Mariano R. Vázquez

Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez (1909 – 18 June 1939), popularly known by his nickname Marianet, was a Catalan anarcho-syndicalist politician that served as Secretary General of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War.

Born into a working class Calé family in Barcelona, his mother died while he was young and his father subsequently abandoned him. He spent his teenage years in poverty and frequently in prison, where he first found connection with the Spanish anarchist movement and learnt how to read and write. After his release, he joined the construction union of the CNT and began writing for its newspaper Solidaridad Obrera, getting involved in a debate on anarchist feminism with Lucía Sánchez Saornil that culminated in the establishment of the Mujeres Libres.

Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Vázquez became the CNT's secretary general, a position from which he was a leading advocate for anarchist collaboration with the Republican government. In the wake of the May Days, his positions on collaboration and military discipline drew criticism from parts of the anarchist movement, which questioned his loyalty to the government of Juan Negrín. After the victory of the Nationalist forces, Vázquez fled to France, where he organised aid for Spanish refugees and the transfer of the CNT's archives to the International Institute of Social History. He also entered into a polemical exchange with Emma Goldman, who had supported him throughout the war but now questioned whether he had been "duped" by Negrín and the Communists. Vázquez himself held that the Republican defeat had been due to a lack of support from Western democracies, and that the CNT had been premature to pursue revolution before winning the war.

Vázquez drowned in the Marne river in June 1939. His memory quickly became a target for anarchist critics of collaborationism, who held him personally responsible for the collapse of the Revolution. Allegations of moral and political corruption were made against him, sometimes infused with anti-Romani sentiment. In the 21st century, he has been cited together with Helios Gómez as a notable example of Romani participation in the leadership of the Spanish anarchist movement.

Early life and activism
Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez was born in 1909 in Barcelona, into a working class Calé family. Vázquez grew up in the neighbourhood of Hostafrancs, in Barcelona's Sants-Montjuïc district. His mother died while he was still a child, and his father abandoned him to a children's shelter, which at the time were well known for having problems with child abuse. By the time he was a teenager, he escaped the institution. But without a family or a job, throughout the 1920s, he faced difficulties with poverty and was frequently imprisoned. In prison, he met members of the Spanish anarchist movement, who became his chosen family and taught him how to read and write. He subsequently dropped his patrilineal surname "Rodríguez" and began signing his name using only his matrilineal surname "Vázquez".

Following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, Vázquez was released from prison into a new political environment. He took up work as a bricklayer and joined the construction union of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), as well as the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), within which he became popularly known by the nickname "Marianet". During the Republican years, he was frequently detained for his anarchist activism and served six prison sentences, which together totalled 29 months. On one occasion, in September 1931, he was arrested during a confrontration between his union and the police. He was imprisoned for a year and three months, which he spent studying anarchist theory and writing articles for the CNT's newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. After his release, he returned to political activism and quickly rose through the ranks of the CNT.

He became a leading voice within the anarchist press, in which he advocated for the establishment of a women's platform within the anarchist movement. In 1935, he published two articles on the subject in Solidaridad Obrera, demonstrating sympathy for the problems anarchist women faced within the movement and recognising that they were effectively "slaves of slaves" so long as they continued to be subject to domination by men. He called for anarchist women and men to unite in order to create a new society, in which everyone would have economic independence and women would thus be liberated from male domination. These articles ignited a public debate between him and Lucía Sánchez Saornil over the issue of anarchist feminism, which culminated in the latter establishing the anarchist women's organisation Mujeres Libres.

