To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades, ALBA is hosting a benefit party in the spirit of the '30s on December 9th in New York City (tickets, info), including live music and a silent auction featuring Jo Davidson bust of Pasionaria (preview and bid). The ALBA...
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(Texto en castellano.) The astoundingly profound and widespread contributions of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to the promotion of justice and human rights have been everywhere on display these last two weeks of October (October 16-30, 2011). Though not always acknowledged in the...
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Focusing a wide lens on the human rights agenda, ALBA hosted “Impugning Impunity: A Human Rights Documentary Film Series” at the Museum of the City of New York in November. The festival kicked off with Hollman Morris’ Impunity, a film about the victims of...
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ALBA’s George Watt Memorial Essay Prizes are awarded annually to a graduate student and an undergraduate student who have written an outstanding essay or thesis chapter about any...
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This essay examines a crucial facet of violence against the clergy: the processes by which male identities, and popular ideas regarding priests’ sexuality and masculinity, influenced the forms and...
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The story of Thane Summers, a student at the University of Washington, provides a case study of one man’s road to the Spanish Civil War. Because he came from...
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Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939, due to be published next month with the University of Wisconsin Press (excerpt, order), reveals scores of unknown facts about the life and work of Luis Buñuel during a crucial decade not only in the filmmaker’s life but in the history of film and photography—as well...
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Among the sources of information about Buñuel's activities during the first few weeks of the war: is a receipt signed dated 25 August 1936, for a loan of £490 granted by Leo Fleischman, an engineer from New York who enlisted in the Fifth Regiment...
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Fanny Schoonheyt, the tall, blond “queen of the machine gun,” was the only Dutch woman to join in the battle action during the Spanish Civil War. Her life is shrouded in mystery. Could she have been the only female foreign official in the Republican...
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Viewing seven documentaries about the Lincoln Brigade in two days, a curious thing happened: I had difficulty telling them apart. Not, of course, in their broad sweep. Rather, it...
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The Spanish daily Público reports: Spain’s Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts has uploaded to the Ministry of Culture’s youtube channel a selection of 93 film documents from its...
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Two-thirds of the way into Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour,...
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Part of the difficulty in studying Kea’s life—and what makes her story so intriguing—is that subtle details change from memoir to memoir. Over the last three years, I have...
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Young men volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War for many reasons, but few American volunteers came from privileged backgrounds. When I saw 1938 and Calaceite, Spain, on...
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It was in 2006 that I first saw this phrase, on a button worn by a young man on the uptown 6 train. I was on the subway heading...
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Al servicio de la República. Diplomáticos y guerra civil. Edited by Ángel Viñas. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. Diplomats are funny creatures. On the one hand, they embody an anachronistic...
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Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War. By Farah Mendlesohn. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. During the Spanish Civil War, in the face of the enormous civilian...
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Grace Under Pressure: The Life of Evan Shipman. By Sean O’Rourke. Harwood Publishing and Unlimited Publishing, 2011.
“I owe Spain a great deal,” Evan Shipman wrote to his good friend...
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I had come to Burgos from New York City in order to lend my presence in representing the families of the former prisoners at San Pedro de Cardeña. My...
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Nancy Wallach, daughter of Lincoln vet Hy Wallach, spoke recently at a gathering in the former concentration campo of San Pedro de Cardeña, where the Francoists held her father,...
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The commemorations celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades came at the very end of a strange never-ending summer. The blue skies that presided over...
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Spanish Supreme Court Judge Manuel Marchena, in charge of the third case pending against Garzón, concluded the investigative stage yesterday with a brief charging the Judge with “cohecho impropio,” that is, the appearance of bribery by accepting a gift from an interested party. Marchena has significantly downscaled the original charge of prevarication, or knowingly...
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Ivry sur Seine, a working class municipality on the southern outskirts of Paris, celebrated ten sons of the town who were killed in Spain fighting in the International Brigades yesterday when a plaque in their honor was unveiled. The ceremony was organized by the ACER (Asociation of Friends of Combattants in Republican Spain, for...
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The trial against Garzón "is fueled by domestic political vendettas rather than substantive legal arguments," Dan Kaufman writes in today's New York Times, "and it could dramatically set back international efforts to hold human-rights violators accountable for their crimes."
The Supreme Court’s zeal to try him has little legal basis; rather, it reflects...
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(En castellano.) If there were credit rating agencies devoted to evaluating the moral health of a country’s institutions, yesterday “Spain” would almost certainly have been downgraded to junk-bond status. Its Supreme Court opened the first of three trials against Judge Baltasar Garzón, thus initiating a three-pronged attack on judicial independence and offering...
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"A number of countries around the world have reason to be grateful for the unstinting efforts of a Spanish judge who finds himself on trial," The Guardian editorializes today,
Judge Baltasar Garzón's 1998 attempt to extradite General Pinochet from Britain to face charges of human rights abuses relating to the 1973 coup in
Judge Garzón's first trial before Spain's Supreme Court has started. Garzón is accused of knowingly going against the law ("prevarication") when ordering allegedly illegal wiretaps while investigating a corruption ring involving the regional leadership of the conservative--and now governing--Partido Popular. The trial, which is expected to last three days, involves seven magistrates from the...
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The international media are gearing up for the upcoming two trials of Judge Baltasar Garzón. "Is it Crash and Burn Time?" Daniel Woolls asks, writing for the Associated Press:
On Tuesday, Garzon goes on trial for allegedly ordering illegal jailhouse wiretaps in a domestic corruption probe. A week later he appears in...
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Garzón's successor at Spain's National Criminal Court, Judge Pablo Ruz, has sent the prosecutor a 19-page brief reactivating the investigation of human rights abuses and war crimes at the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, El País reports. Given the lack of judicial action on the part of the US and British authorities, Ruz...
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A group of prominent Spanish intellectuals including the poet Luis García Montero and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar have rallied to the support of Baltasar Garzón, the crusading Spanish magistrate who last year received the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. So have Human Rights organizations worldwide. In the next two weeks, Garzón will...
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This year’s 5th annual Jarama commemoration will take place during the weekend of Friday 17th to Sunday 19th February. As well as the 5th Jarama Memorial Walk, which will take place on Saturday 18th, there will be other events over the weekend. On Friday 17th, Hugh Purcell, whose work on Tom Wintringham, The Last...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic