone else’s?’ my American friend Paulette asked Sánchez Gordillo when we met him in 2012. It’s a fair question. If you’re establishing micro-communism, there are bound to be imperfections in the levelling-out process, since by definition only a tiny part of the country is going to be communised; it seems a bit arbitrary. ‘We chose his land because he was the one who had the most!’ Sánchez Gordillo replied bluntly. There’s something unscientific and pragmatic about this attitude which is quite refreshing.

The surviving Super-8 footage of the marches to occupy the Duke of Infantado’s land now look so hallowed, so
other-worldly. Sepia is already naturally the colour of the earth around Marinaleda, and the grainy, flickering images seem to plunge the period much further back into the past. The people of Marinaleda wound their way the ten miles from the village to El Humoso, in a stream four or five people wide and several hundred long. The most striking difference in the way they looked back then is that their shirts were plainer, in the prelapsarian simplicity of life before t-shirts with brands and pictures and symbols. Their white cotton clothes are yellowed by the old film, topped with olive or brown berets, the women in blue floaty dresses holding children and stirring great cauldrons of potato stew, wearing white headscarves against the scorching summer sun.

The flags they carried then were the Andalusian tricolour or an unadorned red flag. There is no Second Republic flag, and no custom-made utopia flag of Marinaleda yet: the badge of resistance was simply that of regional identity, or communism. Alongside the throng walks a younger, slimmer Sánchez Gordillo, his hair and beard black, still only in his early thirties, marshalling the marching column, rousing the troops with his megaphone, just as he does now. Back then, many were not confident of success – but in a sense they had little option but to persevere, and were continuously chivvied by the extraordinary persistence of the project and of its leader. ‘I believe that over time’, Sánchez Gordillo recalled recently, ‘the small victories made people believe it was possible.’

Ever-present in that old footage are the cars of the Guardia Civil, who made sure to impede the villagers however they could. ‘Arrested twice in 24 hours’, read the front page of the now defunct
Diario 16
newspaper, under a photograph of a
marinaleña
in a headscarf, shielding her apparently shamed face from the camera. The regional government in Seville would keep sending orders for their eviction, but sometimes it took months to get the court orders – so the
marinaleños
stayed for months, eating and sleeping in makeshift shelters. They were not, in fact, disrupting anything much, in the sense that the land was not being used for anything at all – precisely their complaint. They were idle and the land was idle: the resolution was obvious. On this 1,200-hectare estate the only things growing, for miles in every direction, were wheat and sunflowers – it required only three or four caretakers to tend to it.

The Irish-Italian writer Michael Jacobs came across one of the farm occupations while researching his book
Andalusia
:

On the long drive up to the
cortijo
I passed a group of villagers carrying hoes and rakes, the women dressed in black. They could have been straight out of a communist poster of the 1930s and this impression was reinforced by the political badges they were all wearing. In the middle of all this prowled the leonine and instantly recognisable figure of Sánchez Gordillo, wearing a
Tolstoyan suit and a red sash. He addressed me in a slow solemn voice with no trace of a smile. I could not help feeling, confronted by such a manner and appearance, that I was in the presence of one of the Messianic figures who toured the Andalusian countryside in the nineteenth century.

It was land reform from below, not above, delivered by direct action, and always pacifist: their rule was to leave when evicted (though this did not prevent countless lawsuits for trespassing, roadblocks and other related incidents). They fell into a routine whereby the Guardia Civil would evict them every day at the same time, around 5 or 6 pm, when they would go peacefully and walk back to the village. The following morning they would walk the ten miles back again, flags held high. In the summer of 1985, in the blistering heat, they made the journey every day for a month – taking only Sunday off. Astonishingly, they even developed some cordial relationships with their lifelong enemies in the gendarmerie, such was the familiarity of the routine both sides fell into. Things were not always so smooth – some of the
marinaleños
were arrested and imprisoned (leading to more hunger strikes in sympathy), and in one incident in 1985, a shot was fired at an Andalusian flag flying above the heads of the occupiers: ‘Fired by the same people who once did the same against Blas Infante, and with the same intention,’ as Gordillo put it, displaying the shell casing for the photographers.

They carried out over 100 occupations of El Humoso during the 1980s, at one point camping in the property for ninety days and nights. As the 1992 Seville Universal Exposition approached, and the official rhetoric of civic excitement and pride intensified, Sánchez Gordillo was able to use his platform to contrast the hype ahead of the Expo with the ongoing deprivation in the Andalusian countryside, writing in 1989:

This human disaster occurs when all the official grandiloquence teaches us 1992 will be the year that paradise begins – although it has not yet been clarified who for. 1992 is set before us as the new myth, in the hope we forget the ordeal we have been suffering. Indices of unemployment, emigration, illiteracy, and marginalisation of all kinds are higher and sadder here than anywhere in Europe.