28/02/2024
We have found this text in the Popular Women's Movement Website (MFP) of Brazil, which deals with the life and work of the communist Baleara Aurora Picornell. The text that we reproduce below is an unofficial translation to Spanish, made by a non -lusophone collaborator, so there may be translation or expression errors. However, we reproduce the document because the political content is of great value. In the coming months we will update the publication with a definitive translation/correction.
Aurora Picornell, symbol of communist mujer
The history of the Spanish communist Aurora Picornell, still little known internationally, is a reason for an immense pride for communists of all times and continents due to the remarkable ideological, political and organic work carried out by it in the hard and difficult years of the 1930s in the 1930s in Europe, particularly in Spain. Throughout his short life and his powerful revolutionary and communist career, especially in this complex and winding scenario, he fulfilled their responsibilities and raised the decisive role of communist women in the struggle for the inapplicable future of society without classes, the luminous communism.
After April 14, 1931, on the day of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, and after the republican success in the municipal elections, a period of great political effervescence in Spain was opened, as well as in the postwar Europe, with A magnificent victory of the glorious October revolution, 1917. The Democrats, the progressive and, especially the communists, including communist women, tirelessly developed their tasks to build new communist parties, fight against revisionism as the main danger and promote The massive struggle against imperialism and local reactionaries.
The beginnings of Aurora Picornell
Born on October 1, 1912, in Palma, the capital of Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands, located in the Mediterranean, east of Spain, Aurora Picornell Women can be considered a paradigm of young communists, directly committed to the fight of the classes, and in it, with the politicization and organization of the women of the people. Being the sixth among the seven children of Gabriel Picornell and Joana female, a proletarian and secular family, seen by all as on the left, soon got involved in the class struggles that exploded at the time in Mallorca, accompanied by all her family that already It was involved in the Communist Party. Aurora and her younger sister, called Freedom, received expressive names, which could be interpreted as symbols of the future of the political and social transformation that yearned for their parents.
From an early age, Aurora participated in various activities in defense of the rights of workers and working women also taking a clear option for secularism in a country of strong Catholic tradition. Therefore, the first association in which Aurora joined was the "Lay Liga de Mallorca" being chosen its director during the 1930s. Significant fact of the type of life chosen by Aurora is that she was not only the only woman who participated in The management, but also the only partner of the organization at that time. From the beginning of his work, he encouraged her to give denunciation talks about the situation of women's oppression in her hometown, to encourage them to fight for their rights. The young Aurora never stopped maintaining political relations with the workers or also participating in meetings with the communists of the island, at the same time that she organized support campaigns to the families of many dead workers, or injured, in serious accidents at work, whose managers always remained unpunished.
His solidarity, social and political work, carried out with courage and challenging attitude towards a closed society to liberating ideas, was recognized in an open letter from the Spanish journalist and writer Miguel Ángel Colomar, in which he referred to Aurora as a “courageous young man who always adds his name to all civic manifestations to rescue the freedom of secular slavery ”.
Influenced by his father and his brother Joan, militants of the Communist Party of Spain - PCE from before the Republic, also having as an intellectual reference atheoth Martí, of the "Lay Association", greatly influenced his good relationship, even if he ranged, with The PCE.
Another reference in Aurora's initial formation was someone who, at the end of the 1920s, promoted several women's fighting initiatives under the name of Margarita Leclerc. Actually, Leclerc was one of the many literary and journalistic pseudonyms of José Antonio Ruiz Rodríguez Méndez, also known as Max Bembo, who moved for Mallorca with his partner Teresa Herrero Ruiz. Feminism, brave for the time, of the writer and Leclerc activist deeply marked the young Picornell, who already denoted an unusual commitment to the class, especially with the women of the class. And with just 16 years he openly announced that, next to his companions, he had assumed the great task of fighting for the emancipation of women, under the slogan: “The emancipation of women is the work of women! Aurora's positions were enormously transgressive for the time, especially on an island where a strong and backward conservatism predominated clerical. Thus became, with all its courage, a symbol of the imminent political changes in Mallorca particularly, and in Spain in general.
