Buenaventura Durruti (1896-1936)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buenaventura_Durruti

 

Buenaventura Durruti

 

José Buenaventura Durruti Dumange (14 July 1896 – 20 November 1936) was a central figure of Spanish anarchism during the period leading up to and including the Spanish Civil War.

 

부에나벤투라 두루티(Buenaventura Durruti Dumange, 1896년 7월 14일~1936년 11월 20일)는 스페인 내전에서 활동한 스페인의 아나키스트 혁명가였다.

 

Buenaventura Durruti in 1936

 

스페인 레온 출생으로 레온 철도 회사에서 14세 때부터 일을 시작하다가 1917년 사회주의 연방 건설 운동에 참여하면서 아니키스트가 되었다. 이 파업 와중에 스페인군의 공격으로 노동자 70명이 죽고 500명이 부상당하고 2000명이 법적 재판 없이 투옥당하는 사태가 일어나자 두루티를 프랑스로 망명했다.

 

파리에서 정비사로 일하던 중1920년 바르셀로나로가 노동 조직을 결성하고 카턀루냐에서는 후안 가르시아 올리버, 프란시스코 아스카소, 기타 무정부주의자들과 로스 연대를 조직하고 국왕 알폰소 13세의 암살을 기도했다. 그리고 1923년 노동운동가 살바도르 세귀의 암살에 대한 보복으로 일어난 추기경 후안 솔데비아 로메로 추기경의 암살 사건에 연루되었다.

 

이에 1923년 미겔 프리모 데 리베라의 권력 장악 후 바르셀로나 등지에서 게릴라전을 펼쳤으나 실패하고 아르헨티나로 도피했다. 1936년부터 스페인 내전이 일어나자 올리버, 아스카소 등의 동지들과 함께 참전했으나 바르셀로나의 병영에서 아스카소가 공화파 군대의 총에 맞아 죽었다.

 

이후 7월 24일 사라고사와 바르셀로나에서 3000명의 무장 무정부주의자 군대를 통솔하고 마드리드에서도 민병대를 이끌었으나 11월 20일 마드리드 전투 와중에 카사 데 캄포 지역을 공격하다가 전사했다.

 

 

 

Early life

Durruti was born in León, Spain, son of Anastasia Dumangue and Santiago Durruti, a railway worker in the yard at Leon who described himself as a libertarian socialist. Buenaventura was the second of eight brothers (one was killed in the October 1934 uprising in the Asturias, another died fighting the Fascists on the Madrid front).

 

In 1910, aged 14, Durruti left school to become a trainee mechanic in the railway yard in León. Like his father, he joined the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). He took an active part in the strike of August 1917 called by the UGT when the government overturned an agreement between the union and the employers. The government brought in the Spanish Army to suppress the strike; they killed 70 people and injured more than 500 workers. 2,000 of the strikers were imprisoned without trial or legal process. Durruti managed to escape, but had to flee abroad to France where he came into contact with exiled anarchists. The brutality of the Spanish State had a profound and lasting effect on the young Durruti. From the autumn of 1917 until the beginning of 1920, Durruti worked in Paris as a mechanic. He then decided to return to Spain and arrived at San Sebastian, Basque Country, just across the border. Here, he was introduced to local anarchists such as Suberviola, Ruiz, Aldabatrecu or Marcelino del Campo, with whom he formed the anarchist paramilitary group Los Justicieros ("The Avengers"). In 1921, during the inauguration of the Great Kursaal in San Sebastian, members of this group attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate King Alfonso XIII. Shortly after Buenasca, the then president of the recently formed anarchist controlled Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), persuaded Durruti to go to Barcelona to organise the workers there where the anarchist movement, as well as the syndicalists, was being brutally suppressed and most of its members jailed or executed. Here, with Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso, and other members of Los Justicieros, he founded Los Solidarios ("Solidarity"). In 1923 the group was also implicated in the assassination of Cardinal Juan Soldevilla y Romero, as a reprisal for the killing of an anarcho-syndicalist union activist Salvador Seguí. After Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain in 1923, Durruti and his comrades organised attacks on the military barracks in Barcelona and on the border stations near France. These attacks were unsuccessful and quite a few anarchists were killed. Following these defeats, Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver fled to Latin America. They subsequently travelled widely, visiting Cuba and carrying out bank robberies in Chile and Argentina.[1]

 

Durruti and his companions returned to Spain and Barcelona, becoming an influential militant group within two of the largest anarchist organisations in Spain at the time, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), and of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The influence Durruti's group gained inside the CNT caused a split, with a reformist faction under Ángel Pestaña leaving in 1931 and subsequently forming the Syndicalist Party.

