The Village Against the World

by Dan Hancox

  One thing stood out about these bleak messages about the lack of money coming into the village, something I first noticed at a general assembly in December 2012: the messages weren’t being delivered by Sánchez Gordillo. He wasn’t in the Sindicato that evening, leading the discussion, as he would have been normally, and he was absent again when the peonadas were discussed at further general assemblies in January. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Sánchez Gordillo’s unusually demure presence, buried in the crowd in Seville that day, was one of his first and last public appearances for months.

  Spain is a country that lives to gossip, and the Spanish press and TV had fixated on the Robin Hood mayor all summer – yet they had not yet realised anything untoward was going on with him. It was only when I arrived back in Marinaleda that titbits of information slowly started leaking out of the tightly-bound social networks of the pueblo. The first thing I heard was from someone in Palo Palo, who said when I showed them Sánchez Gordillo’s book that they’d heard el alcalde was a bit unwell, but were not sure what the problem was. Is that why he didn’t seem to be chairing the general assemblies then? I asked León. ‘He’s not doing them for the moment, no,’ León said curtly.

  The next day, another inglesa arrived in the village, a socialist documentary-maker from London called Uzma. She had asked Gloria, a CUT colleague of Sánchez Gordillo’s on the village council, about getting an interview with the mayor, and was told ‘he’s very stressed at the moment’. The mayor’s not really working right now, Gloria explained, and the other councillors are sharing his workload among themselves. ‘But what about an interview?’ Uzma pressed. She was told to try texting him, and with luck, if he was in the right mood, he might decide to talk to her. He wasn’t answering calls or emails. So what about that march to Seville? ‘He still does a few small engagements when he feels up to it.’

  I put the same questions to Sergio, the youngest Marinaleda councillor, and got the same answers. Sánchez Gordillo was a little unwell. He was on indefinite leave – but I’m sure he’ll be back soon, they kept saying. I came to realise this reassurance was given out of hope, rather than any knowledge about his predicament. I felt sorry for them: they were protecting him, but without really understanding what the problem was. Neither Gloria nor Sergio, nor the staff in the Ayuntamiento and the TV station, knew when the next council meeting would be, or when the next Red Sunday might be, or even when the next (officially weekly) general assembly would be. Meanwhile, they had been arranging the assemblies ad hoc, when necessary, and taking it in turns to officiate. Another councillor, Esperanza, had spoken at one recent village event and at the annual Centro de Adultos dinner, and she handled her new responsibilities very well, people said. It was probably a good thing, one marinaleño observed slightly sadly, that the councillors were all getting their first taste of experience in official roles, because el alcalde couldn’t go on forever. But for now, it was a stretch: the councillors are unpaid, so they all have other jobs, and thus couldn’t devote themselves wholeheartedly to taking on mayoral responsibilities.

  Life went on, but there were creeping signs of malaise. I took a visiting Belgian photographer for a look around the TV station in the Casa de Cultura, where they used to record Sánchez Gordillo’s orations for Línea Directa. I asked if we could see inside the studio. They unlocked the doors and flicked on the banks of lights, which crept on as if awaking from a deep sleep; in addition to its 1970s aesthetics, it smelled distinctly musty, like a Cuban-style relic of a fading regime, its glory years left long behind. The studio had not been used in months.

  Slowly, more details emerged. As I won the trust of more and more people in the village, and delved behind the polite but firm obfuscations about the mayor’s health, I began to collect a variety of theories as to just what on earth had been going on since the August événements. Juan Manuel was having family problems, some villagers said, relating either to his ex-wife, his grown-up children, or his new wife and young son – depending on who you talked to. Or he was suffering a deep, placeless depression. Or it was media-induced exhaustion without too much in the way of mental health problems, and he would be back any day now. Sometimes you just have to let a field lie fallow before it yields again, right?

  After one of the village’s special general assemblies in August 2012, when it was all kicking off, someone casually asked Sánchez Gordillo at the end, ‘So, where are you off to now?’ Straight after the evening meeting he was driving to Seville, to catch a plane to Madrid for a prime-time TV chat show that night, after that he had to meet some journalists, then he was going to come back on the last flight to Seville and drive back to Marinaleda, so he could get on the coach at 7 am to lead his pueblo on the next land occupation. This pattern of relentless direct action, rallies, talks and interviews was repeated every day for about six weeks.

