Free The Village Against the World by Dan Hancox Page B

by an average of 200–400 marinaleños and take place sporadically throughout the year. There should be approximately one per week, but it depends on what needs discussing, and how pressing it is. This ‘direct democracy’, with simple ‘hands-up’ voting, is where a great deal is discussed and decided: the budget for the town council, local rates and taxes, the election of political posts within the town, and resolutions to mobilise for more direct action.
    After a decade of strikes and burgeoning labourer organisation, one event took place that drew the world’s attention to Marinaleda for the first time and became the definitive event in establishing the village’s place in modern Spanish history. In August 1980, against a backdrop of strikes across the region, Marinaleda hosted the ‘hunger strike against hunger’ – una huelga de hambre contra el hambre , in which 700 people refused food for nine days.
    ‘Our struggle’, Gordillo said then, ‘arises in a time when the socioeconomic situation has reached unbearable extremes.’ The village was in a truly desperate state by the summer of 1980. In the first seven months of the year they had received an equivalent of 200 pesetas per family per day – less than two euros. At best, most of the jornaleros could afford to buy only lentils, rice, onions and tomatoes from the village shops. Going two days without food so the children could eat was common, as was community solidarity: where families could share their food with one another, they did.
    One story I’d heard, about a group of neighbours clubbing together to buy a gas cylinder for a family of nine to see them through the winter, was met with nods of recognition when I repeated it to other older marinaleños . That was just what you did. The week the hunger strike began, the Guardia Civil had taken nine men from Marinaleda to the police station after finding them foraging for sunflower seeds in the fields. When Sánchez Gordillo described the poverty among landless labourers in Andalusia as a ‘social holocaust’, this was the kind of thing he had in mind.
    Their demand upon launching the hunger strike was for an increase in ‘community employment funds’ (essentially, paid public-works projects for the unemployed) – but this was only a short-term solution, enough to sustain them until the olive harvest came in December. The community employment funds did nothing to address the root causes of the poverty, simply subsidising and stabilising amiserable status quo with humiliating, pointless work like cleaning ditches – which in any case could be done much faster by machines. What was needed was what had always been needed: substantial land reform.
    This, they argued, could be achieved through a change in the crop management of the 23,000 hectares of land between Herrera and Écija, which were planted with labour-light dry crops like corn and sunflowers. The Marinaleda proposal was to sow crops that created substantially more work, like tobacco, cotton or sugar beet, and to create secondary industries for processing them. This, they argued, would instantly lead to a 30 per cent reduction in unemployment in central Andalusia. They also proposed the reforestation of some of the village’s environs with almond and pine trees, and the construction of a dam on the Genil River to irrigate the 50,000 hectares of arid land around it.
    Their demands, and their actions, were discussed and ratified by daily general assemblies, with even the children voting – because some of them, too, had volunteered to take part in the hunger strike. As media interest grew and journalists began to flock towards Marinaleda, other solidarity actions broke out elsewhere, many of them organised by the SOC, including a church occupation in nearby Morón de la Frontera, while 200 fellow jornaleros established four roadblocks on the Malaga-Seville trunk road.
    ‘We will continue until they know there is hunger in Andalusia’, read