The Impostor
Page 20
But there is something more, and perhaps more important. The transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain was basically a muddle, a theoretical impossibility that became a practical reality largely thanks to chance, the conciliatory nature of the majority, and the unifying talent of a few, most notably Adolfo Suárez, the fundamental architect of the change, who was able to take advantage of the confusion to get his own way, which meant putting himself forward as prime minister, but also destroying the Franco regime and building a democracy. Within the sprawling chaos of political change, the re-creation of the C.N.T. was perhaps an even greater upheaval. On the one hand, after decades of dictatorship, the early years of democracy saw an explosion in libertarianism and a fashion for anarchism and the counter-culture, particularly among the young, influenced by the post-’68 anti-authoritarian movements of the West: in the eye of this storm, Marco continued to be part of the majority. On the other hand, the C.N.T., having been stripped and gutted and all but destroyed by Franco, now threw open its doors to fill the void, which quickly turned it into a curious jumble of multifarious inclinations, collectives and ideologies; the aforementioned José Ribas lists them as follows: “Ecologists, university students, homosexuals, feminists, cooperativists, anti-psychiatric collectives, prisoners’ groups (C.O.P.E.L., the Committee of Spanish Prisoners in Struggle), communards […], members of F.A.I. (Iberian Anarchist Federation), members of councils, anarcho-communists, libertarian communists, extremists, radicals more or less advocating violence, dropouts, Trotskyites, members of the Spanish Revolutionary Workers Party, the Organisation of the Communist Left, the Christian Liberation Movement, Leninist infiltrators, revolutionary spontaneists, naturists, and even disguised Christians.” Anyone missing from this list? Yes: there is no mention of police officers or informers, who were so numerous they could have easily created their own internal faction. Enough said. The fact remains that this utter chaos was the perfect terrain for opportunists, people with an insatiable need to be in the limelight, and that in the midst of the colossal double-muddle of political transition and the reconstruction of the C.N.T., no-one was more likely to flourish than a professional conman, a shameless charlatan and schemer like Marco, a past master of creating confusion and navigating within it.
And that is what he did. And, like Adolfo Suárez, he could get his own way, getting himself noticed but also transforming the C.N.T. into what some people in 1977 hoped (or feared) it might once again become after forty years: the largest union in the country. This was not easy to achieve. The traditional philosophy of Spanish anarchism was obsolete, its long-standing theoretical apolitical stance was anachronistic and its direct action strategy woefully inefficient, especially compared to the other more modern and skilled left-wing unions. But if the C.N.T. could adapt its approach and its theories to the realities of the country and could resolve the contradictions tearing it apart, adding the lure and the potential of the youthful counter-culture movement to the prestigious legend of the old union, who knows what might happen; ultimately, it would be much more difficult to move from dictatorship to democracy in the space of a year, yet Suárez achieved this. To say nothing of the fact that, at least at the beginning of political transition, the government didn’t seem to mind the reappearance of the C.N.T.; on the contrary, as far as they were concerned, the anarchist union would serve as a counterbalance to the fearsome power of the large left-wing unions, particularly the communist-leaning Workers’ Commissions, but also the socialist-leaning U.G.T. Whatever the case, in the second half of the Seventies, many supporters of anarchism believed that if anyone could unite the union, reconcile its disagreements and get it in shape, that man was Enric Marco; for his part, Marco made the most of this belief, and of the glorious confusion that reigned, to burst into the limelight as leader of the C.N.T.
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Perhaps the first point at which people decided that Marco was the ideal candidate to lead the union was on July 2, 1977, eighteen months after the inaugural meeting in Sant Medir, six weeks after the legalisation of the C.N.T. and just over a fortnight after the first free democratic elections. By now, Marco was secretary general of the Catalonia chapter of the C.N.T.; by now, he had changed his name: he was no longer Enrique Marco—as he had been for most of his life—or Enrique Durruti—as his apprentice mechanics at Peirós’ garage called him, or as he told them he was called—nor Enric Batlle—as Salsas, Boada and their friends called him, or as he told them he was called—he was Enrique Marcos. He had changed his name so that no-one would confuse him with Enrique Marco Nadal, an elderly libertarian leader and a notable resistant against the Franco regime who, with a number of other left-wing union leaders in the early Sixties, had made a pact with the dictatorship and was ostracised by his comrades as a collaborationist (whereas, in the early twenty-first century, when Marco Nadal was dead and people had forgotten his alleged collaboration but not his unquestionable anti-Franco militancy, Marco made no attempt to avoid this confusion; rather the reverse). July 2 was the first meeting of the C.N.T. since its legalisation, by far the largest since the Civil War. It was a Saturday afternoon, and more than one hundred thousand men and women gathered in Monjuic park in Barcelona. On YouTube, you can watch a short but eloquent film of the event.