  ‘He’s in his sixties now, you know?’ one Gordillista said sympathetically, remembering the summer. ‘Doing that three-week-long walk, in the summer, is it any wonder he’s suffering now? He was doing rallies and interviews and speeches all day, every day. And normally he doesn’t just speak, calmly – it’s like being at the Nuremburg rally.’ She smiled fondly: ‘But in a good way, obviously.’ During one meeting at the end of September 2012, just before he disappeared from the public stage, and indeed from view, he had reportedly forgotten what he was supposed to be saying, in mid-flow.

  ‘It’s depression,’ another lifelong marinaleño told me confidently. ‘But the question is, what is the cause? I think it’s because of our economic problems here.’ I threw him a confused look: no one had mentioned this as a possibility before – I had come to understand Sánchez Gordillo’s problems were entirely personal. ‘Sure, there’s some of that. But he’s worried about the future of the village. There’s no money left to pay the employees at El Humoso: they can’t pay the cooperativistas. I think that’s the main problem for the mayor right now.’

  The farm is inefficient, he went on, which is why they’re losing money; he even went so far as to say El Humoso would work better if a private company ran it. It was heresy for a marinaleño. Surely if a private company took over, especially in the midst of the crisis, they’d sack everyone in the drive for efficiency, plant crops like wheat again, and completely defeat the point of the project? ‘Well, I think a balance between creating jobs and efficiency in the fields and harvests would be ideal.’

  Back in 2011 it had felt as if Marinaleda was separate from the crisis, above the crisis, insulated from its effects by the very thing that had marked them out as different for so many years before. ‘No, no, no,’ he corrected me. ‘If there is less money in Madrid, or in Seville, there is less money here.’

  There was some truth to this: as Mariano Rajoy’s troika-dictated cuts began to bite, the village’s funding from the Junta de Andalucía was drying up fast. The general market downturn, as well as bad luck with recent harvests, was making it ever harder for El Humoso to pay the jornaleros, and pay them on time – sometimes they were waiting three months to be paid, and the olive-picking rates were dropping, on top of the problem with the peonadas.

  Not everyone was quite so pessimistic about the village’s prospects, even if they were losing vital government funds. In Palo Palo one evening I got chatting to a young man called Pacheco, Paco to his friends, with a leather jacket, facial hair and a warm sensibility. He was another product of the great 1960s exodus: born in San Sebastian in the Basque country to Andalusian émigrés, they moved back to Marinaleda in the late 1980s when the struggle was taking off. ‘I was born in the north, but my heart is andaluz,’ Paco assured me.

  We talked about the crisis in the world outside Marinaleda, and he added his own to the great litany of stories of families, mortgages and businesses in trouble. ‘This is an example for the world,’ Paco said. ‘This right here. Even if things aren’t perfect, just look at all the other towns and villages in the crisis. They’re suffering because they put profits before people.’ />
  ‘But Sánchez Gordillo right now – he’s not well, is he?’ I asked, slightly tentatively. It’s been a very stressful time for him, with all the media attention? ‘Yes, but to be fair, he was asking for it,’ said Paco. Paco was right – it was never foisted upon the Robin Hood mayor; he chose that path, because of his belief in the struggle, rather than egotistical self-belief. ‘He’s a … peculiar character,’ he said eventually, after casting around for the right word. Then he checked himself, wondering if peculiar was what he meant. ‘He’s brave, so brave.’

  Before returning to London for Christmas, I wrote to one of the mayor’s CUT colleagues, to enquire one last time if I could meet Sánchez Gordillo again. ‘Dan,’ he wrote back, ‘it is impossible now. He is very sick. I hope you can speak with him in January when you come back. I hope you understand, please.’ The walls were going up around the pueblo. They were fobbing off all requests to see him – whether from the media, documentary-makers, or people wanting to build political bridges from other villages; but his friends and comrades seemed genuinely confident that he just needed a quiet few weeks over the holidays, and he’d be better in the New Year.

