Severino Campos Campos

Spanish militant anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist, born. As a young man he settled in Barcelona and in 1918 he joined the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores. During the 1920s, he was part of the collective producing the newspaper 'El Productor' and would later regularly contribute to the prisoner-support fund run by 'La Revista Blanca' as well as becoming a long-term contributor to the Valencian anarchist newspaper 'Solidaridad Obrera'. In 1931 he became a member of the Comité Regional de Cataluña of the CNT and through the early thirties he worked in several Catalan rationalist schools, especially at the Rationalist School in the Torrassa district, run by the Ocaña family, one of whose members Igualdad (Concepción Ocaña Sánchez; b. Sept. 7, 1912) becoming his life-long companion. During the first years of the Civil war, along with José Peirats and others, Campos fought against CNT participation in the Generalitat, drawing the ire of – and threats from – Juan Garcia Oliver. Campos was also one of the members of the group that drew up the paper adopted in plenary session of the Catalan CNT-FAI held on March 14, 1937, which ended in agreement on CNT-FAI participation in the Generalitat, and helped create a political council within a unified Regional Committee of the CNT, FAI, Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias and the Federación Regional de Agricultores Confederal (Assembly of Regional Farmers' Federations).

Despite his opposition to participation in the Generalitat, he became secretary of the FAI's Comité Regional in June 1937. During the Civil War he also collaborated with the magazine 'Ideas', organ of the Moviment Llibertari del Baix Llobregat, which denounced the degeneration of the revolution. After the war he and his family went into exile in Mexico, returning to Spain after Franco's death to live in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, returning intermittently to Mexico as they struggled to adapt to differences between home and exile. Upon Severino's return, he collaborated on 'Solidaridad Obrera' and in 1979 he was appointed its director, going on to become its editor between 1982 and 1983. In July 1984 he was delegated to the Regional Plenary Session of the CNT in Badalona. In these years he participated in numerous conferences and rallies in Zaragoza, Barcelona, Paris, Perpignan, Valencia, Hospitalet, Vilanova, Elda, etc. On one of the couple's visits to Mexico, Igualdad died in Cuernavaca on October 4, 1990. In 1993 Campos returned to Mexico for good, donating his newspaper library and personal archive to the Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo. Severino Campos died of a respiratory illness on March 25, 2006 in Mexico City aged 100 years and was buried with a red and black flag that covered his coffin. He was survived by his son, the anarchist poet Helenio Campos Ocaña.