Science Talk

Dan Clore · Guest

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Meeting Spain's last anarchist
By Alfonso Daniels
San Buenaventura, Bolivia

Hours after flying on a rickety 19-seater propeller plane and landing on
a dirt strip, you get to the village of San Buenaventura in the heart of
the Bolivian Amazon.

Here, in a simple one-storey brick house next to a row of wooden shacks,
is the home of Antonio Garcia Baron.

He is the only survivor still alive of the anarchist Durruti column
which held Francoist forces at bay in Madrid during the Spanish Civil
War (1936-1939) and the founder of an anarchist community in the heart
of the jungle.

Mr Baron, 87, was wearing a hat and heavy dark glasses. He later
explained that they were to protect his eyes, which were damaged when he
drank a cup of coffee containing poison nine years ago.

It was, he said, the last of more than 100 attempts on his life, which
began in Paris, where he moved in 1945 after five years in the
Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp, and continued in Bolivia, his home
since the early 1950s.

Stateless

He was keen to share his views on 20th Century Spanish history with a
wider audience.

<sidebar>

THE DURRUTI COLUMN

Column of anarchist fighters during Spanish Civil War
Led by Buenaventura Durruti until his death fighting Franco's forces on
outskirts of Madrid in November 1936

After defeat of Republican forces in 1939, many surviving members fled
to France. Many interned in French prison camps.

After Nazis invaded, many imprisoned in concentration camps, others
joined resistance

</sidebar>

"The Spanish press has covered up that the (Catholic) Church
masterminded the death of two million Republicans during the civil war,
not one million as they maintain," Mr Baron said before launching into
one of his many anecdotes.

"I told Himmler (the head of the Nazi SS) when he visited the Mauthausen
quarry on 27 April, 1941, what a great couple the (Nazis) made with the
Church.

"He replied that it was true, but that after the war I would see all the
cardinals with the Pope marching there, pointing at the chimney of the
crematorium."

On the walls of Mr Baron's house is a picture of him taken in the camp.
Next to it is a blue triangle with the number 3422 and letter S inside,
marking the prisoners considered stateless.

"Spain took away my nationality when I entered Mauthausen, they wanted
the Nazis to exterminate us in silence. The Spanish government has
offered to return my nationality but why should I request something that
was stolen from me and 150,000 others?" he said angrily.

Mr Baron arrived in Bolivia on the advice of his friend, the French
anarchist writer Gaston Leval.

"I asked him for a sparsely populated place, without services like water
and electricity, where people lived like 100 years ago -- because where
you have civilisation you'll find priests."

Some 400 people, mostly Guarani Indians, lived there at the time, but in
fact also a German priest.

"He was a tough nut to crack. He learnt of my arrival and told everyone
that I was a criminal. They fled and made the sign of the cross whenever
they saw me, but two months later I started speaking and they realised I
was a good person, so it backfired on him."

Convinced that the priest still spied on him, a few years later he
decided to leave and create a mini-anarchist state in the middle of the
jungle, 60km (37 miles) and three hours by boat from San Buenaventura
along the Quiquibey River.

With him was his Bolivian wife Irma, now 71.

They raised chicken, ducks and pigs and grew corn and rice which they
took twice a year to the village in exchange for other products, always
rejecting money.

Dunkirk

Life was tough and a few years ago Mr Baron lost his right hand while
hunting a jaguar.

For the first five years, until they began having children, they were
alone. Later a group of some 30 nomadic Indians arrived and decided to
stay, hunting and fishing for a living, also never using money.

"We enjoyed freedom in all of its senses, no-one asked us for anything
or told us not to do this or that," he recounted as his wife smiled,
sitting in a chair at the back of the room.

Recently they moved back to the village for health reasons and to be
closer to their children. They live with a daughter, 47, while their
other three children, Violeta, 52, Iris, 31, and 27-year-old Marco
Antonio work in Spain.

They also share the few simple rooms arranged around an internal patio
with three Cuban doctors who are part of a contingent sent to help
provide medical care in Bolivia.

The hours passed and it was time to take the small plane back to La Paz
before the torrential rain isolated the area again.

Only then, as time was running out, did Mr Baron begin speaking in
detail about Mauthausen and the war -- as if wishing to fulfil a promise
to fallen comrades.

How the Nazis threw prisoners from a cliff, how some of them clung to
the mesh wire to avoid their inevitable death, how the Jews were
targeted for harsh treatment and did not survive long.

His memory also took him to Dunkirk where he had arrived in 1940, before
he was caught and imprisoned in Mauthausen.

"I arrived in the morning but the British fleet was some 6km from the
coast. I asked a young English soldier if it would return.

"I saw that he was eating with a spoon in one hand and firing an
anti-aircraft gun with the other," he laughed.

"'Eat if you wish', I told him. 'Do you know how to use it?' he asked
since I didn't have military uniform and was very young.

"'Don't worry,' I said. I grabbed the gun and shot down two planes. He
was dumbstruck.

"I'll never forget the determination of the British fighting stranded on
the beach."

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"