  Back in London in January, one friend in Marinaleda wrote to me to bring me up to speed. ‘Juan Manuel is still keeping quiet and any general assemblies are taken by others and are short and only about work. The financial situation is very bad everywhere and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Someone told me they think that Juan Manuel is suffering more because he is powerless to alter the position and cannot see a way forward. Even if you can speak to him, I doubt it would be very satisfactory … Not much else happening.’

  The mood was increasingly sombre. At one general assembly, one of the CUT village councillors, Dolores, had to give the bad news that there would be reduced rates for the annual olive-picking harvest. Some of the jornaleros at the meeting thought it would barely cover their travel costs.

  When I returned to the village in February 2013, Sánchez Gordillo was still absent. As Antonio made up my room, fitting the sheets with fastidious speed and precision, he asked what I still needed to do on this visit. I mentioned a few things, and that of course, it would be good to speak to el alcalde one more time, if possible. He sighed and said, ‘Well, good luck. He’s still a bit poorly.’

  On the second Saturday in February we went to Marinaleda’s neighbour pueblo El Rubio for their pre-Lenten carnaval, on the last Saturday before Lent; it was a very early Easter this year, and thus a very cold carnaval. At 7 pm, just after the peach skies turned to blue dusk, the procession began winding through the small town’s confusing melee of streets. Just as in Marinaleda, groups of friends wear co-ordinated fancy dress costumes, and there were jellyfish, superheroes, SpongeBob characters, Smurfs, mermaids, cowboys and cross-dressing schoolgirls parading with large measures of rum and coke in hand. The town’s parents and grandparents looked on admiringly in warm coats and scarves as the temperature under the cloudless sky abseiled towards zero.

  Eventually the parade stopped in El Rubio’s Blas Infante park. More drinks were poured, and an eight-piece band of brass and drums competed with a sound system blaring out Spanish dance-pop. As the dusk faded into black and the crowd got progressively merrier, drunken arms were flung around shoulders, and the dancing began – and there, in among the throng, clear as day, was Sánchez Gordillo. After months of absence and confusion, there he was: finally, unmistakably, the Robin Hood mayor, in his red check shirt, keffiyeh, straw hat and tumorous moss of a beard. He had obviously decided to come back to public life in the most befitting way for a man of the people: amid the sociable tumult of the crowd. It was so good to see him out and about again, holding his loud-hailer, leaning on a shopping trolley of supermarket goods – just like in the expropriations the previous summer.

  I did a double take. There was Sánchez Gordillo. And there he was again. And again. There were four, no wait, five, no wait, six Sánchez Gordillos. Three of them were having their photo taken with a man in a ‘sexy nurse’ outfit. One of their beards had fallen off and seemed to be tied to a piece of string. Another one was chatting up one of the mushrooms from the Super Mario Brothers. If this was propaganda of the deed, it was starting to look silly.

  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that Sánchez Gordillo was self-replicating in this way, inspired by Los Gordillos, the Cadiz chirigota group. The real people’s leader seemed to be absent, but his spirit lived on in ludic fancy dress. At Marinaleda’s carnaval the following Saturday night, no one was so disrespectful as to reduce their icon – and elected leader – to a caricature. But in his absence he loomed over the pueblo and lingered in the air, in half-heard conversations from across the bar, dominating without ever being seen. It seemed to elevate the ominous atmosphere all the more because the locals, many of them friends and comrades of decades’ standing, kept referring to him by the honorific title el alcalde, not as Juan Manuel.

  Midway through a long evening and late night of carnival festivity, we were on our fifth or sixth drink in the Sindicato union bar. I had given in to the repeated insistence from local friends that it didn’t matter that I was a) a journalist and b) a foreigner, I had no choice about wearing a costume for carnival. So I was sipping my beer in a monstrous (and unseasonal) Wise Man outfit I’d bought for fifteen euros, trying not to feel self-conscious about being a six-foot-four outsider in a big, flowing, polyester green and turquoise dress, with a homemade silver crown balanced on my head, and a wig of long silvery hair.

  The 10 pm La Liga kick-off was on the big screen, and local underdogs Granada were somehow beating the mighty Barcelona. Marinaleños of all ages mingled happily, tapped their cigarette ash on the floor, and occasionally nodded their heads to the music drifting in from the assembly hall next door, as children hared in and out of the room playing tag.

