Diego Rodríguez Barbosa

On August 22, 1936, he was killed by a fascist platoon in Alcantarilla del Águila (Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain), the anarcho-syndicalist militant and anarcho-tourist propagandist Diego Rodríguez Barbosa. He was born on November 5, 1885 to the place known as El Lugar, in Chiclana de la Frontera (Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain).

His parents were Pedro Rodríguez, a day laborer, and Francisca Barbosa, typical housewife, and had three brothers (José, Francisco and Carmen). After studying in a school of nuns and in a national school, soon, for economic reasons, he began to do work in the field and came into contact with the social movements of his locality. At the age of 18 he already occupied the secretariat of a local Republican party – the most advanced thing in the Chiclana at the time – and in 1906 he founded, with comrade Serrano, an already net-anarchist workers’ society.

He disappeared some time to flee military service and it seems that he went to Buenos Aires (Argentina) and in Paris (France), where his brother José lived. In 1911 I was already in Chiclana. At this time he collaborated in Tierra y Libertad, a publication of which he was a distributor in Chiclana; he promoted the "Sociedad Obrera La Lucha", of which he presided over a rally in August 1912; he was part, with Manuel Aragón Gutiérrez, Tomás Torrejón Torres and Pedro Saucedo Bottosi, of the anarchist group *Juventud (1913); he made a rally to Paterna (1916); etc. Included in the blacklists of the local chieftains, he was forced to emigrate to Paris in 1917, where he did work in a factory and waiter, and then in Barcelona. At the end of 1919 he returned in Chiclana speaking French, Catalan and Esperanto, while converting to naturisme and vegetarianism, cultivating the lands of his parents for a while. He joined Manuela Pareja Sánchez, a native of the Cadiz town of Conil de la Frontera, who will be the case with her usual partner and with whom she will have six children: Archimedes – the firstborn, who died at the Catalan front on January 1, 1938 – Diego, Magdalena, Francisca, Carmen and Arnedo. In 1920 he settled in Cádiz, where he wrote, with Elías García, the purely anarchist publication Rebellion; he also directed Bandera Libre (1920-1921) and presided over a centerist rally. In these years he befriended the most outstanding figures of the Cadiz anarcho-syndicalism, such as José Bonat, Vicente Ballester Tinoco or Clemente de Galé Campos.

At the end of 1921 he was imprisoned for three months, following an attack on a Cadiz contractor, a fact that brought numerous arrests and reprisals that forced many people to emigration. In 1922 it was one of the impulses of the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) of Chiclana. During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, he served as a rationalist teacher in a free school for the children of the people’s husbandmen, while cultivating a field in the Barrio Nuevo de Conil, bought in 1925 with his brother José. At this time he tried unsuccessfully to release the newspaper Al Margen.

During the years of the Second Spanish Republic, he was the most prominent anarchist militant to his region: delegate to the Regional Plenary of October 1931; editor of the newspaper El Sembrado (1932); rallies and conferences – Paterna (1932), Cádiz (1 May 1932), Vejer de la Frontera (1932) and San Fernando (1935 and 1936)–; imprisoned, following the insurrection of January 1933, more than a year to the prison of the Port of the

When the fascist uprising broke out in July 1936, he managed to flee the repression escaping through the camps, but he was arrested, with the fellow cenetist Manuel Estrada Alba (El Regaera), in the Arroyo del Sotillo, seven kilometers from Chiclana, by a platoon of Phalangists from Chiclana. Diego Rodríguez Barbosa, after being tortured, was beaten to death, on August 22, 1936 at the place called Sewer of the Eagle, near Chiclana (Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain); he is said, once dead, he was beheaded and his executioners played football with his head. His body, after being walked in a truck by Chiclana, was buried in a mass grave at the entrance to the San Juan Bautista cemetery in this town. His family was “purged” and he had to leave the village. During his life he wrote prose of social character and poetry, especially carnival couples, where he denounced child and labor farms, prostitution, war, etc. He collaborated, under several pseudonyms (Ile Galas, Juan de la Vallo, Silvestre del Campo), in numerous libertarian press, such as CNT, Ethics, Germ, Initials, El Luchador, La Madre Tierra, La Revista Blanca, La Semana, Solidaridad Obrera, Solidaridad Proletaria, Tierra y Libertad, La Voz del Campesino, etc. He is the author of five scripts, which were written when he was imprisoned, published in "The Free Novel" and "The Ideal Novel" – The Daughter of the Gravedor (1930), Pastora (1933), Evicted (1933), Love, Sacrifice and Vengeance (1935) and Bohemia (1935)– and which in 2001 were reissued in the book by Gutierrez Molina The Anarchism in Chiclana. Diego R. Barbosa, worker and writer (1885-1936).