Melchor Rodriguez Garcia
Melchor Rodríguez García (Seville, May 30, 1893-Madrid, February 14, 1972) was a Spanish syndicalist and anarchist, councilor, prison delegate and briefly mayor of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. He was known as The Red Angel for his humanitarian work to prevent murders of prisoners on the Republican side from his position as prison delegate.
Biography
Youth
Son of Isidoro Rodríguez and María García, born on Calle San Jorge, currently number 23, in the Triana neighborhood in Seville. Melchor lost his father as a child, when he died in an accident on the Guadalquivir docks. His mother, a seamstress and cigarette maker, had to take care of raising Melchor and his two brothers on her own.
Melchor Rodríguez studied at the asylum school until he was thirteen years old. From then on, his family harassed by extreme poverty, he began to work as a tinker in a workshop in Seville. Already in his adolescence he tried to make his way as a bullfighter and left his house to visit various fairs and capeas with better or worse luck. El Cossío (the bullfighting encyclopedia) contains a reference to Melchor Rodríguez, cited as the only right-handed man who combined bullfighting with politics. Melchor made his debut as a bullfighter in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 1913 and later in increasingly important bullrings until arriving on August 4, 1918 to appear in the Puerta de Alcalá bullring in Madrid, where he suffered a serious injury. He retired from the arena in 1920 after some bullfights in El Viso del Alcor, Salamanca and Seville.
After his bullfighting career ended, Melchor moved to Madrid, where he began working as a sheet metal worker around 1921, the year in which he joined the General Union of Workers (U.G.T.). He soon felt attracted to the Labor Movement in the capital, and joined the Anarchist Group of the Central Region immediately after its founding (card no. 3). Shortly after, he was appointed president of the anarchist-style Bodybuilders Union, and went on to join the ranks of the CNT, where he began the fight for the rights of inmates, including those with an ideology contrary to his own, which It cost him prison on countless occasions during the monarchy and the Second Republic.
Civil War
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, anarchist organizations cooperated with the government. On November 10, Melchor Rodríguez was appointed special prison delegate for Madrid. From this position he tried to stop the release of prisoners from Madrid prisons (transfers of groups of inmates who were later shot in Paracuellos de Jarama and other places near the capital), such as Aravaca, although under different pressures and interference so that these resigned on the 14th. He resumed his post on December 4 after protests by the diplomatic corps and the president of the Supreme Court, Mariano Gómez González. However, this time he did so with full powers as General Delegate for Prisons, granted by the then Minister of Justice of the Republican Government, the anarchist Juan García Oliver. Through the prohibition of transfers between 7 in the evening and 7 in the morning, Melchor Rodríguez managed to stop the massacres in Paracuellos and the situation of terror in the prisons, at the price of confronting some communist leaders who wanted to continue with it. such as the Junta de Defensa de Madrid, controlled by the communists José Cazorla and Santiago Carrillo, and at great risk of his life on several occasions according to the testimonies of numerous eyewitnesses.[citation required]
It therefore had the responsibility not only to monitor the regimes and prevent escapes, but also to prevent the attacks and lynchings of prisoners perpetrated until their arrival by different political militias, as well as to end the sacks that had been produced up to then. The most numerous documented sacks took place in the Modelo Prison in Madrid at the beginning of November 1936, when the war front was already very close to the western neighborhoods of the capital, a circumstance that led to the massive transfer of inmates to other prisons such as like the one in Alicante or the prison in Alcalá de Henares, in the east of the province of Madrid. Many of the prisoners never reached their destination, being shot in towns like Paracuellos de Jarama or Torrejón de Ardoz, halfway between Madrid and Alcalá. Melchor Rodríguez managed to stop these atrocities, which led him to confront some leaders of the aforementioned militias, at an obvious risk to his own life. As of his appointment, and suspicious that his orders could be violated, Rodríguez took care of organizing and personally escorting the transfer convoys, thus guaranteeing that the prisoners arrived safely at their destination.
One of the first measures taken by Melchor Rodríguez as prison delegate was the implementation of a norm according to which the release of prisoners from prisons between seven in the evening and seven in the morning was prohibited without their personal authorization. This order meant to a large extent the end of the night walks of prisoners. The expression was a euphemism of the time to refer to the numerous murders of inmates who had been released a short time before, which usually happened during the hours of the night.
