Part 1, Chapter 14 : Toward Paris: 1926

CHAPTER XIV. Toward Paris: 1926

After the holdup of the bank in San Martín, police were now sure of the thieves’ identities. They increased surveillance of the city’s anarchist circles and tightened control over the borders and ports. It would seem impossible for Durruti, Ascaso, and Jover to pass through the net that police had thrown over the region and yet that is exactly what they did. They set off for Europe in Montevideo at the end of February 1926.

Los Errantes experienced some of the most difficult moments of their lives between January 19 and their departure. It was very hard for them to find a safe place to hide and some veteran militants who knew Durruti and Ascaso from Spain even turned their backs on them; not because of police pressure, but simply to avoid getting involved. Had it not been for members of the Unión Sindical Argentina and the La Antorcha and El Libertario groups, it is very likely that authorities would have captured them. But this never happened, as we have said, and the principle organizer of their escape was a Spanish anarchist named J.C. Este. He had recently arrived in Buenos Aires and, when he learned about the difficulties that Los Errantes were facing, he rushed to arrange their trip to Montevideo and put them onboard the steamer that would bring them to France.

While they were busy acquiring passports and preparing their escape to Uruguay, Argentine police were searching for them relentlessly. Their hunt became even more complicated thanks to mistakes made by the police and also the press in Spain. A very confusing article appeared in a Spanish paper on February 23, 1926: “The Spanish Gunmen: Has Durruti Been Arrested In Bordeaux? Nothing is known about the event in Gironde, but in Gijón they guarantee that it happened. Some details of a terrorist’s eventful life.” That was the headline that La Voz de Guipúzcoa printed above its coverage of the news from ABC in Madrid, which had published the following telegram from its Gijón correspondent: “Gijón, 23, 11:00 pm. We just learned that Francisco Durruti has been arrested in Bordeaux for robbing a furniture factory in that city, a crime for which two Spaniards were recently guillotined. Durruti is the leader of the gang of gunmen who held up a branch of the Bank of Spain in Gijón on September 1, 1923. The bank manager, Mr. Luis Ascárate, was shot to death during the act.” “Durruti,” the correspondent from Gijón concludes, “had also been also in Havana, where he committed another bank heist.”

“We were surprised,” La Voz de Guipúzcoa wrote, “that our correspondent in Bordeaux, M. Melsy Cathulin, had not said anything about the matter and so we asked him about the issue during our daily meeting yesterday. He told us that officials had not reported Durruti’s detention and that none of the local newspapers had mentioned the event. This was strange, given the importance of the arrest and the stir caused by the robbery throughout Gironde. Furthermore, no one had previously implicated Durruti in the robbery of the Harribley furniture factory. Police had arrested three anarchists for that crime, in which two people died and three were injured. Two of the arrested anarchists, Recasens and Castro, were guillotined last December, but the leader of their group got away. Recasens and Castro said that their ringleader was from Aragón and used the nickname “El Mano” or “El Negro.” The fugitive in the photographs [which La Voz published] does not resemble Durruti in this slightest and his first name is also not Francisco. José Buenaventura Durruti, also known as “El Gorila,” is indeed one of the most prolific Spanish terrorists. He is a native of León and is fifty years old.

In 1922, Durruti lived in San Sebastián and worked as a mechanic adjuster in the Mújica Brothers factory and then later at another factory. He was vicepresident of the CNT’s Sindicato Unico [trans.: industrial union group] in the Eguía neighborhood and, until August that year, did not stand out as a man of action. He was an excellent worker but it was clear that his extremist ideas were deeply rooted. In August 1922, Durruti and two other syndicalists carried out a bold robbery of the Mendizábal brothers’ office. The three bandits entered with pistols drawn and, pointing them at Mr. Ramón Mendizábal, forced him to open the safe and hand over whatever money was in it, in addition to what he was carrying in his wallet. The crime went unpunished, since Durruti and his accomplices left San Sebastián before police found out about their participation in the event. Durruti was later arrested and transferred to San Sebastián, but it was impossible to prove his culpability.” La Voz de Guipúzcoa continued with Durruti’s biography, but their account contained numerous errors about his trip to the Americas.

