Ramon Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (Barcelona, February 7, 1913-Havana, Cuba, October 19, 1978) was a Spanish communist militant and agent of the Soviet NKVD security service, known for assassinating the Russian politician and revolutionary Leon Trotsky on August 21, 1940. In reward for the act he received Soviet citizenship and was named a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Biography

Early Years

Ramón Mercader was the second son of a marriage from the Barcelona bourgeoisie formed by Pablo Mercader Medina and Caridad del Río Hernández. His father belonged to a prosperous family in the textile business. Caridad del Río was born in Santiago de Cuba into a wealthy family of Spanish origin. After settling in Barcelona before Cuban independence, she received a careful education. After getting engaged in 1908, Pablo and Caridad were married in Barcelona on January 7, 1911. The young wife adopted her husband's surname and would be known from then on as Caridad or Caritat Mercader. The couple had five children: Jorge (b. 1911), Ramón (b. 1913), Montserrat (b. 1914), Pablo (b. 1915) and Luis (b. 1923).

Pablo Mercader had an affable character, politically aligned with conservative Catalan nationalism —his son Luis stated, however, that he later militated in Estat Catalá— and had been a member of the somaten. Caridad del Río had no political opinions known at the time of their marriage. However, the marriage was not a happy one and, after the first years of living together, it began to founder and Caridad began to distance herself from her husband and her social class. In the early 1920s, Ramón's mother began to frequent marginal environments. At the height of gunmen in Barcelona, she frequented anarchist circles, even going so far as to provide them with information with which to attack the business interests of the Mercaders. At the same time, or perhaps as a cause of the transformation experienced by Caridad Mercader, the economic position of the couple began to deteriorate. When the patriarch of the Mercader family died in 1921, his eldest son, Juan, the hereu , was left in charge of the family businesses. However, he ran them ruinously, the business went under, and he eventually fled with his family to Argentina. The rest of the Mercader family was left in a precarious economic position, and the Mercader-Del Río couple, with their children, had to move to a more modest apartment on Ample (or Ancha) street, in the Gothic Quarter, next to the Basilica of La Merced.

Another factor that contributed to the end of her parents' marriage was the relationship that Caridad established with the French aviator Louis Delrieu. In 1919, while Caridad was staying at a family property near Alicante, Delrieu, which ran the Latécoère (later Aéropostale) line between Toulouse and Casablanca, had to make an emergency landing nearby — the identity of the aviador was established in 2013 by Gregorio Luri. Louis and Caridad fell in love and became lovers, although it is not known exactly when. All these scandals led the Del Río and Mercader families to take drastic measures. One night in 1923, nurses from the Nueva Belén de Sant Gervasi Asylum, accompanied by the Caridad brothers, entered her house, put her in a straitjacket and admitted her. Her husband and her brothers considered it preferable for her to be believed crazy than for her to end up in prison, where she was held incommunicado for three months, subjected to extraordinarily aggressive treatment, with frequent cold showers and electroshock sessions. She never forgave her family for this traumatic experience and, from then on, she considered herself detached from any commitment to her family or social class. When she managed to get out of the psychiatric institution, she decided to radically change her life and cut off all ties with her family. On an indeterminate date between 1924 and 1925, Caridad Mercader took her five children and went to live with Delrieu in the French town of Dax, in Las Landes. There she lived with her lover and their children until 1928, when this decided to end the relationship. Shortly after moving to Toulouse, where she ran a restaurant, Caridad Mercader attempted suicide. Upon being notified, Ramón's father, Pablo Mercader, traveled to the French city and took care of Montserrat, Pablo and Luis, Ramón's three younger brothers. Jorge and Ramón stayed in Toulouse, where they studied at the Hospitality School, the first to be a chef, the second to be a hotel maitre. For her part, Caridad evolved towards Marxism, making contact with the French Socialist Party (SFIO) and later with the French Communist Party (PCF).

