Andalucía's communist mayor who ransacked supermarkets retires

The only council leader residents of Marinaleda in Seville province have ever known is forced to leave office after 44 years due to ill health

Alberto Gómez

Seville

Thursday, 6 April 2023 | Updated 10/04/2023 17:26h.

He wanted to make Marinaleda, a town of fewer than 3,000 inhabitants in Seville province, his very own communist paradise. But Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, a fighter for day labourers' rights and town mayor for more than forty years, has lost votes and health in equal measure along the way.

The last council elections in 2019 had a little to do with this decision. Then Gordillo won by the minimum, just a few votes' difference, losing his overall majority. So different from the days when every councillor voted in was a member of his left-wing CUT party (Candidatura Unitaria de Trabajadores) - later forming part of Izquierda Unida but always led by this admirer of Marx and Gandhi, often called the Andalusian Lenin. A born activist, yet now forced to leave a position that seemed tailor-made for him.

Marinaleda knows of no other mayor than Sánchez Gordillo. He won the first democratic local elections after the Franco regime in 1979 and has held office against hell and high water ever since.

It is hard to imagine him now, at 74, defeated by what fate brings: several strokes and their aftermath make it unfeasible for him to remain in charge of this municipality where the two big parties, PP and PSOE, are not welcome. These parties couldn't even manage to garner 100 votes between them in the last municipal elections. Only Avanza Marinaleda, an independent group, managed to give the 'forever' mayor electoral jitters for the first time.

But Sánchez Gordillo, the scourge of the big supermarket chains and a poster boy of political leadership for Bildu (the left-wing, Basque nationalist coalition party), won again.

That was four years ago. He now retires without ever having lost at the ballot box. Those who know him well also realise he will continue to pull all the strings he can. His iron-clad grip on the town casts a long shadow; it's the darker side of his time in office.

"Let them face the consequences," he warned those who voted for other candidates in 2019. "We are going to be tough. Those people who lend their support for our plans will be rewarded, but those who turn their backs on us will be left out in the cold."

For Gordillo, always with a Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck, any opposition is deemed a betrayal. And in Marinaleda, whose sports pavilion is named after Che Guevara, any voices of dissent cost dear.

For 44 years Gordillo has provided something resembling the glory days of communism: two-storey houses for 15 euros monthly rent; full employment in cooperatives where the manager earns the same as the office clerk, (a single salary of about 1,200 euros per month); the occupation of landowners' farms to seize the land for the town; and a public meeting system for wider, community decisions.

In return, those beneficiaries must have shown, and must continue to show, loyalty to the mayor and his ideologies. Such is the price for this "utopia": almost free housing, yes, but exclusively for those who voted for him. This is how he explained it in one of his last speeches as mayor, keeping it brief owing to real difficulty speaking following his last stroke: "The first homes will be for those who stood up for this plan."

Placement agency

One of his priorities has always been the closure of the canneries and other private companies located in the town with the aim that only the council, through a cooperative working as a placement agency, would create local jobs.

"Those who mock today will start crying tomorrow," he pronounced on election night in May 2019, "We will remain in charge."

But his decline, despite re-election, was evident. To the physical deterioration we can add disillusionment as hundreds of loyal voters switched to other candidates, largely due to the creeping authoritarianism that had stained Gordillo's administration in his latter years of service.

Also gone are his 12 years as a member of the Andalusian parliament, where he fiercely opposed any pact with the Socialists.

With the regular land seizures now largely resolved, in 2012 he turned to painting an image of himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, plotting raids on large stores such as Mercadona and Carrefour, stealing only the cheapest basics to be delivered to the most vulnerable - as long as they had voted for him.

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