The first minutes of the film capture the celebratory atmosphere of vindication and offer a panorama of the vast crowds that attended; in the background you can hear “A las barricadas,” the anthem of the C.N.T. Then the music stops and the meeting itself begins, with shots of the speakers and the crowd listening and cheering. Suddenly, Marco appears, sitting on the speakers’ platform, and from that moment, his starring role in the film never falters: he chairs the meeting, making speeches, chanting slogans and getting the audience to chant with him (“Sí, sí, libertad; sí, sí, libertad; amnistía total”), he introduces the other speakers, he is constantly moving around the stage, chatting to comrades, standing next to or behind them, gripped by a feverish enthusiasm.
The slogans are strange. Years after Marco’s scandal broke and our man became the great impostor and the great pariah, a historian of the anarchist movement noted that the Spanish libertarian tradition did not involve chanting slogans, and Marco’s behaviour at the Montjuic meeting should have marked him out as an interloper who didn’t understand the ethos of anarchism. I’m not convinced. Although it’s true that the anarchist tradition did not involve slogans, and therefore it’s possible that the chanting of the crowds offended the ears of the veteran activists and the exiled leaders, for the young activists, by far the majority, who knew nothing or very little about the anarchist tradition and were used to chanting such slogans on protest marches against the dictatorship, Marco’s gesture was unlikely to ring false. At worst (or at best), both young and old might have seen it as a way of bringing historic anarchism into the present, updating the form without betraying its spirit.
In fact, this is what many of the activists thought about Marco’s performance that day; and not just the young anarchists, but members of the communist and socialist unions who had come to Montjuic more out of curiosity than any ideological affinity. Many of them also felt that the exiled leaders surrounding Marco on the stage looked like mummies or zombies, resurrecting ancient heroes thundering preposterous Civil War speeches. José Pierats, the editor of Solidaridad Obrera, the official organ of the C.N.T., seemingly unaware that a large majority of the Catalan people and the entire anti-Franco movement had long been demanding autonomous status for Catalonia, mocked Catalan aspirations for self-government before demanding “free municipalities,” a concept no-one really understood. For her part, Federica Montseny, eternal embodiment of libertarian orthodoxy, and de facto leader (if not de jure proprietor) of the C.N.T., was oblivious or pretended to be oblivious to the jubilation of the vast majority of Spanish people who, only two weeks earlier, had had the opportunity to vote in free elections after forty years of dictatorship. She referred
to the elections only to disparage the money it had cost to organise them and to say that “the price per kilo for a member of parliament seems very high,” a statement theoretically compatible with her radical apolitical stance but, in practice, opportunistic-seeming, even cynical, at least to her more circumspect colleagues; after all, “the Lioness”—as she was known—had taken a position with the Ministry of Health of the Second Republic during the Civil War. In contrast to these bombastic speeches, aloof to everyday concerns and beholden to an archaic ideology, and whose language, tone and manner hailed from a bygone age, Marco’s speech seemed to many of the young and the not-so-young activists in attendance to be clear, forceful, candid, effective, firmly rooted in reality.
Less than a year later, Marco would catapult to the position of secretary general of the C.N.T. for all of Spain. Although he always tried to get along with the various factions in the union, from the start he relied on the most reasonable, competent and ambitious sector, the young domestic anarcho-syndicalists, who, as it turned out, were those who respected him and perhaps most needed him. For this reason, the policies in his mandate were also fairly reasonable, though not his manner of implementing them. Despite his activism in the C.N.T. as a teenager, Marco didn’t have the first idea how a union worked or how to improve its organisation; and though he had a vague and very general notion of its goals, he didn’t know how these might be achieved or how he should proceed. However, though Marco might have been ignorant, he wasn’t stupid and so he employed two complementary strategies to disguise this yawning gap in his knowledge. The first was to understate; the second, to exaggerate. On the union committee, Marco was surrounded by intellectuals and ideologues, or those who claimed or aspired to be, and therefore he never claimed to be an intellectual or an ideologue but a man of action. He barely contributed to discussions about ideas and strategies; he carefully and shrewdly listened to everyone waiting until, through conviction or from sheer exhaustion, all the positions had been laid out and agreement had been reached, at which point, with his gift for oratory and his authority as secretary general, he would simply restate the agreed position and ratify the decision. In this way, not only did he learn from the discussion and hide the fact that he held no serious position on anything, or almost anything, that his only goal was his desire to continue in his current role or secure a better one; it also won him the admiration of his fellow members, particularly the intellectuals and the ideologues, who interpreted his reluctance to contribute to the debates as a sign of humble diffidence of a simple worker hardened by resistance to the dictatorship, and more especially as proof of his innate perspicacity that led him to rise above the debate, and adopt the role of arbiter, thereby facilitating outcomes that were acceptable to all.
