http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420469.stm

Meeting Spain's last anarchist

By Alfonso Daniels
San Buenaventura, Bolivia


Hours after flying on a rickety 19-seater propeller plane and
landing on a dirt strip, you get to the village of San Buenaventura
in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon.


Here, in a simple one-storey brick house next to a row of wooden
shacks, is the home of Antonio Garcia Baron.
He is the only survivor still alive of the anarchist Durruti column
which held Francoist forces at bay in Madrid during the Spanish
Civil War (1936-1939) and the founder of an anarchist community in
the heart of the jungle.

Mr Baron, 87, was wearing a hat and heavy dark glasses. He later
explained that they were to protect his eyes, which were damaged
when he drank a cup of coffee containing poison nine years ago.

It was, he said, the last of more than 100 attempts on his life,
which began in Paris, where he moved in 1945 after five years in the
Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp, and continued in Bolivia, his
home since the early 1950s.

Stateless

He was keen to share his views on 20th Century Spanish history with
a wider audience.


THE DURRUTI COLUMN
Column of anarchist fighters during Spanish Civil War
Led by Buenaventura Durruti until his death fighting Franco's forces
on outskirts of Madrid in November 1936
After defeat of Republican forces in 1939, many surviving members
fled to France. Many interned in French prison camps.
After Nazis invaded, many imprisoned in concentration camps, others
joined resistance

"The Spanish press has covered up that the (Catholic) Church
masterminded the death of two million Republicans during the civil
war, not one million as they maintain," Mr Baron said before
launching into one of his many anecdotes.
"I told Himmler (the head of the Nazi SS) when he visited the
Mauthausen quarry on 27 April, 1941, what a great couple the (Nazis)
made with the Church.

"He replied that it was true, but that after the war I would see all
the cardinals with the Pope marching there, pointing at the chimney
of the crematorium."

On the walls of Mr Baron's house is a picture of him taken in the
camp. Next to it is a blue triangle with the number 3422 and letter
S inside, marking the prisoners considered stateless.

"Spain took away my nationality when I entered Mauthausen, they
wanted the Nazis to exterminate us in silence. The Spanish
government has offered to return my nationality but why should I
request something that was stolen from me and 150,000 others?" he
said angrily.


Mr Baron arrived in Bolivia on the advice of his friend, the French
anarchist writer Gaston Leval.

"I asked him for a sparsely populated place, without services like
water and electricity, where people lived like 100 years ago -
because where you have civilisation you'll find priests."

Some 400 people, mostly Guarani Indians, lived there at the time,
but in fact also a German priest.

"He was a tough nut to crack. He learnt of my arrival and told
everyone that I was a criminal. They fled and made the sign of the
cross whenever they saw me, but two months later I started speaking
and they realised I was a good person, so it backfired on him."

Convinced that the priest still spied on him, a few years later he
decided to leave and create a mini-anarchist state in the middle of
the jungle, 60km (37 miles) and three hours by boat from San
Buenaventura along the Quiquibey River.

With him was his Bolivian wife Irma, now 71.

They raised chicken, ducks and pigs and grew corn and rice which
they took twice a year to the village in exchange for other
products, always rejecting money.

Dunkirk

Life was tough and a few years ago Mr Baron lost his right hand
while hunting a jaguar.

For the first five years, until they began having children, they
were alone. Later a group of some 30 nomadic Indians arrived and
decided to stay, hunting and fishing for a living, also never using
money.

"We enjoyed freedom in all of its senses, no-one asked us for
anything or told us not to do this or that," he recounted as his
wife smiled, sitting in a chair at the back of the room.

Recently they moved back to the village for health reasons and to be
closer to their children. They live with a daughter, 47, while their
other three children, Violeta, 52, Iris, 31, and 27-year-old Marco
Antonio work in Spain.


They also share the few simple rooms arranged around an internal
patio with three Cuban doctors who are part of a contingent sent to
help provide medical care in Bolivia.
The hours passed and it was time to take the small plane back to La
Paz before the torrential rain isolated the area again.

Only then, as time was running out, did Mr Baron begin speaking in
detail about Mauthausen and the war - as if wishing to fulfil a
promise to fallen comrades.

How the Nazis threw prisoners from a cliff, how some of them clung
to the mesh wire to avoid their inevitable death, how the Jews were
targeted for harsh treatment and did not survive long.

His memory also took him to Dunkirk where he had arrived in 1940,
before he was caught and imprisoned in Mauthausen.

"I arrived in the morning but the British fleet was some 6km from
the coast. I asked a young English soldier if it would return.

"I saw that he was eating with a spoon in one hand and firing an
anti-aircraft gun with the other," he laughed.

"'Eat if you wish', I told him. 'Do you know how to use it?' he
asked since I didn't have military uniform and was very young.

"'Don't worry,' I said. I grabbed the gun and shot down two planes.
He was dumbstruck.

"I'll never forget the determination of the British fighting
stranded on the beach."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7420469.stm

Published: 2008/07/08 08:59:21 GMT

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