 

In the Civil War

Working closely with his comrades in the FAI and CNT Durruti helped to co-ordinate armed resistance to the military rising of Francisco Franco, an effort which was to prove vital in preventing General Goded's attempt to seize control of Barcelona. During the battle for the Atarazanas Barracks, Durruti's long-time comrade and closest friend Ascaso was shot dead. Less than a week later, on 24 July 1936 Durruti led over 3,000 armed anarchists (later to become known as the Durruti Column) from Barcelona to Zaragoza. After a brief and bloody battle at Caspe (in Aragón), they halted at Pina de Ebro, on the advice of a regular army officer, postponing an assault on Zaragoza.

 

Death

On 12 November, having been persuaded to leave Aragón by the anarchist leader Federica Montseny on behalf of the government, Durruti led his militia to Madrid to aid in the defense of the city. on 19 November, he was shot while leading a counterattack in the Casa de Campo area. (See also Battle of Madrid.) According to author Antony Beevor (The Spanish Civil War, 1982), Durruti was killed when a companion's machine pistol went off by mistake. He assessed that at the time, the anarchists lied and claimed he had been hit by an enemy sniper's bullet "for reasons of morale and propaganda".

 

Another account of Durruti's death, given in Durruti: The People Armed by Abel Paz, claims that rather than being shot by a fellow soldier he was killed by distant gunfire coming from the area around the Clinical Hospital in University City (Madrid), which had been taken over by Nationalist forces. After a fight to regain control and contact was re-established with troops cut off from communications, Durruti returned temporarily to the Miguel-Angel barracks to issue orders. A message from Liberto Roig arrived informing Durruti that the Clinical Hospital was in the process of being evacuated. Alarmed, he asked his chauffeur, Julio Grave, to get his car and leave immediately for the hospital. His chauffeur gives the following testimonial:

 

We passed a little group of hotels which are at the bottom of this avenue [Avenida de la Reina Victoria] and we turned towards the right. Arriving at the big street, we saw a group of militiamen coming towards us. Durruti thought it was some young men who were leaving the front. This area was completely destroyed by the bullets coming from the Clinical Hospital, which had been taken during these days by the Moors and which dominated all the environs. Durruti had me stop the car which I parked in the angle of one of those little hotels as a precaution. Durruti got out of the auto and went towards the militiamen. He asked them where they were going. As they didn't know what to say, he ordered them to return to the front. The militiamen obeyed and Durruti returned towards the car. The rain of bullets became stronger. From the vast red heap of the clinical hospital, the Moors and the Guardia Civil were shooting furiously. Reaching the door of the machine, Durruti collapsed, a bullet through his chest.

He died on 20 November 1936, at the age of 40, in a makeshift operating theatre set up in what was formerly the Ritz Hotel. The bullet was lodged in the heart, and the diagnosis was "death caused by pleural haemorrhage". The doctors wrote a report in which the path of the bullet and the character of the wound was recorded but not the calibre of the bullet, since they hadn't removed it and there was no autopsy.

 

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"It is we [the workers] who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. [...] That world is growing in this minute."

— Buenaventura Durruti

 

 Durruti (in the middle) with his colleagues Francisco Ascaso (left) and Gregorio Jover (right)

 

 Durruti on campaign in the Front of Aragón

 

 Corpse of Durruti showing the mortal bullet wound in the thorax

 

 Durruti's grave at Montjuïc Cemetery, Barcelona

 

Anarchist poster from the Spanish Revolution showing Durruti as an example and the people's hero