– Abel Paz
From Child to Activist
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Buenaventura Durruti Domínguez, son of Santiago, a railroad worker, and Anastasia, was born on July 14, 1896, in León.
At the age of five, he attended primary school, and at nine, he attended secondary school on Misericordia Street, run by Professor Ricardo Fanjul.
The professor’s assessment of Durruti upon completing his studies was: “A gifted student, absent-minded, but with noble sentiments.”
At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed in a mechanical workshop, which he left at eighteen, having received a good education, which he demonstrated in his first job in Matallana de Torio, building mine wash houses.
He later joined the Northern Railway as an assembly mechanic.
This was in 1914, when the First World War broke out.
Manuel Buenacasa
Although León was a center of clerical and aristocratic domination, there was already a working-class core of the Spanish Socialist Party and the General Union of Workers.
Durruti belonged to the latter from the day he became a wage earner.
His rebellious nature, always willing to confront injustice, earned him a reputation among his colleagues and made him popular in the mining centers.
He participated in union meetings and spoke out in the workplace, where his militant and combative mentality was formed.
During this time, the revolutionary strike of August 1917 took place, which ended in León with the dismissal of workers and the repression of the leaders.
The León branch of the new trade union, the National Confederation of Labor the CNT, also participated in this strike.
Durruti was attracted by the fighting spirit of these men and joined this union, to which he would remain for the rest of his life.
Fired from the railway workshops and boycotted by the León employers, he had to go into exile and settle in Gijón, a center of revolutionary attraction in northern Spain and a hub of anarcho-syndicalist influence in the Asturian region.
There, he befriended Manuel Buenacasa, who introduced him to anarchist theories.
After spending two months in Gijón, he was forced to go into exile in France, unable to find work and having failed to register for military service, despite being 21 years old.
Exile and Revolutionary Action
In Paris, three men influenced him: Sébastien Faure, Louis Lecoin, and Émile Cottin. These men would forever remain linked to his life.
In Spain, his friends sent him news. The revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe prompted him to return to Spain in early 1920.
In San Sebastián, he met Manuel Buenacasa, general secretary of the city’s CNT construction union. A few days after his arrival, he began working as a mechanic, which allowed him to make friends with other militant workers in Barcelona, Madrid, and Zaragoza.
The foundations of an anarchist group had been laid in San Sebastián, and it was the group called “Los Justicieros” that Durruti first joined.
But the people of San Sebastián were people to whom “nothing ever happened,” and Durruti decided to move.
Buenacasa gave him a letter of recommendation for Ángel Pestaña, then general secretary of the CNT National Committee, who was in Barcelona.
Francisco Ascaso
He stopped off in Zaragoza, where the atmosphere was charged with workers’ struggles.
Cardinal Soldevila and the governor of Zaragoza had brought a group of professional assassins from Barcelona to murder Confederate militants and destroy the CNT in Zaragoza.
The reaction was violent, and a group of CNT militants, including Francisco Ascaso, were imprisoned in the Predicadores prison awaiting harsh sentences.
The workers of Zaragoza declared a general strike to demand the release of the prisoners.
Barcelona / Madrid: the “Los Solidarios” group
The event coincided with the arrival of Durruti and his friends in Zaragoza. The prisoners were released, while the struggle took on new proportions.
In this climate, Durruti, a close friend of Ascaso and Torres Escartin, decided to move to Barcelona in January 1922.
Barcelona, like Zaragoza at that time, was at the extreme end of the struggle.
Gangsters attacked labor leaders and murdered them in the streets. Faced with this attack supported by employers and the police, the unionists could only respond using the same methods.
Continue reading “One Life, One Thought: “Durruti, from Revolt to Revolution””
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