Buenaventura Durruti

Buenaventura Durruti was born on July 14, 1896 in León, a city in central Spain. He was the second of four children of a railway worker and a seamstress. He left school at 15 and worked as a mechanic in the railway yard. He joined the socialist UGT union and took part in the strike of August 1917 that was brutally repressed by the army. He escaped to France and came into contact with exiled anarchists who influenced his political views. He returned to Spain in 1919 and joined the anarchist CNT union. He became involved in several strikes and actions against the employers and the state. He formed part of Los Justicieros (The Avengers), a group of anarchists who carried out assassinations of political and business figures. He fled to Latin America in 1923 and continued his militant activities there. He came back to Spain in 1927 and joined Los Solidarios (Solidarity), another group of anarchist activists who opposed the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. He was arrested several times and spent some years in prison. He was released in 1931 after the fall of the monarchy and the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. He became one of the leaders of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), a radical tendency within the CNT that advocated direct action and social revolution. He participated in many uprisings and strikes against the republican government, which he considered as oppressive and reformist as the previous regimes. He also defended the autonomy and culture of Catalonia, where he settled in 1931. In July 1936, he joined the military coup against the Popular Front government that sparked the Spanish Civil War. He led a group of anarchists who resisted the army in Barcelona and defeated them after fierce street fighting. He became one of the most prominent figures of the 1936 Spanish Revolution, which saw a wave of social changes and experiments in anarchist self-management throughout Catalonia and other parts of Spain. He formed the Durruti Column, a militia composed of thousands of anarchist volunteers who fought on various fronts against the fascist forces led by Francisco Franco. He also supported the creation of an antifascist alliance with other leftist groups, such as socialists, communists and republicans, despite his ideological differences with them. In November 1936, he went to Madrid to help defend the city from the fascist siege. He was shot in the chest on November 19, under unclear circumstances, and died the next day in a hospital. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of people who mourned his death as a great loss for the anarchist movement and the antifascist cause. He was buried in Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona with full honors. His legacy is still remembered and celebrated by many anarchists and revolutionaries around the world