  Just as Barcelona were equalising, someone nudged me gently and leaned in as if imparting a secret. ‘Look. It’s el alcalde.’ It was him – actually him this time, talking to a couple on the other side of the bar. He was looking, uncharacteristically, both thin and awkward. Slowly, he circulated the room. Everyone shook his hand and smiled, the older marinaleños placed a tender arm on his shoulder – you’re looking better, they said – and he smiled and looked a bit shy, a bit overwhelmed, like someone who remembered once having a different relationship with these people, now forgotten. When he reached our part of the room, I greeted him, and we exchanged a few words about my book. He was polite but uncomfortable, like a recently released hostage who had just been let out into the light again and was feeling his way back into social situations.

  It had only been a brief outing, and once he’d shown his face, he was gone again. Little changed throughout the spring; he was absent during the semana cultural in Easter week, absent from sports and cultural events, and absent from general assemblies and council meetings. The work of the mayor continued to be carried out by his fellow councillors, who waited and hoped for the pall to pass. The bond of trust and solidarity – and ultimately, silence – around the pueblo held firm; none of the Spanish right-wing commentators who had been baying for his blood the previous August had even noticed the miniature crisis in Marinaleda. At the very least, Sánchez Gordillo’s illness hastened the urgency of questions the village had been ignoring for years: what would happen when their talisman, their leader and comrade, was gone? Could Gordillismo survive without Gordillo, or was he the magic potion that powered the pueblo?

  The Asterix analogy is actually less glib than it sounds: the village of Marinaleda is an implausible, tiny exception to the rule of a seemingly impregnable empire – a liberated space, a labourers’ island in a sea of latifundios. Unlike Asterix’s Gaulish village, however, Marinaleda carries a paradox at its very heart: it is founded on a powerful leadership cult around one truly remarkable individual, but its politics are, above all, the primacy of people power. These politics are sincerely felt, and almost always sincerely executed. Everyone is equ
al, and everyone fights together, on behalf of everyone; but the marinaleños do so most passionately, and most successfully, when Sánchez Gordillo is holding the megaphone.

  This is perhaps closer to the continuum of nineteenth-century Andalusian anarchism than it first appears. In the information age, using the mass media in the way Sánchez Gordillo has done is an appropriate and necessary form of ‘propaganda of the deed’. The deed itself is integral, whether a hunger strike, an occupation or a raid – but the way it is received is, too. In response to the August supermarket raids, many Spaniards said they thought his methods crude, but far fewer disagreed with his message. Because, for all the mainstream media’s flaws, systemic and individual, the question remains: why is it that they fixated on him? Why do Sánchez Gordillo’s headline-grabbing actions work? In part, perhaps, because he’s a charismatic, polarising character; but mostly because people want to hear what he has to say. The megaphone may be shrill, but the words coming out of it have always chimed with the public – all the more so because nobody else in Spanish politics was daring to say them.

  Sánchez Gordillo has delivered many fine and memorable epigrams over the years, some of which I have heard in person, in private discussion, or from a platform, and others in speeches or in articles in days of struggle gone by. There are more elegant and profound quotations, but it is this one that sticks with me: ‘Because we fight together, because we make our lives together, there is a high degree of good neighbourliness. When we plant trees, we do that together too.’ It is this kind of communism that is Marinaleda’s triumph – an almost ineffable sense of solidarity.

  No one ever forgets ‘that strange and moving experience’ of believing in a revolution, George Orwell reflected, after arriving in Republican Barcelona on the brink of civil war, a society fizzing with energy as it fleetingly experienced living communism. Marinaleda is neither fully communist nor fully a utopia: but take a step outside the pueblo and into contemporary Spain, and you will see a society pummelled, impoverished and atomised, pulled into death and destruction by an economic system and a political class who do not care, and have never cared, whether the poor live or die. Sánchez Gordillo’s achievements are more than just the concrete gains of land, housing, sustenance and culture, phenomenal though they are: being there is a strange and moving experience, and, as Orwell suggested, an unforgettable one.