PINOCHET, AND ME the Lincoln Brigade - prospects of Augusto Pinochet's extradition to Spain

Progressive, The, May, 1999 by Ariel Dorfman

That post-Franco Spain is demanding General Pinochet's extradition is a cause of great satisfaction to those who struggle for human rights all over the world. But it must be particularly satisfying to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who watched Francisco Franco die in his bed without ever having been held accountable. Now the ideological heir to Franco, who went to the caudillo's funeral and then had to leave hurriedly before Juan Carlos was crowned, is under arrest because a Spanish judge decided to charge him with the murder of Spanish citizens, with international terrorism, and with crimes against humanity.

What a wonderful gift to Lincoln Brigade Veterans at the end of their lives: some measure of justice in a century that has been woefully remiss in bringing dictators and mass murderers to trial. A sweet way for the pendulum of history to swing back, for a balance to be restored to the cosmos: that the Madrid which the Veterans defended in the battle of Jarama, that the Spain they had to leave against their will, be the final prison for General Pinochet, or, at least, the place where his trial might take place. And even if he were never to be extradited to Spain, even if he were to return to my country and we did not find the strength and breathing space to hold him accountable, even so, the international resolve and courage of the Lincoln Brigade Veterans will have once again received vindication because it is that spirit of going beyond national boundaries to defend freedom that is alive in the attempt by Spanish justice to deny a dictator like Pinochet the right to impunity or immunity.

My love affair with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and my debt to its Veterans, started many years ago, when I was nine years old. One day in October of 1951, the year I visited Europe for the first time, I stood on the frontier of Spain. My Argentine father--a former communist and still very much a man of the left--had sworn, like so many of his generation who had Espana en el corazon, that he would never step on Spanish soil until Franco was gone or dead. But we swear many things in life, and life makes demands of us that are not always heroic or definitive; life has a way of confronting us with what Primo Levi called the gray zones.

My father was working at the time at the United Nations in New York, and he had professional business to conduct in Madrid and Barcelona. And so we came to the frontier of the country he had never wanted to visit in his life, even though it had been at the center of that life and on his mind ever since its struggle against fascism in the thirties had inspired him and countless millions around the world.

What I remember above all was that frontier. We had been traveling from France and, because the tracks were narrow-gauge on the Spanish side, it was necessary to descend in Irun and change trains. My father took me by the hand and walked me to the very edge of Spanish territory. He crouched down to my height so he could look me in the eyes and told me that this was the place where the Republic had been betrayed.

Here, he said, right here, the weapons that the Republic had paid for had been blocked by the French, with the acquiescence of the English and the Americans. Proclaiming their neutrality, these countries, future allies against Germany, had conspired to starve the Republic, not realizing that they were, in fact, encouraging and appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Did I know who Hitler and Mussolini were?

I nodded my head solemnly.

Hitler's aircraft, my father said, and Mussolini's ground troops were engaged on the side of Franco. And I knew who Franco was because he was the hijo de puta who governed this land and whose name I shouldn't mention while we were in Spain. Even then, as a child, I was being trained, as my own children would be many years later in Chile, to hide my thoughts from the men in power, to hide what our family really thought about Franco.

Franco--my father twisted the word in his mouth as if it hurt him merely to say it. Here is where the Second World War began, my father went on. Never forget that here is where the Spanish were betrayed.

My father was crying as he said this, his hand trembling in my hand. I can't remember having seen him cry before that: He was--he still is at ninety-one--a man of steel, not one to vent his emotions. I don't recall him ever crying again, except when he told me, at another train station in Buenos Aires some years later, that his father had died.

Those first tears of his on the Spanish frontier certainly had the effect that he desired: I have never forgotten what Spain meant to him, how the loss of the Spanish Civil War was one of the great tragedies of his life and, I was later to learn, one of the great tragedies of a century that has seen its fill of tragedies.

The antidote to the tears came soon. As soon as the train began chugging south to Madrid, my father told me another story, in hushed, low tones: the story of the International Brigades, and particularly of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Or maybe he used the word "Battalion." How they had poured into this country to counteract the spread of fascism, the decisive battles they had won, el Ejercito del Ebro that had crossed the river and beaten the Falangistas.