Madrid (EFE).- Lagun (Donosti), Tres i Quatre (Valencia) and Antonio Machado (Madrid) are the Spanish bookstores that have suffered the most attacks by extremist groups, but are still open.
They are an example of the cultural and democratic resistance of a sector that has been hit up to 225 times by violent bibliophobia, as stated in “Where books are burned”.
The authors are Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla (historian from Baracal) and Juan Francisco López Pérez.
The book, edited by Tecnos, is the result of an idea that arose in confinement and an exhaustive documentary investigation embodied in 261 pages.
They make known the violent actions against these establishments, the result of the hatred of the radicals towards them, from 1962 to 2018.
Not all of them are there, because as Fernández Soldevilla explained in an interview with EFE, the 225 attacks are only “the tip of the iceberg”.
They are the ones who have left some “trace” in the press or in other documents, but “there were really many more.”
A good number of them did not report themselves, probably out of fear.
The first attack, in Santander
The first documented attack – this time in the form of a threat – reported by the authors took place in October 1962.
His goal was the Sur de Santander bookstore-art gallery.
Its owner was one of the signatories of a letter of support for the Asturian miners on strike.
The Falange papered the window with threatening messages.
And the last attack that the authors have been able to review occurred in 2018 in the Sant Jordi bookstore, in Tarrasa (Barcelona), with a pro-independence tendency and on whose façade they painted a swastika.
Between them, 225 actions, of which 195 (87 percent) correspond to far-right and parapolice terrorism.
Another 17 are attributed to ETA and eight to the extreme left.
The remaining five have raised doubts about authorship and have not been classified.
Forty attacks on Basque bookstores
Whether due to the greater activism of the ultra-right, the more intense Francoist opposition or the greater concentration of bookstores, the truth is that bibliophobia has been primed more with Catalonia (43 actions), the Basque Country (40), Madrid (37 ) and the Valencian Community (30).
The Basque historian Gaizka Fernández Soldevilla, one of the authors of the book “There where books are burned”. EFE/editorial use only
The authors of the book have been struck by the fact that among the terrorist groups in Spain, those of the ultra-right, which has proportionally caused fewer deaths, have nevertheless had a “fixation” on bookstores.
In the opinion of Fernández Soldevilla, he only notes that culture “is a perfect target” for them.
They are groups that were born during the Franco regime and that see bookstores as a “threat” because “they are a focus of culture, freedom, and democratic ideas, a place where people close to the opposition met, where ideas were disseminated…
They see all of this as a great threat to the survival of the Franco dictatorship, because they are pressuring it to change course”, adds the author.
In addition, for them to attack a bookstore was a “very easy and low risk way” to get visibility in the press.
Once they discover that it has an impact, “it’s like a contagion” and the attacks follow one another, not only in Madrid and Barcelona, but in other provinces.
In fact, if there is a black year for these violent actions, it is 1975, with a total of 45.
In the two following years, 36 and 28 were counted.
It worked for the ultra-right groups, says Fernández Soldevilla, until the press “stop paying attention to them” because another issue was taking center stage: terrorist attacks with fatalities.
Friend, attacked by ETA
ETA also had a “fixation” for these establishments.
And he soon began to attack them, the first time in 1973.
During the transition it also did so, but “when it really is an intense phenomenon it is in the era of socialization of suffering.”
That is to say, from 1995 the band, especially through their “kale barroka” groups, retook the bookstores as their objective, the author explains to EFE.
In the book, its authors have only collected ETA’s direct actions against that sector, but Fernández Soldevilla recalls that the gang has attacked them in other ways: with the revolutionary tax, extortion, boycott campaigns…
“Slightly more diffuse ways or as little obvious as a Molotov cocktail, but that have affected bookstores,” he stresses.
Another thing that has surprised the authors is that regardless of the ideology of the aggressors, the same methods are almost always repeated.
The most common of these assaults was: breaking the window and then throwing either a Molotov cocktail or gasoline or paint.
Of course, in some cases there have been shots and the throwing of excrement. In the end, “extremes meet”, adds the writer.
Lagun and bookstores, spaces of freedom
After this research work, the authors draw a conclusion: Bookstores are a space for freedom and the dissemination of culture, but also for political change.
“They were essential for the Transition and later in the Basque Country to guarantee that we are a plural autonomous community and not homogeneously abertzale. That was what the fans put in the point of view and in the end they did not achieve it ”, affirms Fernández Soldevilla.
But they did get the bookstores “to open again and again. In the end they failed in their endeavor and did not achieve their goal.
“They resisted and that saved us. It has given us a great cultural and democratic contribution that as a society we must thank booksellers and bookstores ”, he concludes. EFE