Durruti, a man gifted with a rare intelligence, disappeared from Havana and set sail on a steamship with a false passport. In autumn 1924, he showed up in Paris. He had abundant money at his disposal—the booty from robberies in the Americas—and used part of it to support the anarchist weekly Liberation.

According to Spanish police, Durruti was traveling with another anarchist named Juan Riego Sanz, one of the ringleaders of the irruption at Vera del Bidasoa.

Despite the glaring errors in this article, it does contain two pieces of information that contradict those who tried to dismiss Durruti as a “pistolero:” he was a skilled technical worker and used the money stolen from banks to support the cause. But we return to essential matters: it was this article that shaped the actions of the Argentine police. Specifically, considering the official character of the Madrid daily, and also that the Argentines had failed to apprehend any of Los Errantes, it makes perfect sense that this article led them to think that Durruti had escaped and was in Paris. However, the Buenos Aires authorities were mistaken: Durruti, Ascaso, and Jover sailed to France in the very end February, 1926.

Before embarking, the comrades in charge of arranging their flight learned from reliable sources that the ship was not going to stop in any Spanish port. With that reassuring news, Los Errantes occupied their cabins. Several of the vessel’s sailors were sympathetic to anarchism and Durruti and his friends immediately made contact with them. These sailors’ reports were extremely useful and helped avert a tragedy.

While the ship approached the Canaries Islands, its captain announced that they needed to stop in Spain’s Santa Cruz de Tenerife for reasons beyond their control. Los Errantes became extremely worried. Had they been discovered? Were they going to be delivered to Spanish authorities? They were not going to let themselves be surprised and decided to take control of the ship and prevent it from making that stop at any cost. Who could help them? The anarchist sailors. They immediately spoke with one of them and asked him why the ship was making an unexpected stopover. The sailor put them at ease when he explained that it was fully justified by damage that the steamship had suffered at sea.

The passengers disembarked in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and stayed in a hotel at the shipping company’s expense. They would have to remain there until the company could send another ship, which would pick them up and take them to La Havre.

Although there was apparently no reason to fear, Los Errantes decided to take passage onboard an English ship scheduled to stop in the French port of Cherburgo. They arrived on April 30, 1926 and within two days were living in a hotel on Legendre Street in the Paris’s Clichy neighborhood. Using passports acquired in Buenos Aires, they registered under the names Roberto Cotelo (Durruti), Salvador Arévalo (Ascaso), and Luis Victorio Rejetto (Jover).

Los Errantes found a different Paris in May 1926 than the one they had known two years earlier. Most of the Spanish anarchists had moved to Belgium or scattered to the eastern and southern parts of the country. Lyon and Marseilles were the main centers of exiled anarchist activity. There was a Spanish Commission of Anarchist Relations in Lyon. There was also a group in Béziers called Prisma that would publish a magazine by the same name a year later that would be the voice of Spanish anarchist exiles in France. Nonetheless, Paris was still an important city for the exiled Spanish anarchists, thanks to the International Press, which worked under the auspices of the French anarchist periodical, Le Libertaire, the publication of the French Anarcho-Communist Union.

The following Spanish anarchist groups were among the most active: Germen, Sin Pan, Proa, Afinidades, and Espartaco. Among the most distinguished Spanish militants, we should note Valeriano Orobón Fernández, who published the Spanish language magazine Tiempos Nuevos; Liberto Callejas, who edited Iberón; and Juan Manuel Molina, better known as “Juanel,” who was the Spanish representative on the Administrative Council of the International Press.

The month and a half that Durruti and his friends spent in Paris is largely an informational vacuum for us. What we do know relates to their activities as men of action.

