Santiago Carrillo

Santiago José Carrillo Solares (Gijón, January 18, 1915-Madrid, September 18, 2012) was a Spanish journalist and politician, general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) since 1960 to 1982, and one of the key figures in Spanish communism from the Second Republic to the end of the Transition. He fought in the Spanish civil war, in which the most controversial episode was his degree of responsibility in the Paracuellos massacres, and was a relevant figure in the opposition to Francoism and the Spanish Transition, becoming a deputy for Madrid in Cortes Generales for nine years (from 1977 to 1986).

Childhood and youth

He spent his early childhood in Asturias until his father, Wenceslao Carrillo Alonso-Forjador, a foundry worker and militant of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the General Union of Workers (UGT), acquired the status of leader in 1924 member of both organizations and the family is forced to move to Madrid. They settle in the working-class neighborhood of Cuatro Caminos where they will live without abandoning economic difficulties, since the meager allowances that the workers' organizations allocated to their leaders hardly covered the needs of a family with five children. His mother was María Rosalía Solares Martínez.

Santiago Carrillo arrives in Madrid and joins the Cervantes School Group (located in his neighborhood, Cuatro Caminos) dependent on the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and directed by Ángel Llorca. Santiago Carrillo has said on several occasions that he was educated in the best school in Spain at the time. After completing primary education, he is selected to attend high school, but since the family cannot afford the examination fees, he abandons his studies to resume them years later. Meanwhile he begins to work as an apprentice in a printing company. Shortly after he joined the Socialist Youth of Spain (JJ. SS.) And the UGT.

In 1930, he studied journalism (just like his father) and began to collaborate in El Socialista and on April 14, 1931, after the Republic was proclaimed, he was entrusted with parliamentary information. Carrillo rubs shoulders with the great journalists in charge of parliamentary information from the other newspapers: Víctor de la Serna (Informaciones), Wenceslao Fernández Flórez (ABC)...

In his political militancy, framed from the beginning in the revolutionary minority of the socialist party (facing a reformist majority), he soon stands out for his capacity for analysis and dialectical ease. From the direction of Renovation (the magazine of the JJ. SS.), to which he agreed in 1933, he defended his revolutionary position by extending it within the Youth.

In April 1934, he was elected general secretary of the Socialist Youth. There were two currents in the PSOE at the time. The dominant group at the beginning will be that of the reformers, led by Besteiro and Prieto. The other group, also numerous, is that of the revolutionaries, whose leader was Largo Caballero (the "Spanish Lenin"). Carrillo begins to collaborate closely with Largo Caballero. He would soon achieve his appreciation, to the point of being considered his "dolphin". Supporter of the unification of the worker youth, he tries to provoke the unity of action of the Socialist and Communist Youth. Both organizations call demonstrations and participate in rallies as a unit. He also tries to get the Communist Left, a Trotskyist organization, to join the PSOE. He defends the entry of the PSOE itself, once the revolutionary sector has been imposed, in the Communist International (IC).

He took part in the revolutionary movement known as the Revolution of 1934, which led him to jail until, after the victory of the Popular Front in the elections of February 16, 1936, he was released. He shares a prison with Largo Caballero, his own father's and many other socialist leaders. It is during this confinement that he distances himself from Largo Caballero's political positions, considering them moderate.

Photographed in 1936 in Tolosa

When he was released from prison, the representatives of the Communist International in Spain proposed and organized a trip to Moscow with the addresses of the JJ. H.H. and JJ. DC. to negotiate their unification. In Moscow, Santiago Carrillo was dazzled by the triumphant revolution. The JJs. H.H. and JJ. CC., very close ideologically, reached agreements on the resulting future organization, the Unified Socialist Youth. The organizational base would be the Federation of Socialist Youth, which would maintain its relations with the PSOE. They agreed to adhere to the Communist Youth International as "sympathizers", renounced any relationship with Trotskyist organizations and set as their objective the unification of the workers' parties, under the orbit of Moscow. Condition "sine qua non" to be a leader was not to belong to Freemasonry.