The victory of the Russian Revolution of 1917 was celebrated with revolutionary enthusiasm worldwide, being that the arrival of the proletariat to power for the first time in history, it had a deep impact on Europe. After the first great imperialist war ended, many were involved in different struggles that exploded in the streets of the cities, especially young people, schools and universities, marking a great confrontation with conservative values and customs, in struggle for a new future.
Thanks to its practical activities and also in its studies, Aurora did not take long to completely assume the ideology of the international proletariat, which in its development process was Marxism-Leninism. And he joined the PCE when he was only 19. In a short time he became the best -known communist militant in Mallorca, not only for his personal charisma, but especially due to his firm class commitment and work capacity. This, in addition to the close political collaboration that he later developed with his life and struggle, the famous Comintern agent, Heriberto Quiñones González, very politically persecuted and very attacked by the reaction and the revisionists. And being a couple, the political and private life of Aurora is totally intertwined with quiñones, during the time he played in Spain. And although the intense history of Quiñones must be told, in another text, many of its notable actions as delegate of the Comintern are also part of the life of Aurora.
Intense trajectory y notable
In April 1931, before the municipal elections, Aurora wrote the "open letter to the women of Mallorca", encouraging them to convince their relatives, of the male, to vote for the Republican candidates against what he called "local cacicism." That year, women could not even vote, neither in Spain, nor in many other countries, such as in Brazil. And even without aligning with the official line of the PCE of the time, he wrote another article, with a similar content, for the body of the party, "our word." Aurora wanted to fight for the construction of a working and peasant republic, taking the Soviet Union as an example.
Between the spring and the summer of 1931, Aurora published its first articles in the republican magazine «Citizenship», through which it criticized Catholic moralism and denounced the bad living and education conditions that persisted in some small private schools, households in Elders and correctional houses of palm managed by Catholic nuns. After its first text, published on January 3, 1931, the magazine included a note that celebrated the incorporation of the new collaborator who, however, would move away from this magazine shortly after.
On April 14, 1931, the Second Republic was proclaimed with the departure of King Afonso XIII of Spain. The Second Republic lasted in Spain between April 14, 1931 and April 1, 1939, marked the lives of Spanish revolutionaries and, at the same time, challenged them deeply. The Spanish communists of the PCE initially rejected the proclamation of the Second Republic because they considered that it did not mean an important political step forward, nor to the destruction of capitalism, nor to the realization of the bourgeois democratic revolution. To the extent that the PCE, taking into account that the Spanish bourgeoisie could not understand the character of the revolution and, much less, to achieve this, he concluded that the Second Republic was then a counterrevolution.
In addition, class contradictions, as well as interimperialist contradictions, will be exacerbated greatly on the eve of the beginning of the Second Imperialist World War. And in the fire of these intense contradictions, the Spanish fascists, led by General Francisco Franco, gave a military coup on July 18, 1936 exactly against the Second Republic. This was the trigger for the explosion of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted until April 1939, when Franco won his final victory, thus beginning, in 1939, the fascist regime, whose brutal and criminal actions affected the Spanish people, for more than 30 years.
The important thing about all this was that Aurora's concerns, described, on the one hand, in the face Comrade Stalin, was answered by her with the elevation of her ideological and political commitment. Deploying and applying the ideology of the international proletariat, transforming his communist ideas into a decision to give his life to the revolution, working more than ever, tirelessly.
Revolutionary female courage to heights
Shortly after his affiliation to the PCE, he went to military in the communist youth of Molinar (a neighborhood known at the time as the "little Russia"), acting as an outstanding local leader. His first public intervention as a communist militant occurred on September 12, 1931, during the XVII International Youth Week. In this act, Aurora talked about the situation of women in proletarian Russia pointing out that “women have the same rights as men; Women work only six hours a day; They win the same as men; And that their children are the most respected children in the world because they will be the men of tomorrow, ”as registered by the newspaper Our word , on September 20, 1931.