In 1931, when the Republic was proclaimed in Spain, Ramón returned to Barcelona, where he obtained a job at the Ritz Hotel. Both his brothers, Jorge and Montserrat, as well as his mother, remained in France. According to his brother Luis, Ramón confessed to him that, when his mother returned to Spain, expelled from France in 1935, he had been a convinced communist for several years before. Around 1933, Ramón Mercader did military service in a unit of spenders (sappers).), in which he became a corporal. According to what his brother Luis narrated, he wanted to pursue a military career, but was rejected due to his communist militancy. In Luis's words, Ramón was “a very intelligent, energetic and determined man. Slender, tall (one meter 85 centimeters) and very nice; he always dressed elegantly. He did gymnastics and folded a ten-cent copper coin with three fingers.” In Barcelona, Ramón was a member of the Communist Party of Catalonia (PCC), the tiny Catalan branch of the PCE. It is known that in 1935 he had an affair with the communist militant Marina Ginestà, who would later become famous for the iconic photo that Juan Guzmán took of him on July 21, 1936 on the roof of the Hotel Colón in Barcelona. a womanizer, as confirmed by both Ginestà herself and her friend Teresa Pàmies. It is believed that he participated in the insurrection of October 1934, but without being subsequently arrested. On June 12, 1935, Ramón was arrested in Barcelona along with seventeen other communist militants, when he participated in the meeting of a communist cell that, camouflaged in the form of a literary and recreational club called Miguel de Cervantes, met in Chinatown. After his arrest, he was later transferred to jail model of Valencia, being released after the triumph of the Popular Front, in February 1936 - the police file of Ramón Mercader would later be very important to establish the identity of Trotsky's murderer. At the end of that month, a photo was published in the press in which he appeared at the head of a demonstration, together with other young communists, celebrating the release of Companys from the Puerto de Santa María prison. After his release, Ramón could not return to his job at the Ritz and had to earn a living teaching Catalan. Ramón was in this period an active militant of the Joventuts Comunistes de Catalunya, the youth of the PCC, which joined in June of that year in the Joventuts Socialistes Unificades de Catalunya (JSUC, formed by the merger of the communist and socialist youth organizations of Catalonia). Together with other colleagues from the JSUC, he collaborated in the organization of the so-called Popular Olympics, a multi-sport event that was to be held in response to the Berlin Olympic Games in July of that year in Barcelona. Ramón was the captain of the horse riding team — "a vestige of the bourgeois past in which both he and his parents practiced horse riding" -.

Spanish Civil War and NKVD agent

Leon Trotsky at the end of the 30s

On July 19, 1936, there was an uprising by the Barcelona garrison. Ramón actively participated in the combats against the rebel troops and, after the failure of the uprising, he left for the Aragon front, in the Trueba-Del Barrio column, made up mostly of militants from the PSUC and the Catalan UGT. According to the painter Josep Bartolí, who fought in the same unit as Ramón, both his mother, Caridad, and his brother Ramón, were part of the same column. Ramón was wounded at the front, in Tardienta, weeks after his mother she would also have been injured. Both of them met at a hospital in Lleida —there Teresa Pàmies, then a young militant of the Joventuts Socialistes Unificades de Catalunya in Lleida and later leader of the PSUC, met him when she went to visit her mother.

When he had recovered from his wounds, Ramón Mercader was evacuated to Barcelona, where he was entrusted with the command of the Lina Odena column, also made up mostly of Catalan communists. The column was sent in November to the Madrid front, where it participated in the fighting that took place in the Casa de Campo. Decimated, the unit was evacuated to Catalonia. In Barcelona, Ramón participated in the creation of the Jaume Graells battalion, of the Unified Socialist Youth, which would be integrated into the Carlos Marx column, now transformed into the 27th Division of the Army of the Republic, and of which he was commander. The battalion was training in a requisitioned convent in Sarrià, the Vorochilov barracks. The unit's staff was in a palace located nearby, on Paseo de la Bonanova, which had belonged to a relative of the Mercaders, which was confiscated personally by Ramón.

It is believed that his mother was recruited into the NKVD in early 1937 by Leonid Eitingon and that soon after it was Caridad herself who persuaded her son to also serve the Soviets. An episode narrated by Luis Mercader is known according to which, shortly after returning from Mexico, in the winter of 1937 —Luis did not specify the date— he and his mother visited the Madrid front, where Ramón was. Ramón and Caridad had a long conversation, the purpose of which, according to Luis, was to convince Ramón to also join the NKVD. Months later, in April, Luis would have drawn his conclusions: «... I found out that my mother was related to the Soviets (we called them that). Later I understood that my brother Ramón was related to them."

It has generally been postulated that it was in the summer of that year that Ramón disappeared from Spain to receive training. This is how Luis Mercader described him, without citing where said training took place. —Authors such as Wilmers, Levine or Gorkin affirmed, in fact, that it was in the Soviet Union. However, there are several testimonies that place Ramón Mercader in Spain during 1937 and even during 1938. Teresa Pàmies narrated several meetings with Mercader in 1937 —according to her, she would have visited the old Jaume Graells battalion in the Alcarria area in October, headed by Mercader; after this episode, He narrated how Ramón Mercader was later found in Barcelona, hospitalized due to dysentery.