Upon his return to Spain, even with the opposition of Carlos Hernández Zancajo (president of the JJ. SS.) and other members of the leadership, the unification was soon imposed, and in this process he experienced spectacular growth until reaching the 200,000 affiliates.

The Civil War

The military uprising of July 18 surprises Santiago Carrillo in Paris. He immediately returned to Spain crossing the border at Irún and, once in San Sebastián, he joined the Republican army, participated in the assault on a hotel occupied by the rebel troops and left with a column towards Aguilar de Campoo with the intention of advancing towards Madrid. Without achieving his goal, he fought for several weeks in the Ubidea mountains (border between Álava and Vizcaya), returned to France again to enter the Catalan border and thus return to Madrid where, with the rank of captain, he fought on the front of the saw.

After these first weeks of war, the process of unification of the communist and socialist youth having been interrupted, the leaders of both organizations regrouped. The idea of calling a congress was abandoned and on September 20 an executive made up of seven socialists and seven communists was appointed, with Santiago Carrillo at the head as general secretary. From these first moments, the Unified Socialist Youth have shown themselves to be especially active, being present in all units and on all fronts. Numerous young people join their ranks to fight against the uprising ^{[citation required ]}.

Defense of Madrid and Paracuellos executions

During the month of October 1936, the rebel forces advanced towards Madrid and on November 6 they found themselves at the gates of the capital. The government considers the city lost and hastily moves to Valencia, only in time to deliver two envelopes. One to General Miaja with instructions to organize the defense of Madrid. Another to General Pozas to move the army headquarters away from a city that, they foresee, could fall into the hands of the enemy. That same day Santiago Carrillo joined the Communist Party of Spain.

Immediately, the Madrid Defense Board was formed. It remains together until late at night to try to prevent the rebel troops, sheltered in the Casa de Campo, from entering the city. Santiago Carrillo is appointed Minister of Public Order. The Junta does not know what forces it has, although it is known that they are insufficient and poorly equipped. He has to recruit people and organize them, maintain the structure of the city (overwhelmed by the many peasants who have taken refuge in it, fleeing the advance of the rebel troops) and maintain the morale of its population, which already knows that the government has abandoned the city. (This war episode is known as the Battle of Madrid). He also values that it is necessary to prevent, as far as possible, that with the fall of the city the insurgent army increases its offensive potential. Among other measures, it was decided to evacuate the prisoners from the jails (Modelo, Porlier, Ventas and others), military and civilian sympathizers of the insurgents.

The next morning, November 7th, Madrid suffers air and artillery bombardments, in the Ciudad Universitaria and the Casa de Campo there is hand-to-hand combat and, on the other side of the city, a convoy of Buses that transport prisoners to other prisons outside the city divert or are diverted to the municipality of Paracuellos de Jarama, where the prisoners are killed by firing squad. The events were repeated two days later, this time in the municipality of Torrejón de Ardoz. Until December 4, not all the convoys would reach their destination. In total, between 2,396 and 5,000 prisoners —some authors^[who?] raise these figures to 12,000—, civilians and soldiers were killed and their bodies buried in graves common.

More than twenty years later, after Carrillo was appointed general secretary of the PCE, the Franco regime held Carrillo directly responsible for these massacres, accusing him of having allowed or supported them in his capacity as public order advisor. The controversy among historians continues today (see The responsibility of Santiago Carrillo in the Paracuellos massacres), with a certain consensus that Carrillo, in his capacity as Public Order Counselor, could hardly have been unaware, at least from the beginning. November 7, that the killings were taking place, without him having done anything to prevent it. A group of authors, headed by César Vidal, goes further and holds him directly responsible for the organization and execution of the massacres, without the evidence put forward being considered conclusive by other authors such as Ian Gibson or Ángel Viñas. Carrillo has always denied his participation or responsibility in the massacre. For his part, the Norwegian consul, Felix Schlayer, assured in his memoirs that he came to meet with Carrillo to inform him that the massacres were taking place and that he did not tell him. he made the slightest case.