The multiple achievements and important conquests of the town in the Soviet Union after 1917 had a great impact on Europe and also in the Spanish State. What the Soviets did it in the first years after victory was a remarkable example for Aurora, which was always shown to the masses, especially the women of the town, the reality dreamed by it throughout Spain and everyone.
One of his first tasks as a member of the communist youth was to mobilize the children of communist families and, thus, at the end of December 1931, a nucleus of red pioneers was created, with about 30 members, who made a beautiful and beautiful Brilliant march through the streets of the neighborhood, despite the constant coercion and threats of the Catholic nuns.
Shortly after, Aurora will have its own section in Our p ala bra , where he called the young proletarians to join in the struggle for their rights. His first articles in his section still focused on the denunciation of clericalism and consciousness of women; because he still maintained a certain support for the Second Republic. In his case, the relatively slow traffic between the different political trends was explained by the political relations he maintained, both with republicanism and with communism.
On December 24, 1931, in Palma the radio of the communist youth was created, to make the propaganda and the defense of communist ideas, which had the well -known voice of Aurora and the direction of the so -called Reds of Molin to the family of Catalina Pascual and her sisters, Antonia and Maria Pascual, who, together with Aurora, were the ones that promoted communism in the Molinar neighborhood.
The great political objective of Las Rojas de Molinar was to overcome the barriers of the misinformation imposed by the media under direct command of the Catholic Church, which promoted satanization of communism through simple messages aimed at women. The absurdities reach the point of saying that "communism erases human feelings" and that "communist mothers ate their children starting with the limbs", to the maximum to propagandize that Lenin had declared that "the love of the parents was Something unhappy »and that Alexandra Kollontai considered" the family as a rag of the past. " After 20 communists were arrested at a clandestine meeting, which was being held in Madrid, these same reactionary bodies were scandalized with the presence of a young woman among them, and publicly launched the question: “How explains the presence of a young woman Spanish woman at a Bolshevik meeting? ” The comrades promoted a strong debate and a great political work with the radio of the communist youth against so many falsehoods and nonsense.
In Mallorca, the local committee of PCE was marginalized and strongly attacked by repression since 1929, when he only had 5 militants. Throughout the year 1930, reconstruction was directed by the Communist Federation of Catalan-Balale, and in May 1931, the Mallorcan communists distanced themselves from this link with the Catalans, because they formed a revisionist, opportunistic and right-wing fraction, called the labor block AND CAMPESINO - BOC.
Everything indicates that during the first republican biennium, the communist female core had a discreet presence in the Balearic Islands, while it was still strong in the Spanish State as a whole.
Only when OUR PA l abra He opened a female section, with the denunciation of the bad working conditions and life of the workers' women, it is when the female nucleus in the islands was also developed with other communists, several quite positive political works. The political confrontation with republicanism was really difficult and the local women's commission, at the time, continued with small advances until 1933.
The PCE was also in difficulties to articulate a model of trade union organization according to the Red Trade Union, which led to communist union policy to develop various experiences in the republican era, based almost only on specific local influences. However, the communists of Mallorca had a solid presence in the construction union, because the father and children of the Picornell family participated in relevant positions of the wood and metallurgy union.
Aurora, in turn, focused his work on the area of clothing clothing, in whose factories the workers of Palma were extremely exploited. She was one of the founders and also the most important leader of the tailoring union, founded in January 1931, which had a more higher number of women in relation to men. The struggle for the reduction of working hours and for better salaries extended throughout the year, while there were constant complaints about the bad working conditions suffered by workers. Aurora, always very active, participated in a meeting held at the Casa del Pueblo de Palma, when he spoke in favor of the union of the working class. She stressed that, if this objective was not achieved, the workers and workers would soon be run over by the bourgeois and the government of the bourgeois (working culture; 12-12-1931)
The decisive role of women in the revolution
One of the main roles performed by Aurora in the PCE was exactly the fight in defense of the rights of workers' women and workers. From the study of the Book of Engels, The origin of the family, private property and E herd, Aurora applied constant work for the organization and affiliation of women in communist ranks as a strong strategic objective of the PCE. Taking Engels as a base, Aurora defended the need for the total destruction of imperialism as a path to female emancipation and joined the international communist movement in the struggle for the world proletarian revolution. Many texts on the female issue began to be published in the party propaganda body, being written directly by comrades but signed, for security, with pseudonyms. So he also reinforced his co -optation proposal of more and more communist women in the PCE.