Rise to the CNT leadership
By the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Vázquez had become secretary of the CNT's regional committee in Catalonia. During the July 1936 military uprising in Barcelona, he and other members of the CNT leadership stormed the Atarazanas barracks, seizing weapons in order to fight the Nationalists. The Nationalists were beaten in Catalonia, which became a centre for a social revolution that saw the widespread collectivisation of property by the anarcho-syndicalists. Vázquez, together with Buenaventura Durruti and Joan Garcia i Oliver, met with the Catalan president Lluis Companys, who appeared to having accepted the anarchist control over Barcelona. Vázquez himself then oversaw the formation of an anti-fascist alliance with the government of Catalonia, defending the necessity of anarcho-syndicalists fighting alongside the Popular Front against the Nationalists. Within weeks, the Catalan government – composed of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) – attempted to sideline the newly-established Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA) and bring the Civil Guard into Barcelona. But Vázquez, along with Durruti and Garcia i Oliver, defended anarchist control of the capital by force of arms, demanding the government's immediate dissolution. In order to appease the anarchists and avoid armed confrontation, Catalan prime minister Joan Casanovas decided to exclude the PSUC from his administration, first seeking the approval of Vázquez before publicly announcing the move. By September 1936, Vázquez had overseen the integration of several members of the CNT into the Catalan government, taking three ministries and a number of other posts associated with defence and public order.

Vázquez became a leading advocate of anarchist collaboration with the governments of Catalonia and the Spanish Republic. He moved to Madrid, where he oversaw the integration of anarchists into the Republican government. He initially opposed immediate integration into the government, aiming to secure proportional representation for the CNT in a government presided over by the trade union leader Francisco Largo Caballero. Vázquez managed to secure four ministries for the CNT in the new government, even convincing the intransigent Joan Garcia i Oliver to take a ministerial post. He then moved to Valencia, where the government had sought refuge from the Nationalist's siege of Madrid. The government's move to Valencia provoked discontent from the CNT's membership, many of whom accused the government and their own secretary general, Horacio Prieto, of "cowardice". Prieto himself responded on 18 November 1936, by tendering his "irrevocable resignation". In his place, Vázquez was elected as the new Secretary General of the CNT. In his first address to the CNT, on 20 November, Vázquez appealed for "individual and collective discipline" in the face of the circumstances that drove them to collaboration with the government. He quickly appointed Jacinto Toryho as editor-in-chief of Solidaridad Obrera, replacing the "bohemian" Liberto Callejas, and charged him with adapting the newspaper to the strict discipline he saw as necessary. When Toryho came under attack from Callejas and Jaume Balius i Mir, who accused him of expelling "true anarchists" from the paper and replacing them with "suspect journalists", Vázquez publicly defended him as having worked in service of the CNT's political line.

Throughout the war, Vázquez concerned himself with the situation of the Durruti Column, cultivating relations with Mexico, inviting foreign anarcho-syndicalists to Spain and making revolutionary martyrs of those people killed on the front. When Málaga fell in early 1937, Vázquez called for each party on the republican side to examine their own responsibility in the defeat. In April 1937, when the militarisation of the confederal militias was decreed, he defended the policy in an interview with the anti-statist magazine Nosotros. He promised that the militarisation would not be an authoritarian implementation, and that anarchists would maintain control of their own units, although they would be integrated into a coordinated and unified force, under strict military discipline. Vázquez believed that organisational discipline within the anarchist movement was the best way that they could counter the "tidal wave of confusion" caused by the rise of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). Seeking to impose the military discipline of the frontline onto the anarchist rearguard, he reorganised the CNT's syndicates into sections that could better support the war effort. He also announced military recruitment drives, holding particular contempt for the "señoritos" (young bourgeois men) that spent their time relaxing in cafés rather than fighting on the frontline.

