Free The Village Against the World by Dan Hancox

peasant towns to that of Native American reservations, where native tribes driven from the plains where once they dwelt and worked are contained in miserable isolation, surrounded by the land which belongs to them – producing and reproducing poverty, humiliation and cultural degradation. He records one fellow marinaleño approaching him ‘crying like a child’ in the late 1970s and telling him: ‘Juan Manuel, I’m not a beggar. I want a job, because I am fifty-four and ashamed to be anywhere else than working in the fields’.
    The demonstrations had begun before Franco died, as the increasingly desperate people of the south gained confidence – confidence in the absence of any hope of change from above. The familiar Andalusian dialectic of rebellion and repression intensified in the early 1970s, with huge construction industry demonstrations in Granada and strikes – which were still illegal – throughout the middle period of the decade, as well as sporadic crop burnings on the nobles’ estates. The Guardia Civil continued to exert the violence they had used in the nineteenth century and during the Civil War, and there were a number of deaths on demonstrations. For the impoverishedAndalusian jornaleros , the death of el Generalísimo , though it did not itself guarantee the liberal democracy that would eventually follow – the first free general election was in 1977 – was a clear opportunity to raise the game. It was a classic crisis-opportunity.
    As the tensions of the constitutional Transition proceeded, Marinaleda began working on, and towards, its own definition of freedom. Before the land seizures, before the collective farm, before economic democracy, before the virtually free housing, before the assassination attempts, before the supermarket raids, before utopia – came organisation. The rage of the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s was bundled into the foundations of a movement. In 1976 the field workers’ union, the Sindicato de Obreros del Campo (SOC) was founded, and soon after the Marinaleda chapter formed in the garden of what is now Avenida de la Libertad. It was to be a union for day labourers, focusing on direct action, with a broadly anarchist philosophy. It was designed to be responsive to the precarity of the Andalusian peasant existence. At that time, Spanish union law prohibited voting in union elections until you had worked for the same employer for more than six months – ruling out 98 per cent of the 500,000 Andalusian field workers, severing an entire class from labour organisation.
    On 4 December 1977 young Caparros was martyred, and the following January, the SOC began occupying the land. Early the following year, SOC’s Marinaleda chapter occupied a farm twenty miles away, near Osuna, for twodays – the first time they had done so since the Second Republic. It ended when they were violently evicted by the Guardia Civil and several union leaders were jailed.
    Meanwhile in Madrid, a new democratic Constitution had been written. In Marinaleda they held a general assembly to discuss it, and an official position was decided on: they would abstain from voting in the referendum to approve the Constitution. Most of the pueblo were already involved in the occupations and strikes, and wished to continue focusing their democratic energies that way. (They have maintained this ambivalence: in the context of the current Spanish crisis, I have heard the Constitution described in Marinaleda as a ‘pact with the residues of Francoism’. In their propaganda, it is accused of being ‘useless in stopping the markets’ war against the people’.)
    They had chosen to ignore the new developments in Madrid, but Madrid had nonetheless noticed them. The Andalusian workers worried the Spanish bourgeoisie, a class largely composed of Francoists surreptitiously changing out of their uniforms. With some alarm, the Madrid newspapers quoted one of SOC’s founders as claiming that ‘the labourers, in