Mike Booth: The Gringo Chronicles

British journalist, editor, world traveller, and old Spain hand David Baird has written a new book, his seventh, and he didn’t have to go far to research it. He’s been sitting virtually on top of it since he arrived in the Andalusian village of Frigiliana to live in 1971. Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War in the Spanish Sierras, about to be published by Maroma Press in English and Editorial Almuzara in Spanish (where the title is Entre dos fuegos: Guerra sin cuartel en las sierras andaluzas) tells the long-ignored story of “the people of the sierra”. This was the anti-Franco guerrilla movement which operated in the mountains of Spain’s Málaga and Granada provinces in the 1940s and 50s during the fierce Franco repression after the Spanish Civil War.

For years Baird had heard hushed references to “la gente de la sierra”, and “el maquis”, as the anti-Franco resistance fighters were known, but it wasn’t till he started doing his research for Between Two Fires that he discovered that his own adopted village of Frigiliana was one of the principal centers both for guerrilla and counter-guerrilla activity.

One of his principal informants was Rosario “La Pichana”, a village grandmother who had lived just three doors away from Baird’s own house ever since he arrived there in the 70′s. He had greeted her on the street hundreds of times over the years, without ever suspecting that Rosario was a protagonist of one of the most dramatic series of events of recent Spanish history. Her story, the most moving in the book, tells how her young husband was arrested for no apparent reason by Franco’s militarized police, the Civil Guard, and taken to their headquarters in the village, never to be seen alive again.

Rosario’s testimony goes beyond mere murder to catalog the grueling lives of the peasants in the “years of hunger” after the civil war. Not only were they assailed by poverty, drought and hunger, but by the relentless coercion dished out by the Franco police state. Rosario sums it up nicely: “A lot of people went to Barcelona, because the life here was just beatings and killings.”

Though more than half a century has elapsed since the events portrayed in Entre Dos Fuegos, Baird was fortunate enough to have been able to interview not only witnesses but some of the actual participants in the events.

“My research was a battle against time,” he says. “The old-timers who lived through those desperate years are fast disappearing — in fact eight of those I interviewed have since died.”

Francisco Aguado, the Civil Guard colonel who wrote the official version of the conflict, denigrates “the bandits” and dots his account with terms like “eliminated”, “liquidated” and “exterminated”. But he also expresses grudging respect for the canny guerrilla leader, “Roberto”.

In an interesting aside from the story of the people of the sierra and the village of Frigiliana, Baird dedicates a chapter to what he calls “Operation Banana”, the efforts of the Allied secret services, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), from 1943 to infiltrate intelligence operatives into Spain, whose dictatorial regime was theoretically neutral but in fact sympathized with Hitler and Mussolini.

The Allies’ activities in Spain during World War II could best be described by a Spanish word: “esperpento,” a grotesque comedy of errors in which the two intelligence services not only competed with one another, but within their own teams and their own diplomatic corps on the ground in Spain. Didn’t a wise man once say: “Military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music.”

With Between Two Fires David Baird has written a valuable and necessary book, particularly for those of us who are fascinated by the tragic events in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War. He got there in time to speak with witnesses and participants — on both sides, adding to our understanding of post-war Spain at a moment when the legacy of the Franco years is a subject of fierce debate. This is no doubt why the book was snapped up by Almuzara, one of Spain’s best and brightest young publishing companies.