The Village Against the World (19 page)

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.

Among the
estepeños
I found a general sense of pride in their local curiosity down in the valley, but this pride was often tinged with scepticism. There is, some older
estepeños
thought, a gap between the village’s ideal and its reality. ‘The mayor is not perfect,’ they kept saying; ‘it is not perfect.’ One portly, well-read businessman in comfortable middle age, with a warm, solid handshake, was especially keen to talk to me (anonymously) about Marinaleda. He was amused and gratified that I had come such a long way to visit the Sierra Sur, and regarded Sánchez Gordillo with heavily caveated admiration – but admiration nonetheless. He showed me Félix Talego’s book, which, like several local history buffs I’d met, he had tracked down despite it being an obscure academic tome unknown even to ruthlessly thorough websites like Amazon.

‘
Si la trabajas con tus manos y la riegas con tu sudor, tuya es la tierra, trabajador
’, he recited, dusting off a part of his encyclopaedic brain and quoting Sánchez Gordillo’s 1980 book. The phrase translates somewhat less poetically as ‘If you work it with your hands and water it with your sweat, the land is yours, worker’ – but it is the Marinaleda philosophy encapsulated. After Franco’s death, the businessman told me, the Spanish people felt lost, suddenly deprived of a patriarch. It was a scary, fractious time, and while most of
Spain ‘ran around like a headless chicken’, Sánchez Gordillo captivated the working class with declamations like the one above. That makes him sound a bit like a cynical opportunist, I said – is that how you see him? ‘No, don’t misunderstand me, I think the town is based on noble, wonderful ideals. But the reality is not so perfect.’

Isn’t it a bit unreasonable to expect it to be perfect? Absolutely, he said, they shouldn’t be attacked for imperfection; things are hardly perfect in Estepa, either. ‘It’s just that you shouldn’t believe everything Sánchez Gordillo says. When someone quarrels with him, it becomes difficult for that person to continue to live in Marinaleda.’ There are of course no gulags, no Stasi-style holding cells, no show trials, but it becomes ‘difficult’ to live there. People gossip, he explained, and make your life hard in petty little ways. Perhaps that’s actually a small-town difficulty, rather than an ideological one? In
pueblos
of that size, when people talk, everyone talks. Sure, he said: ostracism and gossip are more of a danger than anything else – they are the only danger, in fact.

I heard the same innuendoes a few times from
estepeños
, that opposing the mayor can lead to ‘problems’. One whom I met had more than just innuendo and insinuations – she had a tip-off about two Marinaleda ‘exiles’ living in Estepa. I took some details, made some phone calls, and eventually Javi helped me find the address of this allegedly dissident man and his wife. On a deathly quiet residential street in mid-afternoon, cobbles tumbling down the valley beneath
us, we rang the doorbell, and a woman answered. She greeted us warmly – oh, an Englishman! – but when we explained our purpose, and mentioned the M-word, she retreated into the doorway a little.

Careless talk doesn’t cost lives out here, but it can cost friendships. In the name of prudence, I stood at a distance, as Javi made earnest assurances that we would maintain her and her husband’s anonymity, that I could be trusted. ‘I’ll take your number in case my husband is willing to speak to you when he gets in,’ she said, with a look that seemed to add: ‘and he definitely, definitely won’t.’

As we walked away from the house, Javi tried to account for this reluctance to speak. There is an expression in Spain, he told me, ‘
no querer remover la mierda
’; you don’t want to stir up the shit, because it smells worse. You let the bad things in your past lie dormant. It’s a phrase which sums up a lot about a nation which has spent three decades under theoretical observance of an official ‘pact of forgetting’ about their civil war and fascist dictatorship. Now, at last, some of the mass graves of those killed by Franco are being dug up, and the remains given proper burials. In left-wing communities like Marinaleda, they haven’t forgotten so easily: one programme on the radio station is called
Without Memory, There Is no History
.

There is of course no equivalence here, between a Spanish elite that connived in covering up the mass murder and torture of Franco’s White Terror, and a village mayor who has simplified the narrative of his people’s struggle a
little, and perhaps overlooked the odd act of intimidation carried out by comrades. But while the Gordillistas rightly chide the nation around it for shrinking away from awkward questions about recent Spanish history, it’s a shame that some of the village’s own imperfections are brushed under the carpet.

Unsurprisingly, the exile never called me back.

7
The Village Against the Crisis

March 2013: driving west along the Andalusian coast road, from Malaga towards Jerez, the deep, layered, tree-lined hills facing the sea are disfigured by the marks of what the locals call the ‘brick crisis’. For once, the Costa del Sol looks like it’s never seen the
sol
in its life: swathed in dense fog, and the kind of rain that is so light yet so all-pervasive you’re not sure if it’s mist, precipitation, or sea-spray. Under portentous slate-grey skies, the hills have an almost mystical aspect. Here and there, concrete construction frames are cut arbitrarily into the rock. Some of these housing projects are barely started, just Meccano frames, steel girders slowly breaking out in rust. There are others which are further along the construction process: whole rows of houses, painted, rooved, but still without windows. Some are finished, and empty.