Pável Sudoplatov recounted how, when he was still a simple NKVD agent, he assassinated the Ukrainian opposition leader Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam at the end of May 1938 and that, in his flight to the Soviet Union, he spent three weeks in Barcelona, where he would have met Ramón Mercader. On the other hand, the documentation kept by the Federal Security Service (successor to the KGB) affirms that Ramón received his instruction in France —this coincides with the testimony of Luis Mercader, who maintained that Ramón was for the first time in the Soviet Union in 1960, after being released from prison in Mexico. According to Sudoplatov, Eitingon would have sent Ramón to Paris in the summer of that year, with the aim of infiltrating French Trotskyist organizations. Although Stalin did not had still given the order to assassinate Trotsky, the NKVD had begun to prepare the operation, although Mercader was not yet directly involved in the matter. Leon Trotsky, who had been one of Lenin's most faithful collaborators, had lived in exile since January 1937 in Mexico, after being forced to leave Norway under pressure from the Soviet government. Thanks to the efforts of the American Trotskyists through Diego Rivera, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas had agreed to grant him asylum.

According to the testimony of Clemence Béranger, Ramón would have moved to Paris —where his mother had already been for "some time"— on some indeterminate date in 1938. Instructed by Eitingon, Ramón had to seduce Sylvia Ageloff, an American social worker and Trotskyist, whom he should use to introduce himself to Trotsky's entourage. Ramón Mercader used the false identity of Jacques Mornard, the supposed son of a Belgian diplomat. Ageloff arrived in Paris at the end of June 1938, on vacation and in order to take advantage of the trip to attend the founding meeting of the Fourth International. He did not know that his chance meeting with Mornard-Mercader had been arranged by Soviet intelligence. Mercader seduced Sylvia Ageloff and continued her relationship with her until she left for New York in February 1939. From then on, they continued writing to each other, which did not prevent Ramón from trying other ways of approaching the circle of Trotsky. After her murder, Frida Kahlo declared that she had met Mercader during her stay in Paris (January-April 1939). He would have asked her to help him find a house near Trotski's home in Coyoacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City, to which Kahlo refused.

Intervention in the assassination of Trotsky: the Pato operation

Present state of the house of Trotski in Coyoacán, at present the House of Leon Trotsky Museum.

In March 1939, Pavel Sudoplatov, director of the Special Operations department, received an explicit order from Stalin to end Trotsky's life. Eitingon, who had just arrived in Moscow, designed the operation on Sudoplatov's orders Utka or Duck. The plan was not outlined until July and only in early August was it personally approved by Stalin. Operation Pato comprised several operatives made up of Spanish and Mexican communists recruited during the Spanish Civil War. One of them was directed by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and had the objective of assassinating the exiled leader; the other was made up of Caridad and Ramón Mercader. This was solely to deal with surveillance and information gathering. The participation of mother and child was foreseen from the first version of the plan.

In the summer of 1939, Eitingon traveled to Paris from the Soviet Union and spent a couple of months training Caridad and Ramón. Both traveled to New York at the end of August. Coinciding with the start of World War II, orders were issued from Moscow to suspend the transfer of Eitingon and the Merchants to America, but these orders were not followed. Ramón stayed in New York for a few weeks before moving to Mexico City at the beginning of October, from where he convinced Sylvia Ageloff to meet him. In September, his mother and Eitingon traveled to Mexico as well.In the early hours of May 23-24, a group of gunmen led by Siqueiros stormed Trostki's home in Coyoacán without even injuring him.

Sentence to Ramón Mercader, Jacques Mornardby the Sixth Criminal Court of Mexico City, June 27, 1944.

Eitingon had to report the failure of the operation. The news reached Moscow via a message carried by courier to New York and broadcast in code from there to the Soviet capital. Upon arrival of the message, Stalin became furious and sent for Sudoplatov and Beria, who explained that the alternative plan would be put into operation. Ramón had been in Mexico for several months, under a false identity and as Sylvia Ageloff's boyfriend, and he he had devoted himself solely to the gathering of information, without having personally dealt with Trotsky. A few days after the failed attempt carried out by the Siqueiros group, Ramón Mercader finally met Trotski through his relationship with Ageloff. At the end of June he traveled to New York for ten days to receive instructions. After several months in which Ramón cultivated a relationship with the exiled leader, on the morning of August 20, 1940, he was received alone by the communist leader. Mercader supposedly brought him some writings. Trotsky approached the window in order to read better and at that moment Mercader delivered a ferocious blow to his head (nape) with an ice ax, burying the tool deeply into Trotsky's skull. Even so, Trotsky did not perish instantly and survived in spasms and convulsions for another 12 hours before passing away. Sylvia Ageloff, upon learning the true nature of Ramón's interest in her, attempted suicide. Arrested by Trotsky's guards and the Mexican authorities, he identified himself as Jacques Mornard , he was sentenced for murder to twenty years in prison. Initially, Mercader's statement was that he had personal problems with Trotsky.