Conflict and mediation
In the early months of the war, both the anarchists and the government of Largo Caballero had wanted equitable collaboration, with anarchist leaders such as Vázquez, Federica Montseny and Joan Peiró giving a speech on the matter in Valencia on International Workers' Day. But civil conflict between the anarchists and communists had begun to come to a head in early 1937, as the latter faction increasingly attacked the former. In April of that year, Vázquez publicly denounced the Communists for killing anarcho-syndicalists in Toledo. During the May Days, when fighting the two factions broke out over control of Barcelona, Vázquez went to the city in order to mediate a ceasefire. He and Montseny managed to secure an armistice, in exchange for the dismissal of the Catalan communist police chief Eusebio Rodríguez Salas. Vázquez believed that the Communists had deliberately sought to provoke the anarchists into open conflict. Diego Abad de Santillán expressed to Vázquez regret over their response to the provocation, saying that the CNT leadership had made an error "in bringing an end to the firing without having resolved the pending problems."

In the wake of the conflict, Vázquez reiterated his support for the government, calling for it to be reorganised on the basis of a CNT-UGT coalition with Largo Caballero continuing as its president. But Largo Caballero failed to form a new cabinet and was subsequently replaced by the communist-backed Juan Negrín. Negrín quickly ousted the CNT from his cabinet and Vázquez immediately began appealing for its reincorporation, but his requests were rejected. On 29 May, Vázquez issued a report that rejected further collaboration with the "government of the counterrevolution" and called for the formation of an opposition coalition with the UGT. But this was widely seen by his opponents as a bluff, as within days of the report's publication, Vázquez was meeting with Negrín in an attempt "to discuss conditions for possible collaboration". The following month, Vázquez called for the creation of a government with proportional representation for all organisations on the Republican side, but the government had no intention of readmitting the anarchists into their ranks. Juan Manuel Molina Mateo reported that, during this period, Vázquez spent his meetings with Negrín "discussing trivialities" and appeared ignorant to the "gigantic operation under way to end once and for all the influence of the CNT." After the fall of Euskadi in June 1937, Vázquez appealed personally to President Manuel Azaña, demanding the re-entry of the CNT into government and a reform of the Republican war effort.

In this time, the Negrín government had also intensified its repression against the POUM and its leader Andreu Nin was forcibly disappeared. Although he saw the affair as a symptom of intra-Marxist conflict between the Stalinists and Trotskiysts, Vázquez publicly protested against the political repression of the POUM. He stated that the repression of the POUM had started the Republicans down a "dangerous course", which he believed would lead to the political repression of anyone that demonstrated opposition to the government. He even expressed worry that he himself may have been at risk of arrest, imprisonment and even execution. He subsequently appealed to the Republican government for the repressions against the POUM to be halted.

Campaign for reintegration
Despite the repressions, Vázquez continued to support the government even after Negrín's rise to power. This made him a focus of criticism from other anarchists, who accused Vázquez of "revisionism" and "betrayal of anarchist principles". Vázquez was most vocally criticised by the Friends of Durruti Group, led by Jaume Balius, who had taken up a personal vendetta against him. He was also criticised by the Ramón Liarte and Josep Peirats, the leaders of the Anarchist Youth of Catalonia. When the anarchist government ministers Federica Montseny and Joan Garcia i Oliver were attacked by foreign anarchists in June 1937, Vázquez hit back, calling for the international anarchist movement to give them the confidence and support that they needed to win the war. To Vázquez, "those who set themselves up as apostles of the anarchist ideal neither understand nor want to understand, even though they could never have even dreamt of the scale of our tragedy or of our struggle." He denounced his critics, who "instead of helping us and defending us from the attacks made on us abroad by Marxists and reformists... all they know is how to criticise us... [thus] playing into the hands of the enemy, helping its campaign to undermine Spanish anarchism." He thought it tragic that the Spanish anarchists "could not turn to a world anarchist movement capable of providing arms in abundance, capable of pressurising the democratic powers, that could have, to put it in a nutshell, sabotaged fascism." He finally concluded by praising Helmut Rüdiger, as the only member of the IWA that had a "real critical spirit", rather than judging the situation solely "through the lens of ideas and principles".