Aurora Picornell became known as the Mallorcan passionate, from 1931, when it became a powerful mobilizer of the communist revolutionaries, following this same political commitment during the Second Republic, until she was cowardly murdered, with 25 years, on the 5th of January 1937. However, it is worth mentioning that in his brief career and, particularly, in his last years, the life and struggle of the young Mallorcan passionate has very little in common with the life of the internationally known passionate of Spain , Dolores Ibárruri, who was the general secretary of the PCE in 1942, after the death of José Díaz, a position he held until 1960, when Santiago Carrillo happened. Dolores Ibárruri, unlike the young Aurora Picornell, became a renegade revisionist and, therefore, is one of those responsible for the hard attack of the PCE to the Communist International and Comrade Stalin, and other types of serious problems created for The Spanish communists.
The silence that fell on the agitated militancy of Aurora Picornell in the course of the next four decades of the Francoist victory can be explained by the destruction, almost total, of the labor movement in Mallorca and by the murder of the clandestine communist resistance, occurred in 1948 .
In addition, several urban reforms made in Palma destroyed the original Molinar neighborhood, very degraded after the years. The buildings were demolished, making the vestiges and memories of the streets where Aurora and his family were born, opening the space for the transformation of the famous and very expensive tourist center that is today.
Aurora and the commune agent in Spain
The famous Comintern agent who historically met as Heriberto Quiñones González arrived in Palmas, Mallorca, in 1931. He soon contacted the Picornell family becoming welcomed on a Christmas night. Like other agents, it had been sent by Comintern to Spain to direct the structuring and consolidation of the Communist International Section in Spain
After having worked in Argentina, where, as stated, he collaborated directly with Vittorio Codovilla, Quiñones also maintained a close connection with the Asturian colony in the country, which allowed him to learn well Castilian to guarantee greater veracity to his documentation of his documentation of Spanish nationality, used to arrive in Spain in October 1930. After Argentina, he went through France, where he was expelled, and then went to Spain, first arriving in Barcelona. Quiñones worked with another known member of the Comintern, the Swiss Edgar Woog, better known as Alfred Stirner, Secretary of Latin American Affairs of the Communist International and remained close to the main delegate of Comintern in Spain, also Swiss Jules Humberto Droz.
He arrested many times, Quiñones was expelled from the Spanish territory on August 22, 1931. But he soon returned to the country to settle in Mallorca, where he contributed to the expansion of the work of the communists on the island. It was during his first stage in the country that began his love relationship with Aurora Picornell. It is reported that the couple would have married in Valencia, but before the judge, in 1936, Aurora claimed to be single, while he, in several statements after other arrests, also declared themselves single. Then they moved to the city of Valencia, where they lived together and very close to the maximum manager of the local communist committee. Aurora worked in the tailoring sector and also joined the young communists of Valencia, with the pseudonym of Amaro Pino. His return to the Balearic Islands took place in 1933, at the beginning of the electoral campaign of the first election in which Spanish women could vote. Aurora was then 23 years old, the age that allowed her to vote and she, like other Spanish women, made this new right in a marked decisive vote. In the islands, these elections caused a bitter result on the left, to the extent that it clearly benefited the reactionary candidates and defenders of right -wing positions.
The communists of the Balearic Islands had to face many difficulties in the period of 1931-1933, a reformist Bienna, with many persecutions made by the Government. The triumph of the right in the 1933 elections opened a period of rectification and reforms, known as the radical-caedist biennium or black biennium of the Second Republic 1 , when the October 1934 revolution took place 2 , with strikers tried to assault the government in Madrid. For the communists it was a complex period during which they had to go to hiding and, throughout the year, new proposals favorable to a certain unit of action with other leftist forces were slowly being introduced in the PCE. This political reformulation culminated in the incorporation of PCE in labor alliances 3 .
