We are pleased by provide a link to this thorough report-back written by Joaquín Ruiz Gaspar of Os Monegros about the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the arrival of the Durruti Column to the town of Bujaraloz in Aragón. Over the course of four days, collectives, organizations, and individuals gathered for a conference on the history of the Spanish Revolution and the Durruti Column, formed to liberate Saragossa (Zaragoza) from Nationalist insurgents. Speakers at the conference, which converged with the Bujaraloz Anarchist Book Fair, included historians Dolors Marín, Roberto Martínez, and Agustín Guillamón, among others.
As is written on the plaque that was placed outside Bujaraloz’s local barracks in March 1937 to commemorate Durruti, a replica of which conference-goers reinstalled at the same place after it had been torn down by victorious Nationalist forces in the Civil War, it was here “that Durruti commenced his glorious campaign of reconquest for the people in Aragonese lands who had fallen into the hands of fascist power.”
Marín, author of Dones del foc (Women of Fire, or Ardent Women), recalled the numerous international anarchist women who supported the Spanish Revolution, including Emma Goldman and Simone Weil, while declaring that “the Revolution [itself] represented a change, or a possibility of change, of paradigm for women” in Iberia.
As Guillamón notes, it is unfortunate that the CNT Defense Committees that played such an important role in defeating the military uprising and launching the social revolution in Barcelona in July 1936 “had not been sufficiently developed in Zaragoza, despite the fact that this was the second-most anarchist city in Spain.” Broadly speaking, “a total revolution never took place” beginning in July 1936, “as the State was never destroyed, since the libertarian movement didn’t know what to do with the power it had gained in the streets.”
As Ruiz Gaspar summarizes Martínez’s research:
After the failed coup d’etat and military uprising, the people organize themselves in committees and take power. They arm themselves, organize patrols, and form militias. At this time, there were principally two sectors [on the left]: supporters of the Republican government, and the anarchists. Meanwhile, the libertarian movement, by means of the CNT, faces its own dilemma: to make a revolution, or to fight a war. Ultimately, it is decided to postpone the revolution and prioritize the war-effort and anti-fascist unity, following the creation of the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia, directed toward Saragossa. The Durruti Column sets off through the zone of Bujaraloz, and the Ortiz Column goes a bit farther south, on the opposite side of the Ebro River […].
Many militia fighters end up deserting over their rejection of [the] militarization [increasingly imposed by the Republic], although the killer blow against the libertarian movement arrives with the Saragossa offensive and the battle of Belchite (1937), which completely exhaust the libertarian movement, and completely destroy the social revolution.