In July 1937, when the government decreed the legalisation of anarchist agricultural collectives and offered them financial credit in return for recognition of the government, Vázquez encouraged them to accept the offer. In August 1937, when anarchists protested against the establishment of the Servicio de Información Militar (SIM), the CNT's leadership continued to support its existence, with Vázquez himself recommending that Negrín appoint Garcia i Oliver as its leader. In an address to the 1937 Paris Congress of the International Workers' Association (IWA), Vázquez downplayed reports of repression by the Republican government against the anarchists and stated that the CNT was still growing and united in purpose in spite of the repression against it. He concluded with a declaration that: "For the moment, our concern is to win the war. Once this has been achieved, we shall resume the offensive in the social sphere and then—our friends must believe us—the revolution will be achieved without delay! Neither communism nor the bourgeoisie can frighten us. We alone can conquer. We shall win and we shall have in Spain the total dominion of the CNT."

Vázquez also requested that the Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman attend the IWA's meeting, where he asked her to defend the CNT's continued collaboration with the Republican government. Although Goldman had been privately sympathetic to anarchist criticisms of collaboration and militarisation, she publicly defended the policy as the best of many bad options, urging European and American anarchists to tone down their criticisms of the CNT leadership. Nevertheless, in January 1938, Vázquez and the FAI's leader Pedro Herrera wrote to Goldman requesting that she herself tone down her own criticisms of the PCE and the Republican government, worrying that such criticisms would cultivate indifference among the international labour movement towards the Spanish anti-fascists.

As the Nationalists began to advance against the Republicans, Vázquez continued to campaign for the anarchists to be reincorporated into the government. This process culminated in March 1938, with the formation of a pact between the CNT and the UGT on the basis of the CNT's reentry into the government. The pact was largely welcomed by the anarchist rank-and-file, who were exhausted with the factional dispute. Although a vocal minority still opposed it, Vázquez retorted that "we are indifferent to these malcontents... I embrace comrade Rodríguez Vega, the secretary of the UGT, as a symbol of the unity of the Spanish working class."

By this time, the Nationalists were already seeing massive advances in their Aragon Offensive and the Republican government was starting to consider the option of surrender, believing their defeat to be inevitable. This move was met with a furious response from the workers of Barcelona, with Vázquez backing a Communist-led demonstration that demanded the Republicans continue to resist the Nationalist advance and called for the removal of Defence Minister Indalecio Prieto. Although Vázquez convinced many anarcho-syndicalists to participate in the demonstration, there was already a division within the anarchist movement over the issue of continued resistance. Vázquez himself argued for the necessity of "all-out resistance", while the FAI's peninsular committee called for opposition to the Republican "counterrevolution" and was even beginning to consider the possibility of an armistice with the Nationalists. Not long after the demonstrations, Vázquez again reiterated his calls for representatives of the CNT be brought into the government. But he shocked some of his colleagues in the CNT leadership when he also proposed that the overall composition of the government remain unchanged, in effect proposing that Prieto be allowed to remain in the defence ministry. Prieto himself refused to resign, which he considered would have been "equivalent to desertion", although he acknowledged that he would continue to occupy his post "without authority and without respect."

Debates on continued collaboration
In April 1938, Negrín finally agreed to bring a member of the CNT into his cabinet, but was only prepared to give it one ministry and wanted to chose the minister himself. He initially only offered token representation to the CNT and UGT, without any ministerial positions, but this was rejected by Vázquez himself. Vázquez and Horacio Prieto put together a list of three CNT members for their prospective ministry, from which Negrín chose Segundo Blanco as his minister of education and health. Meanwhile, Vázquez and Prieto themselves joined the national committee of the Popular Front, which acted as a "sub-government" to Negrín's council of ministers. The move was met with skepticism from many in the anarchist movement, who questioned whether they would have any meaningful power within the communist-controlled government.