As soon as the Balearic section, the PCE was characterized at this stage by an acute sectarianism due to its low theoretical and weak formation of Marxism. But in any case, with the work done in this biennium, the party achieved success in the areas of youth and union, which meant the creation of an important basis for greater local development.
In the period of 1931-1933, the communists of the island became a reference for the most combative workers sectors. But it was only in the last years of the Second Republic that Aurora Picornell and Heriberto Quiñones became key figures to the communist movement on the island. Since the beginning of 1934, the communist policy developed and promoted by the Quiñones in Mallorca was based on the formation of groups of the so -called single front for the Fight against Fascism and Imperialist War. The strategic line of the Communist International proposed to attract the base militancy of other left -wing organizations, at the same time that was attacked to the Directorate of the Spanish Socialist Party - PSOE and the National Workers' Central - CNT.
Quiñones led the fight against a former leader of the PCE, Pere Antoni Bauza Servera, who soon left the party to organize, in Mallorca, the labor and peasant block. Aurora once again summoned women to join the struggles, obtaining the creation of the single front in Menorca. With the reactivation of the PCE in 1934, it was possible to form a local female cell composed of eight women, and the agitation made by Aurora influenced the subsequent development of the communist movement in Menorca, which was very intense during the civil war.
Greater responsibilities assumed by Aurora
In Mallorca, Aurora reactivated the work of the communists among women, which allowed to create an agency called Women's Section of the Communist Party, which promoted the first local celebration of International Working Women's Day. Published in Our words A text in which he pointed out that women could not be outside the celebration and struggle at the time the country was in full revolutionary development. And in the article, the example of the women's workers in Bilbo who, in the face of the prevailing misery and the terrible hunger that tormented them, decided to steal a truck loaded with bread and a grocery store for their survival and their families.
Aurora also called on the PCE committees and communist youth to get involved in the organization of that campaign, which should still be linked to the fight against imperialism, fascism and war. This, in addition to the struggle for lowering the price of food and salary equality between men and women. At the celebration meeting on March 8 in Palma, he spoke on behalf of the PCE Women Section.
Writing in Our words , Aurora published ten articles, and three of these articles dealt with the working conditions of women in the industry and in the field, and others of interviews with different workers. He also wrote criticizing Catholic parades in the region that classify them as "fascist provocations." Then he diversified the issues of his articles that revealed with them a constant political maturity, parallel to the fact that he assumed greater responsibilities in the Balearic communist organization.
Dam and murdered
In the same period, women's struggles for their basic and elementary rights grew visibly in many countries, while the creation of new workers' parties under the ideology of Marxism-Leninism struggled to take power. In this scenario, the fascist threat grew again in the old continent. But where there is repression there is also a lot of rebellion, an anti -fascist movement was widely driven since 1933, with a decisive participation of young people and women who did not escape the hard fight.
Many young people assumed the prominence in the framework of the development of the revolutionary movement of October 1934, whose main outbreaks were in Catalonia and Asturias. Thousands of women served on battle fronts, many of them killed or arrested after the defeat of the conflict. The actions of women linked to the Association of Women against War and Fascism, founded in 1933 with the support of the Communist Party of Spain, led this organization to be declared illegal.
With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the city of Mallorca fell into the hands of the Falangists contrary to the Republican regime, and the young Aurora Picornell soon was trapped in the house of the town and imprisoned in the Women's Prison in Mallorca. In the well -known night of the Magi, on January 5, 1936, she was taken from prison by speech, in the law that took her to the convent of Montuiri, where she was brutally tortured and killed on the same night, along with others Four comrades with whom he fought a lot: Catalina Flaquer Pascual, her daughters Antonia Pascual Flaquer and Maria Pascual Flaquer, and Belarmina Rodríguez, all the Reds of Molinar. His father and one of his brothers were also killed by the fascists in the same period and, Quiñones, he was killed years later, already during the Francoist fascist military regime.