According to Sudoplatov, initially Eitingon and Caridad Mercader had planned an attack on Trotsky's house at the moment Ramón was inside. He would take advantage of the confusion to shoot at his target. Ramón disagreed with the plan and decided to take charge of assassinating Trotsky alone.

Current state of the office where Trotski was killed by Ramon Mercader.

Trotsky would die the next day. According to the agreed plan, Caridad Mercader and Eitingon were waiting for Ramón in the vicinity of Trotski's house-fortress in a car —other sources speak of two— to help him escape. They realized that the attack had failed as soon as they observed the hustle and bustle and heard the sirens of the police patrols without Ramón having left, whereupon they fled the place and quickly left the country. However, according to the testimony of Eduardo Ceniceros, who would later become a lawyer for Ramón Mercader, it was Caridad who, before leaving the country illegally, took the necessary steps for her son to receive legal assistance. The chosen one, at the suggestion of Lombardo Toledano, was Octavio Medellín Ostos. Caridad did not reveal the identity of Trotsky's alleged murderer or that she was his son: «Look, graduate, what this boy has done. He is the son of a very dear comrade who is outside of Mexico and because of that friendship with his mother, I have come to request that they take charge of his defense." Caridad Mercader finally arrived in Moscow almost a year later Trotsky's assassination in March 1941. On June 17, Lavrenti Beria, the director of the NKVD, organized a grand reception during which the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin, decorated Trotsky. Caridad Merchant with the Order of Lenin. For Ramón the star of Hero of the Soviet Union was reserved.

Operation Gnome

Piolet used by Ramón Mercader to murder Trotski exhibited in a private collection in the US. United States

Stalin had decided that Ramón Mercader had to be released and ordered an operation to be prepared to obtain him. The first references to the plan date from May 30, 1943. In late 1943, the Soviet Union opened an embassy in Mexico, which provided legal cover for the NKVD station —rezidentura, in the terminology Soviet—in that country. Its main objectives were two: to cover the espionage operations that the Soviets carried out to learn the secrets of the American atomic bomb and to get Mercader out of jail. The operation, with the code name of Gnomo —which was the name assigned to Mercader-, studied various strategies for Mercader to escape from prison, in which Soviet operatives and Mexican and Spanish communists exiled in the country had to intervene. In the summer of 1943, Jesús Hernández was sent to Mexico along with Francisco Antón. In addition to the tasks related to the reorganization of the PCE in the American country —also part of his attempt to take control of the party, succeeding the recently deceased José Díaz as general secretary—, Hernández also worked for the NKVD and had the objective of reinforcing the work of the rezidentura in Mexico and the operations it carried out.

At the end of 1943, the Soviet rezident devised a plan by which Mercader could flee during one of the prison breaks to go and testify in court. Taking advantage of a reduction in the guard that was to guard him, Mercader would be put in a car and taken out of the country. Eitingon, under the code name Tom, was to coordinate the plan. The operation was a fiasco. Added to the incapacity, mistrust, and quarrels between the Soviet, Spanish, and Mexican operatives, was the unexpected presence in the country of Caridad Mercader. Apparently, he personally embarked on a series of negotiations with Mexican authorities to obtain the freedom of your son. In fact, according to Ceniceros, the mother and son could even see each other in person, outside the prison. The appearance on the scene of Caridad Mercader and her efforts would have alerted the Mexican authorities, who tightened Ramón's prison regime, so that the attempts to achieve their escape would have been unsuccessful. As Luis narrated, "[Caridad] knew many important people there [...] and, probably, she implored from one to another. But what he did was raise the hare and as a consequence everything that had been organized collapsed." As a result, the Soviets ordered Caridad to leave Mexico immediately, and no further attempts were made to remove Ramón Mercader. from prison, who had to fully serve his twenty-year sentence in the Lecumberri prison. Almost all the authors who have dealt with the subject, like Ramón himself, attributed the failure, in whole or in part, to the presence of Caridad there. In fact, Ramón never forgave his mother for her interference in the operation and considered her responsible for the additional period he had to spend in prison: "I had to spend sixteen years in jail because of him." However, he was never blamed. face personally.

