The Volunteers’ Political Reading

When they joined the International Brigades, many of the Paraguayan volunteers – like all the volunteers who filled out these forms – mentioned the international Works or authors that they had read. In this way, the indicated the political writings that had defined the questions that most concerned them, as well as their perspectives on international events, forging their ideology, their way of seeing the world and what was happening in it.

As the Communist Party of Paraguay’s “Militants Biography” cards completed by Emiliano Paiva or Víctor Martínez - whose card is shown here – indicate, they had first become interested and involved in the proletarian movement in the 1920s. One of the key influences were the works that the Spanish writer and journalist Rafael Barrett had published during the years he lived in Paraguay.

Rafael Barrett was an anarchist intellectual who consolidated his ideology during his period in Paraguay, between 1904 and 1908, when he developed the political ideas and publications for which he is best remembered today. The relation between these Paraguayan men’s decision to volunteer to fight fascism in Spain and their ideology, which came from an Spanish anarchist exile, is paradoxical. Barrett planted the seed of antifascism in Paraguay many years before fascism itself was created.

Barrett was not the only anarchist who Paraguayan leftists and revolutionaries had read during the 1920s and 1930s. Their militants cards also mentioned the Russian Mikhail Bakunin and French geographer Élisée Reclus. They also listed a number communist authors: classic ones such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and more recent Soviet ones like Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin.

ETB