Gerardo Iglesias

Gerardo Iglesias Argüelles (La Cerezal, Mieres, Asturias, June 29, 1945) is a Spanish miner, trade unionist and politician, now retired from public life.

Biography

In 1950, as a child, he witnessed the torture of his father, arrested by the Civil Guard for supporting the anti-Franco guerrillas. A miner by profession, he became a member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) at the age of 15, in 1961. Due to his political and union activities (he participated in the organization of the Workers' Commissions) he was repeatedly imprisoned during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.. In 1962, due to the great mining strike in Asturias (mining strike of 1962), he was arrested for the first time. The following year he was elected a member of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Asturias. At the end of January 1967, Iglesias was arrested, along with other members of the Provincial Coordinator of the CC.OO., in a broad operation that sought to thwart the Asturias day of struggle that had been called for the 27th in protest of the trial that was going to take place in the Court of Public Order against union comrades in Madrid. He was sentenced to four years and six months in prison.

Member of the PCE Central Committee

In 1973 he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the PCE. Arrested again, he had to serve another year in jail.Iglesias constantly led struggles for the sake of improving life for the miners, using his position in the PCE to put pressure on the Government. The civil authorities knew that the leadership of Asturian communism was concentrated in the Tres Amigos well (the most important in the area), in Mieres, led by Gerardo Iglesias. In this sense, the official spokesmen dismissed the union fight by accusing it of "fighting private interests."After the CCOO General Assembly held in Barcelona in 1976, he was elected the first general secretary of the CCOO in Asturias. The III Regional Conference of the PCA elects him as general secretary in 1978. That same year he is re-elected as a member of the Central Committee of the PCE in the IX Congress of the same and becomes part of the Executive Committee. He presided over the X Congress of the PCE held in 1981, after defending the Carrillista theses and confronting the so-called renovators , who after the Congress ended up being expelled or voluntarily leaving the organization.

General Secretary of the PCE

In November 1982, after the resignation of Santiago Carrillo, he was elected general secretary of the PCE and initially turned towards theses close to those of the recently purged renovadores. For this last reason, he ended up facing Carrillo's Eurocommunist sector until the latter's expulsion in 1985. In 1986 he participated in the creation of Izquierda Unida of which he was elected General Coordinator. In the general elections of 1986 he was elected deputy for Madrid. At the same time, he promoted the process of Communist Unity with Ignacio Gallego's PCPE and Enrique Líster's PCOE, establishing a greater proximity with Moscow after the progressive abandonment of Carrillo Eurocommunism.

Resignation and withdrawal from politics

In 1988, during the XII Congress of the PCE, Gerardo Iglesias resigned from all his posts and Julio Anguita was appointed the new general secretary, who would also replace him in the direction of IU the following year. Although he received a proposal in 1990 to To stand again in the regional elections, he did not accept and left politics permanently. He would rejoin his old position in the mine, until due to an illness resulting from a work accident he had to retire. On October 4, 2016, the prosecution requested the suspension of the statement of Gerardo Iglesias for the torture suffered during the dictatorship by the police officer Pascual Honrado de la Fuente.

Works

• Why would I sneeze the memory (2011). Posted by Madera Norway Editors. Churches toured the history of the maquis in Asturias during the Spanish civil war and until the last of the guerrillas harassed on the mountain died.
• The amnesia of the accomplices (2015). Posted in Oviedo by KRK Editions. It gathers a compendium of 150 resistant biographies that faced the Franco regime in the years after the Civil War.