Ramón's relationship with his mother

Numerous historians and publicists have presented Caridad del Río as a fanatical person who pushed her son to murder. Leonardo Padura described Caridad as follows: "Caridad del Río had not only been the one who educated her son in hatred and put him in contact with the officers of the dismal Soviet NKVD in charge of conceiving and executing the murder, but also He encouraged and promoted his mission until that same afternoon of August 20, when aboard a car and in the company of the creator of the plan, he saw Ramón Mercader enter Trotsky's house and into the sewers of the history of the century». Gorkin made a similar analysis when he first stated that "a dark police apparatus turned Caridad into a terrorist, mother of a murderer", adding that Ramón was sacrificed to the "blind fanaticism he professed". The description would be corroborated with the confidences that, according to Castro Delgado, Caridad had given her during her stay in the Soviet Union: "I have made a murderer out of Ramón." Other sources corroborate the devastating influence of her mother and her fanaticism for Stalinist communism over her son:

Ramon: – "After the war I want to live in Spain."-

Charity:-"You don't choose. None of us choose. We only do what the party decides."-

Ramon: "I refuse"-.

Charity:–"Put this in the head of a bitch. You don't think, you just obey. You don't act on your own, you just run. You don't decide, you just do. You will be my hand in the neck of that son of a bitch, my voice will be that of Comrade Stalin, and Stalin thinks for all of us."

Luis Mercader, however, presented a completely different vision. According to the youngest of the Mercaders, Caridad would not have had a great influence on Ramón or on any of his children, since, in reality, he lived with them for a short time. He also cited how his brother had told him that he was the one who he volunteered to commit the murder, simply to help Eitingon accomplish his mission.

For his part, Gregorio Luri points out an innovative thesis to justify the fact that Caridad recruited his son, which in the end put him on the path of committing an assassination. According to Luri, Caridad recruited his son to keep him away from the front so that his brother Pablo, killed in combat a few weeks before, would not suffer the fate of his brother.

Last years

In August 1953 his true identity was revealed. On May 6, 1960, Ramón Mercader finished his sentence and was able to travel to Moscow with a Czechoslovakian passport. There, where his brother Luis de él continued to live, he settled with his wife Roquelia. In the structure of the KGB he reached the rank of colonel, being secretly decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Medal (no. 11089), the highest Soviet distinction, fulfilling the promise he had made. Leonid Eitingon. The award was received in person directly from the then director of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin.

Access to the cemetery of Kuntsevo in Moscow, where the ashes of Ramón Mercader are buried.

He spent his last years living between Moscow and Havana, where he died of cancer in 1978. Rumor had it that the disease had been caused by a watch, a gift from the KGB, contaminated with radioactive polonium to eliminate the possibility of it revealing secret information. He is buried in the Moscow Kuntsevo Cemetery, reserved for Heroes of the Soviet Union, under an assumed name Ramón Ivánovich López (Рамон Иванович Лопес), near the ashes of notorious double agent Kim Philby. He also has a place of honor in the Moscow KGB museum.

In literature and cinema

Joseph Losey directed the 1972 film The Assassination of Trotsky, with Richard Burton, Alain Delon and Romy Schneider as the main protagonists. There is a documentary about Ramón Mercader, Asaltar los cielos, from 1996, directed by José Luis López Linares and Javier Rioyo. Before dealing with the figure of Ramón Mercader, he deals with that of his mother, Caridad.

Jorge Semprún published in 1969 the novel The second death of Ramón Mercader about the assassination of Trotsky. In the work The man who loved dogs, by Leonardo Padura, the long exile of Trotsky until his assassination in Mexico, the life of Ramón Mercader and that of a young Cuban, Iván, who she meets the killer while walking two Russian greyhounds on the beach.

From 2016 is the film El elegido, by Antonio Chavarrías, whose protagonist is Alfonso Herrera. It tells the story of Ramón during the Trotsky assassination operation.

The Obedient Assassin by John P. Davison (2016) is another novel about Ramón Mercader and the assassination of Trotsky.

In November 2017, Channel One Russia launched the Trotsky series that reviews the politician's biography through interviews between him and Ramón Mercader as well as flashbacks to the protagonist's past. Ramón Mercader is played by actor Matsim Matveyev.