When had they learned that Alfonso XIII intended to pass through Paris on a trip to London? We don’t know. But after Durruti and his friends arrived in the French capital they met three old acquaintances who had fled Spain: Teodoro Peña, Pedro Boadas Rivas, and Agustín García Capdevila. These youths were implicated in bomb attacks on Spanish soldiers and it would be disastrous if they fell into the French police’s hands. Los Errantes thus decided to send them to Argentina, recommending them as good comrades to Roscigna. According to Osvaldo Bayer, those youths “carried a special invitation from Durruti for Roscigna, asking him to come to Europe, because he was needed as a strategic man of action. Roscigna did not accept the request: he apologized, but said that he was too engaged in the struggle in Argentina to leave.” [170] They had also asked Boadas to tell a comrade-driver in Buenos Aires that they urgently needed him in Paris. If we link Roscigna and the driver with the plan to kidnap Alfonso XIII—for which Durruti, Ascaso, and Jover were arrested on June 25—it is easy to deduce that their main concern from May until their detention was preparing the action against the King of Spain.

With the exception of comments by Italian anarchist Nino Napolitano, who was close with Durruti and Ascaso, very little information is available about this mysterious conspiracy.

I met Ascaso and Durruti at the home of a Parisian comrade named Bertha. One day they lost a suitcase and naturally I offered them mine. Ascaso took it in hand and said, laughing: “It isn’t strong enough!” I objected and said that the suitcase was perfectly good, of excellent treated material. I seemed like a shopkeeper anxious to sell his wares, but my efforts were in vain. Ascaso didn’t want it. Some time later I found out why: they needed a very strong suitcase to carry dismantled rifles and other weapons.

Around that time [1926], Paris was preparing for a visit from King Alfonso XIII.... The Third Republic planned to receive the man who had killed Francisco Ferrer with the melodies of La Marseillaise. Durruti and Ascaso planned to receive him with a pair of shots. They organized everything with absolute serenity.

This is the idiosyncrasy of Spaniards: they behave like great men, which is not to say patriots, even when they are proletarians. Our two comrades possessed this talent and made great use of it in the days preceding the official visit. To elude the web of police agents, they went to places in the French capital frequented by members of high society. They played tennis in a club and even bought a fancy automobile so as not to seem suspicious when they pulled up next to the statesmen participating in the welcome ceremony. They planned every detail meticulously.

We had dinner in Bertha’s house on the eve of the King’s arrival. I remember that she served us a sago soup that neither Ascaso nor I liked very much. We made fun of her culinary skills. When Durruti and Ascaso laughed, she began to cry.

“Where two conspire, my man is the third,” Maniscalao, the known agent provocateur of the Bourbons once said smugly. This time the third man was sitting at the wheel of the car that would take Ascaso and Durruti to the scene of the action. He had sold out to the French police. The two conspirators were arrested and Paris received Alfonso XIII to the sounds of La Marseillaise without missing a beat.[171]

Nino Napolitano’s testimony is first hand, but he wrote it in 1948. Too many things had happened in the intervening twenty-two years for him to be able to recall all the facts properly and, as a result, there are contradictions in his account of the period.

Bertha lived with Ferrandel, who ran Le Libertaire, and surely both were aware of Ascaso and Durruti’s plans. The visit mentioned in the quote must have occurred while they were preparing the action and, since the visits were infrequent, Bertha was quick to break into tears when teased. Ascaso and Durruti were arrested on June 25 and Alfonso XIII arrived two days later. The important thing in Nino’s comments is his reference to the provocateur; to the “driver” recruited by Los Errantes in circumstances that are unknown to us.

We noted that they had asked Boadas to tell the Argentine driver-comrade to come to Paris quickly. The Argentine did not come. García Vivancos also disappointed them (he was a member of Los Solidarios and had demonstrated his excellent driving skills during the Gijón bank robbery). Presumably, it was shortly before the King’s arrival, as time pressed upon them, that someone introduced them to the “driver” who would betray them. They were arrested in the morning while leaving their hotel on Legendre Street. A search of the premises revealed the weapons that they had hidden in the room.

The press first published news of their arrest on July 2, although it did not mention the date of their detention. Durruti clarifies this in a letter that he sent to his family while incarcerated: “I was arrested on June 25, on the occasion of the King of Spain’s trip to Paris, and implicated in a plot against him.... After my arrest, they took me to La Santé.”