"Nobody gave a penny for them": the network of women that challenged Francoism

Barcelona"Suspense can be synonymous with hope," reflects Basque writer Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981). The reader who delves into the pages of her new novel, Internal Service (La Segona Perifèria/Tusquets), translated from Basque into Catalan by Pau Joan Hernández, knows perfectly well that the story does not end well, but the four protagonists trust until the very last moment in a good ending. They are Bittori Etxeberria, Delia Lauroba, Itziar Mujika, and Tere Verdes, who risked everything to help imprisoned comrades, support the Basque Government in exile, and stand up to Francoism. Together with other agents, they wove one of the most effective espionage and evasion structures in the north of the Iberian Peninsula: the Álava network. They did so in a context of terror, because by mid-1937, the Basque Country had been massacred from the air, the coup plotters had occupied it, and the government of Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre had gone into exile.

"My surprise was seeing that this had happened where I live, and no one had ever explained it to me," admits Agirre. "Furthermore, the protagonists had been very discreet women, very much of their time. They didn't seem cut out to be spies." They were women who had little to do with the image of spies that has reached us through cinema. Agirre discovered who they were at a traveling exhibition of the Sabino Arana Foundation. Within the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), a formation with conservative and Catholic roots, the role of women was strictly secondary. "The PNV, unlike other parties that existed during the Second Republic, did not facilitate the emergence of women leaders or female soldiers. Women always had a subaltern role there," the author details. The initial task they were given responded precisely to this traditional vision of gender roles: to enter prisons to care for prisoners, bring them clothes or food, and, incidentally, collect clandestine information.

The key was solidarity

None of the men who thought of them at first foresaw their organizational capacity. "No one gave a dime for them. And suddenly they demonstrated that, by joining together, they were capable of organizing a powerful network that passed information and also helped to cross the border clandestinely without raising suspicion," asserts Aguirre. The key was collective solidarity. "What they achieved, they achieved because they united. They gave each other strength," explains the author.

The great threat to the network was the policeman Pedro Urraca, to whom the author gives a lot of prominence and turns into an antagonist, the villain of the movie. In part, because Agirre, who has also made an authentic immersion in the archive of the Sabino Arana Foundation, has documented herself very well thanks to the great outreach work done by Lorena Urraca, the granddaughter of the man who arrested President Companys. "Pedro Urraca only thought about himself. Sometimes this selfishness and narcissism is more dangerous than true fanaticism. Nothing stopped him. It made absolutely no difference to him to hurt those around him. He hated everyone, he was a miserable person," details Agirre.

When the list with the names of the network members fell into Urraca's hands, according to the author's account, the arrests were triggered. In 1940, the Nazis occupied Paris, and the Basque Government in exile had to abandon the building it occupied at number 11 Rue Marceau. Agirre poses different possibilities: "There was a hypothesis that said it was simply a blunder. Someone left the papers behind and they fell into the wrong hands... But there is also another hypothesis, that of a traitor. I thought that, for the book, even if the other assumption was the most likely, the fact of the traitor was very narratively attractive," she ensures. The book is already finished and published, but it may be that the author has new answers. "Very recently I received an email from a historian from Gernika who has recorded testimonies from people who participated in the network and who say the name and surname of this traitor," asserts the writer, who plans to talk to the historian. Be that as it may, the four women were interrogated, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. Later, their sentences were changed to terms of between twenty and thirty years. Luis Álava, one of the leaders of the network, was executed by firing squad.

To narrate some voids, Agirre, who was also able to listen to some of these women because they were interviewed and recorded, chooses to borrow mechanisms from cinematographic language and reflect on how we explain the past. "To explain anything, but also the past, you have to invent it in some way and you have to put a frame around it... History does not begin at one point, it is where we decide to start explaining, and the end is the same. The past as it happened is inaccessible, we will never know," she says. None of the four women had children, but they did have nephews, nieces, and grand-nephews and grand-nieces. Agirre spoke with Etxeberria's grand-niece. "She must have been a very charismatic person, based on how they remembered her in her town, Elizondo. She never regretted it or was ashamed of it, and she explained everything to the family. Her grand-niece told me that when she discovered that her venerable great-aunt had been in prison, she couldn't believe it, and she explained to me that Bittori told her that good people could also end up locked up," explains Katixa Agirre.