On December 24, 1936, Santiago Carrillo left the JDM, when the front in Madrid had stabilized, and focused all his efforts on the political direction of the JSU, an organization that was especially combative throughout the war, with a majority of its affiliates (more than 200,000) integrated into the republican army.

On April 19, 1937, he resigned as president of the Madrid Press and Propaganda Board on the occasion of the non-celebration of the anniversary of the Republic on April 14. In a press release, comrade Carrillo saysː

"The government ordered the organization of the party and, to this end, a commission was appointed. But for fear and pressure from the CNT and FAI this commission has done nothing. This is the secret of not having celebrated the feast of April 14 with the splendor of ritual. "

In 1937 he became part of the political bureau of the PCE, as a substitute member.

Carrillo, since joining the PCE, disciplinedly complied with all the positions of the party leadership during the war. He did not raise any major discrepancy and assumed all the slogans of the Communist International.

Exile and hiding

The fight from Paris

At the end of the war, he left for France through the Catalan border, where he was participating in the last battles.

In 1936 he married Asunción Sánchez de Tudela, alias Chon, with whom he had a daughter, Aurora, who was born with very serious health conditions and would die very young. About his first wife there are different versions of his story. According to the communist Enrique Líster, Chon ended up buried in the garden of Dolores Ibárruri's house in Paris.

From Paris he travels to Belgium where the CI prepares a trip for him to reach Moscow. He travels to different countries to organize the IJC. On the death of the general secretary of the PCE, José Díaz, from Cuba, he declares that the only one capable of assuming the maximum responsibility of the PCE is Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria. Shortly after, Dolores Ibárruri was appointed general secretary against all odds, ousting the clearest candidate, Vicente Uribe. She is in Algiers when he is appointed a member of the Political Bureau and is entrusted with the highest organizational responsibility of the party at that time: the organization of the PCE in Spain. From there he travels to Paris as a stowaway on a French warship. In Paris, in 1944, he decides to stop the invasion of the Aran Valley. Carrillo considered that that invasion was nonsense in which most of the participating guerrillas would have died. He orders their withdrawal and organizes the "maquis" until their dissolution in 1949.

Between April 1946 and January 1947, he was a minister without portfolio in the Republican government in exile led by José Giral, a position with which the PCE distanced itself from Negrín's followers.

In 1948, Carrillo visits Tito with a request for weapons for the guerilla; A short time later, the party leadership, with the assistance of Santiago Carrillo, meets with Stalin at his request. Stalin, faced with the sterile efforts of the guerrillas, advised infiltration of the Vertical Unions, considering them a legal mass organization that the communists should use to combat Francoism. The PCE leadership is not convinced that they should infiltrate an organization so discredited among the workers, but they leave the interview willing to follow Stalin's recommendations. Together with the decision to infiltrate the vertical unions, although it was not suggested by Stalin, the party leadership decides to liquidate the armed struggle. Carrillo is tasked with presenting the new strategy, something he does in the communist magazine Nuestra Bandera .

In 1949, in Paris, he married Carmen Menéndez Menéndez (born 1923), with whom he would have three children, Santiago, José (Pepe) and Jorge. The Carrillo family lives under a false French identity, Santiago He justifies his long absences with a supposed profession as a traveling salesman. His own children, during their early childhood, will be unaware of his true identity; and all the weight of the "Giscard" family will fall on Carmen, who is the breadwinner of the family, is in charge of educating the children, taking care of the house and making work compatible with her activities as a PCE militant.

Promotion to General Secretary

In the 1950s, relations between La Pasionaria and Carrillo cooled down due to differences regarding the organization of the party in Paris. Carrillo points out the mismanagement of Uribe (the number two of the PCE at that time), the head of the organization in France. Previously, another leader, Francisco Antón Sanz, raised the same criticism, being removed from the leadership and sent to Warsaw.

At the V Congress of the PCE, held in Czechoslovakia in 1954, Carrillo proposed the democratization of the party.

