Abel Paz

Abel Paz
Paz in 2007
Born	Diego Camacho Escámez (1921-08-12)August 12, 1921 Almería, Andalusia, Spain
Died	April 13, 2009(2009-04-13) (aged 87) Barcelona, Spain
Other names	Abel Paz
Occupation	Anarchist, writer, historian
Known for	Prominence as a Spanish anarchist and anti-fascist

Abel Paz (1921–2009) was a Spanish anarchist and historian who fought in the Spanish Civil War and wrote multiple volumes on anarchist history, including a biography of Buenaventura Durruti, an influential anarchist during the war. He kept the anarchist tradition throughout his life, including a decade in Francoist Spain's jails and multiple decades in exile in France.

Early life and career

Abel Paz was born Diego Camacho Escámez on August 12, 1921, in Almería, southeastern Andalusia. When he was six years old, he moved in with his Barcelonan uncle, who was a member of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), a Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labor union. Before his teens, Paz joined the libertarian Ferrerist school Escuela Natura in Barcelona's El Clot working class region. He briefly moved back to Almería, where his mother was too a CNT member and he subscribed to the Libertarian Youth in 1935.

But by February 1936, he had returned to Barcelona for what became the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. He joined the CNT-FAI (allied with the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, founded a group that fought the CNT-FAI's moderate policies, and fought for the working class and anarchists. Following his 1937 arrest in a clash with Stalinists, he worked in a farm collective, wrote for the FAI's Tierra y Libertad periodical, and fought on the Catalan front. In early 1939, when Franco's Nationalists retook Catalonia, Paz and hundreds of thousands of anarchists sought asylum in France until 1942, when he returned to Catalonia and attempted to restart the CNT. He was jailed and passed between prisons for five years. Not long after his release, he was jailed for another five years for participating in the Libertarian Youth. After his release in 1952, he returned to the resistance and became the underground organization's delegate to the 1953 International Congress.

He remained in France, where he traveled and participated in anti-Francoist, CNT, and Libertarian Youth groups. His partner, Antònia Fontanillas, from a lineage of anarchists, traveled with him through 1958. Over the next decade, Paz wrote multiple history books, including a biography of CNT figure Buenaventura Durruti, known as the most comprehensive account as of the late 2000s. In 1979, he returned to Spain's anarchist movement, where he wrote a four-volume memoir and spoke with young libertarians about his experiences. In the mid-1990s, Paz toured Italian public meetings following interest in Ken Loach's 1995 film about the Spanish Civil War, Land and Freedom. He participated in media accounts of the war through his physical decline and death on April 13, 2009.

Selected works

Paz at his Barcelonan apartment, 2006

• La Barcelona Rebelde: Guía De Una Ciudad Silenciada Octaedro, 2003. ISBN 978-84-8063-628-5
• Durruti en la Revolución Española. Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 1996.
• Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. AK Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-904859-50-5. Translated by Chuck W. Morse.
• Durruti: the people armed. Black Rose, 1976. ISBN 978-0-919618-74-9 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-919618-73-2 (hbk.)
• The Spanish civil war. Hazan, 1997. ISBN 978-2-85025-532-8
• The Story of the Iron Column: Militant Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War. AK Press and Kate Sharpley Library, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84935-064-8. Translated by Paul Sharkey.

Further reading

• Balanzà, Albert (2009-04-24). "Mor l’històric dirigent anarquista Abel Paz, veí del carrer Verdi". L'Independent de Gràcia. p. 5. http://web.archive.org/web/20100624103220/http://independent.cat/gracia/Independent_294.pdf. 
• Bernecker, Walther L. (1998). "Review of Durruti 1896-1936". p. 155. ISSN 0945-8301. JSTOR 43112810. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43112810. 
• "Buenaventura Durruti 1896-1936 (Book)". August 2001. p. 319. ISSN 0020-8590. 
• "CNT 1939-1951. El anarquismo contra el Estado franquista (Book)". April 2003. p. 157. ISSN 0020-8590. 
• Guillamón, Agustín (February 2010). "Abel Paz, Anarchist and Historian". https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/v41q3n. 
• "La cuestión de Marruecos y la República española (Book)". April 2002. p. 175. ISSN 0020-8590. 
• "Remembering Diego Camacho AKA Abel Paz". 2010. p. 47. ISSN 1069-1995.