It was quite common at the time that the communists gave their children representative names of their class ideology. So it was that the only daughter of Aurora and Quiñones was called Octubrina Roja. The franchise regime was found to officially and impartially change the beautiful and expressive name of the baby, chosen by its parents, by the name of Francisca, in a tax and absurd act. Octubrina Roja still crawled when her parents were cowardly killed by the fascists. After marrying and having two daughters, whom he called Joana and Aurora, Octubrina Roja died when he was still very young, fighting the bad living conditions that the communists and their families faced during the fascist regime.
In October 2022 it was confirmed that part of the mortal remains found in the previous year, in the common wells of the Son Colets in Manacor, Spanish State, belonged to Aurora Picornell. It was identified and at the same time, the investigation indicated to have been killed by five shots, three of them in the head. In addition, it is believed that Aurora was raped and very mistreated before its execution.
Before that, in 2017, on the 80th anniversary of his murder, Aurora was appointed unanimously "favorite daughter of Mallorca." In 2019, his bust was inaugurated in the Molinar neighborhood, and on October 25, 2022, already with its identified remains, it was approved that the Municipal Library of Molinar was renamed Aurora Picornell Municipal Library.
Aurora lives. ¡Viva Aurora!
The exploited and oppressed masses worldwide, in particular women, which are half of this immense contingent, continue to fight. At this time, when imperialism is experiencing an unprecedented decomposition crisis, with the opening of a new period of revolutions worldwide, the growth of exploited and oppressed struggles, not only in dominated countries, but also in the Imperialist countries, it is each larger and larger and larger and larger and larger. Most visible day. Therefore, rescuing examples, especially the examples of communist women in imperialist centers, is part of reinforcing revolutionary convictions and further increase communist optimism.
When President Mao Tsetung said that "women hold on their back the mitald of heaven and must conquer it," he said that the Chinese revolution could not have won the resounding victory if he did not get involved and committed in his process half of that of the Population, that is, women, who are this other half. The active presence of communist women in the revolutionary struggle has been greater than what is disseminated, but it is still little. Highlight examples such as Aurora Picornell is to reaffirm the strength, disposition and awareness of the communists who fight, pouring their own blood, for the conquest of a bright future for all humanity.
The rescue of the exemplary participation of communist women in immense and daily work developed at that time in Spain and in many other countries is an important part of the rescue of the entire long and great history of the communist struggle worldwide, from The struggle of Marx and Engels and the publication in 1848 of the Communist Party Manifesto.
Today, the Maoist Communist Party of the Spanish State follows its ideological, political, organic work, to reconstitute as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist military party, mainly Maoist, universal validity contributions of President Gonzalo. This development process is the son of the long history of the hard struggle fought before, by all militants, many of them killed, such as Aurora Picornell. The current process developed by the new generation of Maoist communists is also born from the titanic work of their predecessors. Therefore, Aurora Picornell is not just the example of "advanced woman in her time", as some say. But yes, one among the many expressions of struggle and resistance of the Spanish people from Franco, against imperialism and all kinds of revisionism and opportunism.
That Aurora is "symbol of communist woman" to follow is, in addition, the confirmation of the importance of the integration of women into the popular war. Let us remember it as a way of raising and promoting the participation of comrades, of raising our ideological, political and theoretical forge to promote female cadres, on the way to the revolution in the Spanish State, at the service of the World Proletarian Revolution.
Viva Aurora Picornell!
1 The second biennium of the Second Republic, also called the Biennio Radica-Cedista, reformist Bans, a reformist biennium, also called black biennium on the left, constitutes the period between the 1933 and February 1936 elections, during which the center parties- Republican right governed by the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux, allies with anti-republican and clerical sectors of the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights-CEDA.
2 The Revolution of 1934, in Spain, was a strike movement, revolutionary, which was injured on October 5 and on October 19, The main photographs are in cataluña and and making.
3 The National Workers' Central -CNT of Asturias, the General Union of Workers -UGT, signed a pact with the Socialist Federation of Asturias -FSA, forming the Workers Alliance Plasma as Union of the proletarian brothers -UHP, which would join with Other workers' organizations such as Boc, the communist left and finally the Communist Party of Spain.