In 1955 Spain joined the UN at the proposal of the United States and with the favorable vote of the Soviet Union. Stalin had died in 1953 and a process of détente was beginning. The United States and the USSR had each proposed the entry of different countries that the other would approve. Santiago Carrillo from Paris published an article in Nuestra Bandera approving the entry and raising the "national reconciliation policy". The PCE leadership, unaware of the article's existence, makes statements to the contrary. Carrillo finds out about these statements when the article is still in print without doing anything to remove it. As a result of this situation, Santiago Carrillo was about to be expelled from the party.

The conflict raised by Santiago Carrillo was serious. Carrillo was the highest political manager of the PCE organization in Spain, he controlled that organization. Management could not allow all that power to be in the hands of someone who was beyond his control and his attitude was considered high treason.

The XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was held on those dates, where Carrillo was excluded from the communist party delegation with the excuse of being essential in Paris. Between sessions, the leadership of the PCE, led by Pasionaria, swore an oath against Carrillo. Everything indicated that Carrillo would be expelled from the party for "fractionario" when Pasionaria came to know the content of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech, a report for internal use by the CPSU in which he condemned Stalinist practices and reviewed the structure of the CPSU. Pasionaria understood that times had changed, and made the rest of the management reconsider his position.

Shortly after Santiago Carrillo traveled to Budapest, summoned by the party leadership. Carrillo travels convinced that he will be expelled from the party. However, he returned to Paris as virtual general secretary, since Dolores Ibárruri delegated all his responsibilities to him since then. At the VI Congress of the PCE, Carrillo officially accessed the General Secretariat while Pasionaria was promoted to the Presidency.

Santiago Carrillo at a SED Congress,1963. Walter Ulbricht and Nikita Jruschov on his right. Nicolae Ceauşescu to his left

Under Carrillo's leadership, the PCE became the most belligerent organization in opposition to Francoism. When Carrillo gained prominence in the PCE, with the headline "The Paracuellos Massacre", Francoism launched its propaganda machine to hold him responsible for those deaths, although his responsibility is still debated by historians.

With Carrillo's ascension to the General Secretariat, Stalinist practices do not disappear, they only soften. In 1964 the differences between Fernando Claudín and Jorge Semprún were resolved by accusing them of factionaries and expelling them from the party. Santiago Carrillo exercised the General Secretariat with authority. Claudín would comment that on one occasion he raised the following question in the Central Committee: "Comrades, is it not abnormal that after eight years, since Santiago directed the work, we have not adopted any resolution contrary to his positions?" Claudín recounts that after a silence, Mije said: "Yes, once, when Santiago proposed to go clandestinely to Asturias, we rejected his position." The Communist Party failed to resolve its internal democracy problems during the period in which Carrillo remained in its leadership, dissensions were never accepted naturally and in most cases they were resolved with the departure of the party from the minority position.

Starting in 1968, after his criticism of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he began to distance himself from the guardianship of the USSR and his rapprochement, together with the Italian communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, and the Frenchman Georges Marchais, to the independent line with respect to Moscow known as Eurocommunism.

The Spanish Transition

In July 1974, Carrillo together with the monarchist Rafael Calvo Serer presented in Paris the Declaration of the Democratic Junta of Spain, in which the PCE and CCOO had played a prominent role. In 12 points, the Democratic Junta synthesized the social demands of the Spanish democratic opposition.

Carrillo in December 1976 and Enrico Berlinguer, secretary of the ICP.

In 1976, after Franco's death, he secretly returned to Spain and was arrested, in an action provoked by himself in order to put the government in the position of having to recognize the existence and strength of the party, as well as like the efforts developed in the clandestine period in the fight for freedoms.

Before this return, he had already held talks, through third parties, with the government of Adolfo Suárez. Carrillo had offered guarantees of moderation of his militants, as well as the acceptance of the monarchical regime and the national flag, anticipating the socialist party itself in this. His activities and mentality, more open and cautious than that of many party members, have led him to be considered by some historians as one of the personalities who made possible the success of the political transition to democracy in Spain.