But Vázquez himself praised the formation of the new government, declaring that the CNT and UGT's participation had "opened up new courses of action that inspire everyone with confidence, serenity, and a spirit of sacrifice." In an address the CNT's local unions, he affirmed that by re-entering the government, the CNT would be able to regain the positions it had lost the previous year and halt repression against the anarchist movement. He called for discipline among the anarchists and to accept even "restrictive or arbitrary" decisions by the government, so long as they were necessary to advance the war effort. He also justified the CNT only holding one government ministry as a means to "reassure the bourgeois democracies", which he hoped would continue to allow the passage of war materiel over the border. This move came amidst heightening discontent from the radical elements of the anarchist movement, including from Jacinto Toryho, who Vázquez swiftly ousted as editor of Solidaridad Obrera, bringing the paper in line with his policy of "unqualified governmental collaboration". When the Negrín government published its political programme, the anarchist movement became increasingly worried about the apparent counter-revolutionary aspirations of the Republican state. Vázquez and Prieto attempted to calm the rising anxieties of the anarchist movement by providing a positive spin to the programme's points, defending it as necessary in order to solicit support from Western democracies, although this support would ultimately never arrive.

By October 1938, the Spanish anarchist movement was on the verge of splitting over continued collaboration with the Republican government. At the movement's National Plenary in Barcelona, Vázquez took the side of the "collaborationists". He defended the necessity of anti-fascist unity against the now-overwhelming military force of the Nationalists, as he believed that the prolonging the war could result in it merging with a coming Europe-wide war, which would force the Western democracies to intervene against the Nationalists. In his defence of continued collaboration with the government, he also attacked his opponents for adhering to a "juvenile" and dogmatic interpretation of anarchist ideology, and criticised the anarchist collectives, Control Patrols and the Regional Defence Council of Aragon. He likewise blamed resistance to the militarisation of the militias for the anarchists' lack of positions within the Republican Army command, while personally defending Negrín as irreplacable. He was opposed by the "abstentionists", now led by Pedro Herrera and the FAI, who called for a return to anti-statist principles and accused Vázquez himself of opportunism and of abandoning anarchist principles.

Although she privately aligned with the FAI, Goldman publicly refused to speak out against the CNT, out of fear of a Republican defeat. In her correspondence with Vázquez, she attempted to appeal for clemency for imprisoned members of the POUM, but he declined the pursue the issue due to the pressing Nationalist advance. Before the end of the year, Goldman's office in London was closed by the CNT-FAI. Meanwhile, at this time, the Mujeres Libres were themselves experiencing severe financial difficulties, but had received little-to-no support from the official anarchist organisations. When Emma Goldman appealed to Vázquez for aid, he responded defensively, rejecting that the CNT hadn't done enough for the women's organisation, while pointing out that the anarchist movement did not have the resources that the Communists had.

Exile and death
In February 1939, as the Nationalists' Catalonia Offensive began to advance, Vázquez instructed anarchists to begin evacuating the country, and himself fled into exile in France. In the French capital of Paris, he oversaw the reorganisation of the Spanish anarchist movement in exile, becoming general secretary of the Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE). From this position, Vázquez organised the provision of aid to other refugees that had fled Spain, encouraging Spanish anarchists to cross the Atlantic to Mexico, where they were hosted by the sympathetic government of Lázaro Cárdenas. He also personally ensured the removal of the Spanish anarchist movement's archives from Spain and their transfer to the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam.

In his personal analysis of the Republican defeat, Vázquez continued to emphasise a lack of discipline as a motivating factor. He blamed both the CNT's attempts at socialisation and the Marxists' intentions to Bolshevise the country, which the "naive" Spanish government had been unable to hide in its propaganda directed towards the Western democracies. He entered into a bitter exchange of angry letters with Emma Goldman, who accused him of having been "duped" by Negrín and the Communists into "giv[ing] up the defence of Barcelona". Vázquez retorted that no betrayal had taken place, stating that it was the lack of Western democratic support that had been the cause for the Republican defeat. He argued that the collectivisations of the Spanish Revolution had frightened off western powers from supporting the Republic, that launching a revolution before the war had been won was a mistake, and that the CNT had been "too revolutionary" and hadn't compromised enough. He concluded with the declaration that: "Revolution cannot triumph in any country if it is not backed by the solidarity of the proletariat. That is precisely the whole point and towards this end it is necessary to devise a way whereby no more isolated revolutions are attempted so that we may avoid sterile sacrifices. We must be capable of preparing conditions so that at least it will break out in two or three countries at once."

