Two winners share the honors of this year’s ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, splitting $100,000 to continue their fight for justice in Latin America. (Read the full press release here. En castellano; order tickets here).
Both Fredy Peccerelli, Executive Director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, and Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America...
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ALBA's 76th annual celebration (tickets here) will focus on civilian victims of armed conflict, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica (which took place on April 26, 1937) and the struggle for Human Rights in Latin America...
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ALBA is proud to announce its 2012 teaching institutes for high school teachers, made possible by the Puffin Foundation and donors like you: March 17, 2012: Professional development day in Seattle, co-hosted by the Center for Spanish Studies and the Division of Spanish and Portuguese...
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In an ostensible attempt to save face, the Spanish Supreme Court absolved Judge Baltasar Garzón yesterday from "prevarication," or knowingly making a decision against the law, in relation to...
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I have just read the writ with which the presiding judge dismisses, on the grounds of an expired statute of limitations, the so-called “New York” case against Baltasar Garzón....
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Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen are among the members of the Honorary Committee inviting you to join us at the annual event in New York City honoring...
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What inspired Picasso to paint his Guernica? The great cultural tradition that links Picasso with artists like Goya has always been the High Road towards the masterpiece. But exploring the Low Road of newspapers, pamphlets and street posters can also provide surprisingly rich pickings, allowing us to reconstruct a street view of Picasso...
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As we begin the fifth year of ALBA’s teaching programs for high school instructors, we are detecting positive patterns in the anonymous evaluations each teacher is asked to complete at the end of the program. Last December in Chicago, for example, a male world...
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On July 18, 1936, at the age of 22, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) traveled to Barcelona, on assignment for the British magazine Life and Letters Today, to report on the People’s Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular). An anti-fascist alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, the...
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Fugitive from Spanish Fascism. A Memoir. By Miguel Domínguez Soler. Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Baker. Cornerstone Press, 2010.
Miguel Domínguez Soler, a young Spanish Socialist worker, committed...
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The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier in Spain, by John L. Wainwright’s. Hatchet Green Publishing, 2012.
From the cover photograph, of the...
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Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America, by Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler. The New Press, 2011. (Buy.)
Somewhere lurking in our imaginations we carry...
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Rickard Jorgensen, who has generously supported the development of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade collection at NYU's Tamiment library, writes:
After much work by Mike Nash, Gail Malmgreen, Elizabeth Compa,...
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Planning for your will and your legacy? The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade established their legacy with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Now you can continue their “good...
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Dear Editors, In the December issue, in an article on “Nick” Carter, the writer makes what seems to me some shameful and unwarranted remarks. He says Carter’s death fighting...
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Many thought the day would never come. And yet this past week, a handful of aging victims of Francoist repression appeared before Spain's Supreme Court to tell the...
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"The secrets from a vault of moldy documents long covered in bat and rat droppings could soon help to put former top Guatemalan officials behind bars, years after the...
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Diana Anhalt (author of A Gathering of Fugitives, American Political Expatriates in Mexico, 1948-1965), and Yvonne Scholten, biographer of the Dutch miliciana Fanny Schoonheyt, are interested in...
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Jeremy O. Simer sends a touching note: A couple of months ago, my friend Lonnie Nelson called from Seattle to ask me to help her arrange for someone in...
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Agustí Centelles (1909-1985) is one of the most important photojournalists of the Spanish Civil War, and his work should be studied alongside that of Robert Capa, David Seymour, Gerda...
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In the 1930s, Margaret Palmer was an American expat living in Spain, and working as a local agent for the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art. She also was in...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting public awareness, research, and discussion about the Spanish Civil War. Learn more at our website or
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Adam Hochshild reviews Paul Preston's monumental The Spanish Holocaust for the New York Times (read an excerpt from the book in The Volunteer; other reviews here and here):
An eminent and prolific British historian of modern Spain, Preston says this was “an extremely painful book to write.”...
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The Observer's Sean O'Hagan reviews the translation of Susana Fortes's novelized version of the love affair between Spanish Civil War photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the film rights for which have been bought by Michael Mann:
Fortes's short novel is essentially a historical romance that concentrates on the relationship between...
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The electronic artist Grey Filastine connects efforts in Spain and Indonesia to confront a dictatorial past and achieve justice in the present, the Jakarta Globe reports:
“They’re excavating the mass graves, they’re going through the political process of changing the history books, of removing big statues of Franco, like all...
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A plaque has been unveiled in Sussex to commemorate the 4,000 Basque children brought to the county 75 years ago, the BBC reports:
The children were escaping the Spanish Civil War, and arrived on a ship from Bilbao. The ceremony took place in Blackboys, near Uckfield, where 20 children and...
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The work done by ALBA/Puffin Award winner Fredy Peccerelli and his team is absolutely essential, says his colleague José Suasnavar of the Guatemalan Association of Forensic Anthropology (FAFG), EFE reports In an interview with the prestigious Latin American academic institution FLACSO, Suasnavar describes the Guatemalan exhumation process in detail. Read it
Jefferson Morley writes in Salon:
Kate Doyle’s job isn’t exactly journalism, though she’s nailed more big stories than many Pulitzer Prize winners. Her work does not quite qualify as law enforcement either, though a few bad guys living in confined quarters rue the day she came into their lives. “Human rights detective”...
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Lisa Mullens interviewed ALBA/Puffin Award winner Doyle on the Public Radio International program The World. Doyle discusses her work in Guatemala and Peru. You can listen to the full hour-long program, or just the interview with Kate, titled “Documenting Latin America’s Painful Past.” “Yes, it is scary to go up against human rights criminals," Doyle tells...
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Richard Bermack's photographs of the 2012 ALBA celebration in New York, including the ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony and the reception, can be viewed here.
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Len Tsou has posted his photographs from yesterday's annual ALBA celebration and ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony. View them here.
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CNN Latin America interviewed Kate Doyle and Fredy Peccerelli this morning about their 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, which was awarded to them yesterday in New York. Watch the video here.
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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