It will definitely be with the Atocha massacre attack on January 24, 1977, where four lawyers affiliated with the PCE are shot to death by a group of extreme right, when many believe that Carrillo obtains the definitive support from Spanish society and Suarez. A day later, the first large mass demonstration of the left since the Second Republic took place, followed weeks later by dozens of strikes and peaceful demonstrations, in solidarity with what happened and the communist party.

Santiago Carrillo and Rafael Alberti at the first PCE party at the Casa de Campo. 1978.

On January 27, Carrillo meets with Suárez and promises that the PCE will renounce claiming the republic, in exchange for legalization. On March 2, at a meeting held in Madrid attended by Marchais and Berlinguer, Carrillo officially presents the Eurocommunist movement. On April 9, the PCE was legalized by the Suárez government, which caused not a few tensions within it and a certain rattling of sabers, with the immediate resignation of the Minister of the Navy. Santiago Carrillo's statement after hearing the news was:

I just met the legalization of the PCE. The news gives me the same satisfaction that millions of workers and Democrats will feel in Spain. It is an act that gives credibility and strength to the process of marching towards democracy. Now, what is indispensable is that the other parties are also legalized and that genuine union freedom is achieved. The working class and the workers of culture will finally be able to speak in our country with their true voice. I don't think President Suarez is a friend of the communists. I consider him rather an anti-communist, but a smart anti-communist who has understood that ideas are not destroyed with repression and illegalization. And he's willing to face ours, yours. Well, that's the ground where the divergences must be settled. And let the people, with their vote, decide. This requires the legalization of parties to be accompanied by genuine freedoms and non-discriminatory treatment in the State media.

Democratic period

On June 15, the first democratic elections take place in which Carrillo is elected deputy to Congress for Madrid, later taking part as such in the process of drafting the new Constitution.

The debacle and his expulsion from the leadership of the PCE

His election would be renewed in the successive electoral calls of 1979 and 1982. However, the electoral results were not good and a series of personalities belonging to the so-called renovation sector began to drop out. This would lead him to leave the general secretariat in the hands of Gerardo Iglesias on November 6, 1982. Iglesias was much younger and belonged to that critical sector, and he soon had strong confrontations with him that culminated on April 15, 1985 with the departure of the party leadership of Carrillo and his followers.

The following year he forms a new party called the Spanish Workers' Party-Communist Unity (PTE-UC), which soon proves incapable of attracting voters, so it ends up joining the PSOE along with its leaders, except Carrillo who does not accept entry into the Socialist Party due to his many years as a communist militant.

In the background, the last few years

Santiago Carrillo signing his Memories at the Madrid Book Fair in 2006.

On October 20, 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Autonomous University of Madrid. The ceremony was marked by the violent action of a small group of people who attended the protest rally. Among them, some burst into the room with Francoist flags and hurled insults at Carrillo, calling him a "murderer"; and "genocidal". A few months earlier, on April 16, members of the extreme right had already tried to attack him during a gathering in a bookstore in Madrid, on the occasion of the presentation of the book Historias de las dos Españas by the writer Santos Juliá. Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid.

In his last years he continued to collaborate regularly with various media outlets such as El País and Cadena SER.

Death

On September 18, 2012, at the age of ninety-seven, Santiago Carrillo died at home while taking a nap due to heart failure, according to his family, a few months after he was admitted to the hospital. a hospital in Madrid due to blood supply problems. Some 25,000 people said goodbye to Santiago Carrillo in his funeral chapel in the CCOO's Marcelino Camacho Auditorium on Wednesday, September 19, starting at 10:00 a.m. At his funeral, personalities from the Spanish political leadership such as King Juan Carlos I and Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, representing the ruling party. The king told the press that: "[Carrillo] was a fundamental person for the Transition and Democracy and very loved."

Works

Television participation

• Tell me how it happened. interpreting himself in chapter 178 of the tenth season called Before dying than losing lifeas a communist leader.
• Seven Lives interpreting himself, in a cameo as former party partner of Soledad Huete.

Additional bibliography

• Preston, Paul (2013). The red fox. The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Madrid: Editorial Debate. ISBN 9788490324226.