This was the first concealment tactic. The second was no less sophisticated, though it was more fitting to his temperament; in particular it played to his reputation as a man of action, since it involved launching himself wholeheartedly into the fray. Marco never stopped: in addition to continuing his work at the garage and studying at the university, Marco went everywhere as secretary general of the union, talked to everyone, attended every meeting, party, commemoration and funeral, ensured he was at the forefront of every struggle, every strike, every demonstration and if necessary, of every confrontation with the police or the authorities. This unthinking restlessness made it difficult, if not impossible, to work with him; it also made his own work impossible, or very difficult: rather than solving problems, he postponed them, or transformed them into different problems, such that they continued to mount up in an ever growing chaos. Marco also used the dust clouds raised by his constant hyperactivity to conceal his political ineptitude and, more importantly, to ensure he was in the limelight, gradually becoming famous, indeed a celebrity in the union, a man people stopped in the street, someone everyone wanted to talk to, everyone respected for his entirely genuine fight for the rights and the dignity of workers, and more especially for his past as an indefatigable Republican hero and an opponent of the Franco regime, a past that was fictitious, or at the very least heavily embroidered, but one that Marco proudly wore like a sergeant’s stripes, a military medal, or a saint’s halo, as the ultimate source of authority, one that he only flaunted when it was absolutely necessary and when no-one could contradict or challenge it. (On the other hand, he barely mentioned his no-less-fictitious past as a prisoner of Flossenbürg: in part, because he had only just begun to construct it, but mostly because it was unlikely to be useful or afford him any influence over his comrades. It should be remembered that, at the time, even the left-wing did not consider the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Nazi camps relevant to Spanish history.) Marco was more than happy, he was exultant. Not only had he begun a new life, but this new life was better than he could ever have imagined. And although his ruse meant that he had to present himself to the media as a simple mechanic—“To aspire to something more would feel like hogging the limelight, something I would find embarrassing,” he declared in an interview with the weekly magazine Por Favor in 1978—he knew that he was much more than that: by now, he was giving speeches to rapt crowds, he was a respected and admired leader, he was the promising secretary general of one of the largest unions in the country, he had won the heart of the young, beautiful, educated woman he loved and had gone to live with her in Sant Cugat, and they had just had their first daughter, Elizabeth (the second, Ona, would be born six years later, in 1984). What more could he wish for?
In early 1978, as the number of those joining continued to grow at the same dizzying rate it had since the C.N.T. was legalised, many people believed that it would become the second or third largest union in the country; it’s quite possible that many, including Marco, still thought so in mid-April when, at a meeting in Madrid, our man was elected secretary general of the C.N.T. throughout Spain. After all, the union seemed to have united around a sensible programme of reforms and around its new leader, about whom Juan Gómez Casas—outgoing secretary general and later a bitter enemy of Marco—declared was “dynamism personified, he is brave and intelligent and, in short, he is the man this organisation needed.” Marco had reached the summit, and so had the C.N.T. From there, it was downhill for both.
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The C.N.T.’s self-destruction didn’t come about because of the contradictions within it, but because of mistakes it made which made those same contradictions irreconcilable. The first, and perhaps the most important, was a miscalculation. In 1977, in the midst of the euphoria surrounding the rise of the union, the young anarcho-syndicalists who supported Marco proposed arranging a conference that would redefine the organisation, correct the anachronisms and the inefficiency of many of its approaches, adapting them to the modern world; it was a perfectly reasonable idea, especially considering that the last congress had taken place in 1936. But among the talking points, the young anarcho-syndicalists made the rash (or naive) mistake of including a review of the role played by the exiled leaders during the forty years of the Franco regime, and insisting that Federica Montseny personally write a report explaining what had happened during this period: Marco and his friends did not anticipate that the exiled veterans would take the proposal as they did: as a slap in the face, a threat or a snub by a bunch of ungrateful brats who, after the veterans had heroically held aloft the banner of freedom during the brutal years of the dictatorship, presumed to judge their behaviour and to settle scores. This tactical error unleashed a fury within the organisation.