At the end of July 1936, Melchor seized, along with three trusted collaborators, the Viana Palace, located at number 1 Calle del Duque de Rivas in Madrid. The palace served for almost the entire war of refuge for many people persecuted as suspected of disaffection with the Government, some of whom were rescued in extremis from prison by Melchor himself, when they had already been sentenced to death by a People's Court. To do this, Rodríguez García made use of his revolutionary prestige and his public position, giving the captors to understand that he and his collaborators (constituted in an anarchist cell of the FAI which they called Los Libertos) would be in charge of to apply the sentence. The Palacio de Viana suffered the impact of an aviation bomb, resulting in injuries to the wife and daughter of Melchor Rodríguez. The family then moved to an apartment at Paseo de Recoletos 23 in Madrid, where Melchor continued his humanitarian activities. On numerous occasions he provided documents (such as C.N.T. cards or personal guarantees) to persecuted people, and managed the transfer of some of them to embassies such as the one of Finland or Romania to guarantee their safety. On several occasions he went so far as to provide passports and transportation to France for families in danger of dying, and on at least one occasion he personally accompanied the evadeees to Perpignan, France. >The Freedmen were suspected of having supported the rebellion of the military coup leaders; witnesses affirm that, upon crossing the border, the scene of one of these protected men was seen raising his arm in a fascist manner and exclaiming: "Up Spain, long live Franco!». Given the power of the FAI in the first months of the conflict, the certificate issued by this anarchist group was almost always the only way to leave the country, above the official documents of the Republican Government or the Generalitat of Catalonia.
One of the most notable performances by Melchor Rodríguez took place during some riots, after the National Air Force bombed Alcalá de Henares (December 8, 1936). A protest concentration in which armed militiamen participated arrived at the Alcalá prison, the ringleaders entering the first street market where they demanded the opening of cells to lynch several prisoners. Rodríguez went to the prison and risked his life by confronting the mob for several hours. He gave the order to deliver weapons to the inmates in case the assailants persisted in their efforts.
In this and other similar interventions (for example, in the Modelo Prison in Madrid) he personally managed to prevent harassment or arbitrary executions of inmates, frequent practices until his arrival in office. Thus he saved in extremis the lives of many people, some of whom later testified to the humanitarianism of Melchor Rodríguez García (for example, the soldiers Agustín Muñoz Grandes and Valentín Galarza, Ramón Serrano Súñer – who would later form part of the Franco governments–, Dr. Mariano Gómez Ulla, the brothers Rafael, Cayetano, Ramón and Daniel Luca de Tena, the broadcaster Bobby Deglané, the soccer player Ricardo Zamora and the Falangists Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Raimundo Fernández-Cuesta, among others).
On another occasion, Melchor Rodríguez denounced that José Cazorla, Public Order Counselor of the Madrid Defense Board, maintained illegal private prisons, apparently controlled by members of the Communist Party.
All these actions earned him being known by people on the right as The Red Angel. The famous maxim is attributed to him:
You can die for ideas, but never kill for them.
On March 1, 1937, he was dismissed from his position after a long series of disagreements with the communists, particularly with José Cazorla who had succeeded Carrillo as head of the Ministry of Public Order on December 24, 1936. Melchor Rodríguez went on to take over the office responsible for the cemeteries in Madrid. From then on, the old excesses against the inmates returned to a large extent, although the massive removals of prisoners in November and December 1936 were no longer repeated. Despite the brevity of his time at the Delegation of Prisons, barely three months, all the authors who have dealt with the figure of Rodríguez agree that the number of people who saved their lives thanks to his intervention can be estimated at several thousand In any case, Melchor Rodríguez continued to denounce the situation from his new job, in which he once again stood out on several occasions, assuming considerable risks. An example of this was the burial of his friend Serafín Álvarez Quintero on April 13, 1938, in which Rodríguez managed to have a crucifix displayed, thus fulfilling the last will of his friend.
Rodríguez was also appointed councilor of Madrid, representing the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Segismundo Casado appointed him mayor of Madrid in the last days of the war, and he was in charge of transferring power to the Francoists when Madrid surrendered on March 28, 1939.
Stepanov Report
Stoyan Minéyevich Ivanov, alias Stepanov, was an agent of Stalin in republican Spain. In 1939 he wrote a lengthy report on what, in his opinion, were the causes of the defeat of the Republic. In the report, Stepanov also refers to Melchor Rodríguez in the following terms. .
«...Melchor Rodríguez, anarchist. Former director of Republican prisons. From this subject who walked freely through the streets of Madrid with the fascists, the fascist newspaper Ya of 21 April 1939, while inserting a picture of him, said: "Melchor Rodríguez, who, from his position as director of Prisons of the Center region, bravely defended thousands of nationals locked in the red prisons." And then the following interview is included:- Why did you, being anarchist, save the life of so many nationals in the red period?