Despite their argument, for Goldman's 70th birthday in June 1939, Vázquez sent her his appreciation for her sustained understanding and aid in their struggle. He dubbed Goldman as the "spiritual mother" of the Spanish anarchist movement, in a tribute that Goldman described as the most beautiful she had ever received. On the evening of that same birthday, she received another cable from Paris: Vázquez had been found dead in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, having drowned in the Marne river. Some of his friends considered the circumstances of his death to be suspicious.

Legacy
In a lecture he had given in September 1938, Vázquez reflected on how the Spanish anarchist movement of the 1930s would be treated in history. He personally hoped to be recorded in history as a principled anti-fascist, who treated fascism as the "number-one enemy" of the time period, contrasting himself with "purists" who preferred idealistic sacrifices to necessary compromise. But to historian Burnett Bolloten, Vázquez's leadership during the Civil War had been characterised by "waverings and inconsistencies", which he contrasted with the unchanging party line of the Communist Party.

After his death, critics of anarchist collaboration with the Republican government began to hold Vázquez to be personally responsible for the collapse of the Spanish Revolution. Anarchist historian Josep Peirats attacked Vázquez for having "clung like a leech to Negrín's gang"; and Juan Gómez Casas wrote that collaboration "had a devastating effect upon him", noting how much he had changed since his time as secretary of the CNT's construction union. But Bolloten rejected the characterisation of Vázquez as a conscious servant of Negrín and the Communists, noting a post-war report by the Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti that said the party had "no possibility of directly influencing the Anarchist unions from the inside", as Vazquez had consistently refused to link the CNT with the PCE.

Vázquez was posthumously accused of a number of personal, moral and political infractions, most of which were unsubstantiated rumours and some of which were driven by anti-Romani sentiment. Although Vázquez never publicly referenced his identity as a Romani person, that identity was frequently highlighted and stereotyped by his opponents in order to discredit him. In his book El eco de los pasos, Joan Garcia i Oliver accused Vázquez variously of being a Soviet puppet or, stressing his "intellectual limitation", other members of the anarchist leadership. Garcia denounced the "unmistakably Gypsy" Vázquez as untrustworthy and claimed that any changes in the CNT during the war were due to "Gypsy chicanery".

In contrast, while Federica Montseny agreed that the CNT's collaboration with Negrín had led to a "disaster", she also defended Vázquez's position of prolonging the war until the outbreak of World War II as having been vindicated by the pace of history. On the 20th anniversary of his death, Montseny published a biography of Vázquez in the CNT's journal Cénit. Although she expressed her admiration for him, describing him as very friendly and attractive, her description was also mixed with anti-Romani sentiments, depicting him an unintelligent, infantile and inexperienced man of "insufficient culture".

Despite the abundant availability of documents and material on his life, as of 2022, Vázquez has not been the subject of a complete biography. Vázquez, along with Helios Gómez, has been cited by Spanish historians María Sierra and Juan Profundo as a notable example of Romani participation in the Spanish anarchist movement. Sierra and Profundo contrasted the anti-Romani stereotypes of "laziness, ignorance and dishonesty", which were levelled against him by his opponents, with his effectiveness as leader of the CNT.

Selected works

 * "Mujer: Factor revolucionario" (Solidaridad Obrera, 18 September 1935)
 * "Avance: Por la elevación de la mujer” (Solidaridad Obrera, 10 October 1935)
 * "Army Organization" (Spanish Revolution, 9 April 1937)