Marcelino Camacho

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Marcelino Camacho (2008)

Marcelino Camacho Abad (born January 21, 1918 in Osma , Soria province , † October 29, 2010 in Madrid ) was a Spanish resistance fighter against the fascist Franco regime, a communist union leader and politician. He was one of the founders of the Comisiones Obreras (Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras - CC.OO.), the Spanish trade union federation with the largest number of members, and from 1976 to 1987 its general secretary. From 1977 to 1981 he was a member of the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de España - PCE) for Madrid in the Congreso de los Diputados (House of Representatives) of the Cortes Generales . In Spain he is a symbol of the left labor movement and the resistance against the Franco regime .

Life

Born in 1918 as the son of a unionized railroad worker in the central Spanish province of Soria, Marcelino Camacho was familiar with socialist ideas from an early age. In 1935 he first joined the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), to which his father also belonged, and then the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). He was less than 18 years old when the Franco coup and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 changed his life forever.

Camacho fought on the side of the republican associations on the central and southern fronts against the Franco forces. After the military victory of the Franquists , he went into hiding, but was denounced, captured and sentenced in 1939 to 12 years in prison. Three years later, in 1942, he was taken to a prison camp in Gipuzkoa (Guipúzcoa), then to a prison camp in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, Salamanca province . Eventually he was sent to a penal camp in Tangier . (The International Zone of Tangier was annexed by Spain in 1940 and incorporated into the Spanish protectorate of Morocco ).

In 1944 Camacho and other prisoners managed to escape to French Morocco . The French colonial officials arrested him. He was granted political asylum and taken to Oran in Algeria . In Algerian exile, he joined the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU). Here he met Josefina (born Samper / * 1927 in Fondón, Almería), a young communist who was committed to the rescue of Spanish refugees and to support the resistance movement in Spain. Marcelino Camacho married Josefina on December 22, 1948. On July 18, 1957 - after an amnesty - the couple returned to fascist Spain with their two children, daughter Yenia and son Marcel, and Camacho took a job as a metalworker in the engine factory Perkins Hispania in Madrid.

In the following years he tried to organize the resistance against the fascist Franco regime, began to rebuild the workers 'movement that had been crushed by Franco and formed the communist-oriented Comisiones Obreras (Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras - CC.OO. - Workers' Commissions) as a counterweight to this the unified union established by law by the Franco regime in 1940 (Ley de 26 de enero de 1940 sobre Unidad Sindical - see Spanish Wiki). The compulsory state union forced employers and workers together, their leaders were appointed by the generalissimo, and any form of industrial action was prohibited. The CC.OO. Therefore saw itself as "the opposition of all workers against a pseudo-union that does not serve us" .

On March 1, 1967, Camacho and other members of the CC.OO. arrested and detained in Carabanchel . Only after more than 6 years was he sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in December 1973 in the 1001 trial against the leaders of the workers' commissions. Just five days after Franco's death, on November 25, 1975, the convicted trade unionists were pardoned by King Juan Carlos I.

After the trade union confederation CC.OO. Legalized by the state, Camacho was elected its first general secretary in 1977. In 1985 he organized the first general strike against the first socialist government in Spain under Felipe González and its pension reform . In 1987, he resigned from the chairmanship of the trade union confederation for reasons of age and became its age president. Camacho was elected to the Cortes twice .

In 2001 Camacho was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Polytechnic University of Valencia .

Fonts

  • Conversations in prison: the labor union movement in Spain . In: Marxist paperbacks (=  Marxism current ). tape 94 . Marxist sheets, 1976, ISBN 978-3-88012-412-7 .
  • Memorias: Confieso que he luchado . In: Colección Memorias . tape 3 . Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1990, ISBN 978-84-7880-059-9 (Spanish).

literature

  • Josep Melià: Marcelino Camacho . Editorial Cambio 16, 1977, ISBN 978-84-85229-13-0 (Spanish).
  • Etsuko Asami, Alfredo Gómez Gil: Marcelino Camacho y Josefina: Coherencia y honradez de un líder . Algaba Ediciones, Madrid 2003, ISBN 84-96107-03-5 (Spanish).

Web links

Commons : Marcelino Camacho  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Farewell to Marcelino Camacho. In: RedGlobe. October 29, 2010, archived from the original on January 24, 2018 ; accessed on January 21, 2018 .
  2. ^ A b c Evaristo Villar, Juanjo Sánchez: Marcelino Camacho. In: Éxodo. January 2008, archived from the original on January 24, 2018 ; Retrieved January 24, 2018 (Spanish, interview with Marcelino Camacho).
  3. ↑ Crazy Adventure . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , December 23, 1968 ( spiegel.de [accessed January 24, 2018]).
  4. ↑ José Luis Ibáñez Salas: El proceso 1001: Sindicalistas en el segundo franquismo. In: Anatomia de la historia. November 25, 2016, Retrieved January 28, 2018 (Spanish).
  5. ^ A b Wolfgang Hamdorf: 100 years ago: Spanish union leader Marcelino Camacho was born. In: Deutschlandfunk. January 21, 2018, archived from the original on January 24, 2018 ; accessed on January 24, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Camacho, Marcelino
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Camacho Abad, Marcelino (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish politician and trade unionist
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Osma , Soria Province
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 2010
Place of death Madrid