- It was just my duty. I always saw myself reflected in every prisoner. When I was in prison, I asked the monarchists, the Rightists, the Republicans... to protect those who were in power; then I considered myself forced to do the same thing I had defended when I myself was in prison, that is, to save the lives of these people.
- Was it easy?
-Now I can say with satisfaction that I often risked losing my own life for saving those of others. Many times in my own office, they pointed me to the chest with a gun barrel. It was coming out of the problem with value. When I returned to Madrid after having saved 1,532 prisoners from the dead in Alcalá, I had to hear tremendous insults and threats from leaders of relevance who even accused me of being a fascist.
I often had the possibility of fleeing the republican area, but I did not take advantage of it, because who had been concerned about the 12,000 prisoners in the five prisons in Madrid, and the 1,500 in Alcalá, the 28 people hidden in my house and many, many more? Only I could do this. Now I must say that I was alone in this matter. None of them, from the reds, helped me... »
Testimony in his favor by General Muñoz Grandes during the court martial after the civil war
After the war, Melchor's work was not only not recognized, but he was subjected to the same repression that fell on the defeated. Soon after, he was arrested and tried twice in court martial. Acquitted in the first of them and appealed against by the prosecutor, he was sentenced to twenty years and one day, of which he served four. It is worth noting in the celebration of this second court martial the attitude of General Agustín Muñoz Grandes, whom Melchor, like other imprisoned soldiers, had saved in the war. At the end of the War Council in which the death penalty was requested for Melchor and the prosecutor asking if any of those present in the room had anything to allege, Muñoz Grandes stood up, introduced himself as Lieutenant General of the Army and together with his Testimony featured thousands of signatures from people Rodríguez had saved, in some cases at personal risk, as collateral to save his life. He was in the Porlier prison and in the El Puerto de Santa María prison, where he was provisionally released in 1944.
Life in Madrid during the dictatorship and clandestine anarcho-syndicalism
From that moment on, Melchor Rodríguez had the possibility of joining the dictatorship established by the victors and occupying a position offered to him in the vertical union organization or living in a comfortable job offered by one of the thousands of people those he saved, options he always rejected. On the contrary, he was a versatile person who established his residence in Madrid and continued to be a libertarian and militant in the CNT, an activity that cost him to go to jail on several more occasions. Materially, he lived very austerely from various insurance portfolios. He wrote pasodobles and cuplés lyrics with maestro José Padilla Sánchez and other authors. In addition, he sometimes published articles and poems in the newspaper Ya of his friend Martín Artajo, former Minister of Foreign Affairs.
At the beginning of Francoism he was an active member of clandestine anarcho-syndicalism, being a firm supporter of Marco Nadal's national committee. Together with him, he maintained contacts with the English embassy for the recognition of the Alliance of Spanish Democratic Forces. In 1947 he was arrested and prosecuted the following year, accused of introducing propaganda in the Alcalá prison, for which he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, which he served in the Carabanchel prison.
Burial with rank of state funeral
At his funeral in 1972, celebrated with the status of a state funeral, people of conflicting ideologies such as anarchists and Falangists, among others, attended. The anarchist hymn To the barricades was sung and the Our Father was prayed, the coffin was covered with the flag of the Libertarian Movement.He was buried in the San Justo cemetery.
Honors and distinctions
In the town of Alcalá de Henares, the General Secretariat of Penitentiary Institutions (Ministry of the Interior) inaugurated on July 7, 2009 a Social Integration Center named after Melchor Rodríguez in his honor in recognition of the work he carried out in favor of the insertion and resocialization of prisoners.
On January 26, 2016, the Madrid City Council unanimously approved a proposal by the municipal Ciudadanos group for a street in the capital to be named after Melchor Rodríguez in his honor, in recognition of the city's last mayor republican for the great social and political consensus and for its great relevance that this had for reconciliation and harmony after the Civil War.
In December 2016, the Alcalá de Henares City Council approved the placement of a plaque in his honor on Santo Tomás de Aquino street.
In 2023, he received the Madrid Medal posthumously.
Melchor Rodríguez in film and literature
After several decades the oblivion of the figure of Melchor Rodríguez has aroused greater interest in 2017 as a result of various tributes and studies on his career. In this sense, various literary works and film documentaries have been published about Rodríguez García, such as the novels Os Salvaré La Vida (winner of the 2017 edition of the Alfonso X Prize for Historical Novels), El Anarquista Indómito (2017) by José Luis Olaizola and the documentary by Alfonso Domínguez Melchor Rodríguez, el Ángel Rojo (2017) was nominated for best director and best screenplay in the 2017 Goya Awards, from which he did not win an award.
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