The massacre of 'La Desbandá' from Malaga to Almería will be recognized as a Place of Democratic Memory

“From Málaga to Almería there are more than 250 kilometers, all along the sea on the right and, on the left, the mountains.

I left Malaga on the night of the 7th. We went in a group, my parents, my brothers, the family of my boyfriend Luis, who was the organizing secretary of the PCE in Malaga, who was at the front, and the mother and sister of one of my comrades, whose name was Manrique.

We had our clothes on, a bag with bread and a bar of chocolate.

There were many people who marched with shouts, cries and names... because we called each other so as not to lose contact.

We soon realized that we lost Luis's family and could no longer find them.

The night was terrifying.

Darkness, fatigue and desperation accompanied us and at dawn the ships began to cannonade the road, attacking us in some places that made our progress difficult and the road was cut off in many places.

If we deviated to avoid the shelling, then the planes would bomb us.”

This is how Lina Molina Rivero kept February 7, 1937 in her memory when, many years later, in 2001, she told it to her daughter, who put it in writing.

That night of horror began

La Desbandá

, a mass flight on foot from Málaga to Almería in which many were murdered and did not reach any destination.

Others, however, took years to find peace or their destination appeared thousands of kilometers from the starting point.

Changing names, relationships and some specific details, Lina's is the story of thousands of Malaga residents and people from the mountains of Cádiz, Campo de Gibraltar and the southern mountains of Seville who arrived in Malaga fleeing from the rebellious fascist soldiers.

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These republicans of diverse origin were grouped in the capital of Malaga in a number that fluctuated, according to researchers, between 120,000 and 300,000.

The siege of Málaga became unsustainable that night and, harassed by the fascist bombings of Queipo de Llano and the cannon shots from the ships from the sea, the march to Almería, a republican area that month of February, began.

Between 3,000 and 5,000 people died on that horror trip.

Now the Government has begun the process to declare these events, and the places where they occurred, Place of Democratic Memory.

The Democratic Memory Law approved in 2022 defines a Place of Democratic Memory as the “space, property, place or intangible or intangible cultural heritage in which events of singular relevance have occurred due to their historical, symbolic significance or their impact on the collective memory, linked to democratic memory, the struggle of Spanish citizens for their rights and freedoms, the memory of women, as well as the repression and violence against the population as a consequence of the resistance to the coup d'état of July 1936 , the War, the Dictatorship, the exile and the fight for the recovery and deepening of democratic values.”

Image of 'La Desbandá' after the fall of Málaga, in February 1937. Jesús Majada Neila

Some spaces on this route are already classified as such but, in this case, explains the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez López, in addition to new specific spaces, the declaration is expanded to “immaterial elements such as facts, exodus, the persecution and the massacre of what is known as

La Desbandá

”.

The start of the process is dated February 14 and in a few months, a year at most, the Secretary of State himself will sign the final declaration.

The initiation of the file already implies immediate protection, with the obligation to commemorate and disseminate what happened.

That is what is already happening in the Fort or Castle of Carchuna (Granada), one of the 10 spaces on the N-340, between Malaga and Granada, which will soon be milestones of historical memory.

The fort now hosts the permanent exhibition

La Desbandá.

1937. From Málaga to the Pyrenees

,

recently inaugurated by the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, who recalled that flight as “the first major mobilization of the population in times of war before the Second World War.”

The exhibition, curated by the professors of Modern and Contemporary History of the University of Malaga Lucía Prieto Borrego and Encarnación Barranquero Texeira, shows numerous documents, testimonies and a series of photographs.

The mayor of Carchuna-Calahonda, the socialist Juan Alberto Ferrer, believes it is essential to have spaces like this to disseminate “history as it was, not as it was told to us.”

It is the catalog of this exhibition that includes Molina Rivero's testimony transcribed by his daughter.

Far beyond Almería

Until now, the story of

La Desbandá

has almost always been limited to what happened in those days and weeks on the road from Malaga to Almería.

But that is still just the first stage of a hellish journey.

Barranquero, one of the first investigators of this massacre, remembers that “tens of thousands of people arrived in Almería who could not stay in the city, so the Almería republicans organized transfers to the north and reached Murcia, Valencia, Castellón and even Catalonia. ”.

From there, the advance of the fascist troops pushed them again and some went to France into exile.

Hence the exhibition mentions the Pyrenees in its title.

Fernando Martínez, who in addition to being Secretary of State for Democratic Memory is a professor of Contemporary History at the University of Almería, has researched the exile of the Andalusians in 1939. And his data confirm that the suffering of those who lived through

La Desbandá

did not end in a few days or weeks.

“37% of the Andalusians in the concentration camps in France had experienced the massacre,” he says.

Some of them were even “transferred to concentration camps in the French colonies of North Africa.”

Even part of the contingent, known as the children of Russia, was made up of evacuees who arrived from Almería to Valencia from where, by boat, they left that same year for the Soviet Union.

Lina Molina Rivero, the woman who told her daughter that first terrible night, is an example of those who traveled from Malaga to beyond the Pyrenees.

First, she came from Malaga to Almería, where she spent a few months.

Then, she was taken to the Murcian town of Espinardo and, from there, she moved to Valencia.

“The war was felt there,” she said, and together with her mother and sister she took the last train that left Valencia for Barcelona.

From there, she went to Plá de Cadí, in Lleida.

In the first months of 1939, she arrived in France.

There she ended a tremendous two-year journey, a journey that is now recognized as a milestone of Democratic Memory.

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