The small town of Bossòst, in the Val d’Aran, hosted an unusual scene 80 years ago, in the middle of the post-war period, in the hardest years of Franco’s reign. Juan Socasau, baker, allowed himself to share discussions and wine, in full view, with his neighbor Juan Blázquez Arroyo, Republican mayor during the civil war, general of the French internal forces and, at that time, member of the state. Major of the Spanish maquis army.
Blázquez, known at the time as General Caesarwas at the time the protagonist of what was called Operation Reconquista de España, the invasion with more than 4,000 Republican guerrillas from France, in October 1944, who sought to change the regime in Spain by taking advantage of the Nazi defeat. An almost suicidal mission encouraged by the communist Jesús Monzón and whose first step was the capture of the Aran Valley, the region of the Catalan Pyrenees which borders the French country and Aragon. A resounding failure which only lasted ten days until they decreed the withdrawal.
“My mother perfectly remembered Blázquez’s two bodyguards stationed in front of the house, with their weapons, while his father drank wine with him,” says Juan Carlos Riera Socasau, who grew up in the same house. Little is known about General Caesar’s brief return to his Val d’Aran, between October 19 and 27. He never wanted to remember it, perhaps out of shame at having participated in a failed operation precisely at home, among his people. “One will wonder if it was a stain on him,” observes Riera.
A doctor by profession and historian by vocation, author of numerous works on the Val d’Aran, Juan Carlos Riera Socasau is the author of Juan Blázquez ‘General Caesar’ and Lola Clavero. Resistance and exile from Aran. The story follows the steps of this couple from their communist activism in the years before the civil war to their exile in Toulouse, followed by their fight against Nazism – with a film about the escape from the Vernet concentration camp – , a complicated political and political history. personal survival in Prague and definitive retirement in Morocco.
A true odyssey, that experienced by the Blázquez-Clavero couple, which ended for them in Rabat, where he died in 1974 and where he currently rests. “I tried to have the body repatriated, because they make it easier for those who were French soldiers, but they told me no because he did not die as a member of the corps,” deplores Riera. The woman, Lola Clavero, lived to return to Spain. After the death of Francisco Franco, he returned to his hometown of Gipuzkoa, where he died in 2004.
Lola Clavero never hid her husband’s reluctance to remember those autumn days of 1944 in their Aran Valley, of guerrillas surrounded by snow-covered mountains and frightened Aranese. “Juanitu He opposed the operation on principle. “He said that it was a needless sacrifice of young people,” he confessed to the historian Ferran Sánchez Agustí, who collected it in Maquis and Pyrenees. The Gramins invasion (1944-1945). “He predicted failure, but recommended the Vale of Aran as the center of the invasion,” he said.
The Aranese orography was the most favorable to republican interests. After all, this region was the only one in all the Pyrenees with a simple escape route to France. On the other hand, towards Catalonia, they had the Puerto de la Bonaigua, at 2,000 meters above sea level, behind which to equip themselves.
A short-lived mayor and member of La Résistance
The story of the Blázquez-Clavero marriage is one of the investigations that are being revealed these days in Viella during the conference October 1944, Operation to reconquer Spain. The son of an Aranese woman and a mining engineer from Malaga, Blázquez Arroyo was born in 1914 and began activism in the United Socialist Youth (JSU) during his studies in Madrid, where he met Lola Clavero de Saint -Sebastien. She was a dentist, he had only half studied law, they lived through the outbreak of the civil war in Bossòst. At only 23 years old, Blázquez was chosen in October 1936 as mayor of this small town of 900 inhabitants.
From then on, he is remembered as crossing the border in search of weapons and helping the local priest, Agustí Nart, escape. “His attitude was very popular, he was from Bossòst and he protected his people above all else,” explains Riera Socasau. The same attitude would guide him when he invaded the valley in 1944, when neighbors feared reprisals.
Blázquez left city hall in early 1937 to take up the post of political commissar in the Republican army, and at the end of the war he moved to the south of France, where he continued his communist activism. He was the founder of the Spanish National Union (UNE) and, while working as a bus driver or laborer in the countryside, he participated in the French resistance against the Nazis.
He was arrested in December 1942 and remained locked up in several concentration camps until his escape from Le Vernet in October 1943. He escaped to avoid deportation to the Nazi extermination camps. Two Romanian prisoners escaped with him, including Mihail Florescu, who would become a minister in his country’s socialist republic. At night, they cut cables and crossed rivers and crops, seeking shelter in houses and farms. They remained in hiding practically until the liberation of Paris.
The Aranese days of the Reconquista
During the summer of 1944, Blázquez lived with the euphoria of having defeated Hitler and the hope that the next dictator to fall would be Franco. Ignoring the voices from within and the rejection of De Gaulle himself or the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Communist Party in France decided to launch Operation Reconquest of Spain.
“The decision to enter through the Aran Valley seems to have been taken by Juan Blázquez, due to his direct knowledge of the place,” said Gregorio Morán in Misery and greatness of the Spanish Communist Partyin tune with the memory of Lola Clavero. He nevertheless expressed his reservations about the foreseeable failure. And he wasn’t the only one. More striking than his was the opposition of the head of the operation himself, Colonel Vicente López Tovar, who also did not see it clearly, proof to the extent to which the operation was doomed to failure. .
Before the Landing, the ill-advised actions of the maquis multiplied throughout the Pyrenees. And on October 19, more than 4,000 soldiers entered a region of barely 4,500 inhabitants. The maquis occupied 18 villages, but they did not reach the capital, Viella, and no popular uprising occurred in favor of the republicans. “People in general were afraid, they had left the war behind them, many Aranese had not returned from the front,” says Riera Socasau, who remembers her grandfather’s words to the invaders: “And what will happen to us? “If it doesn’t go well?”
The guerrillas were careful not to punish the local population, whatever their political affiliation. There were also no major clashes with Franco’s army, whose significant troops were led by General Moscardó. The toll is 32 soldiers of the Francoist army killed against 129 maquis. Of these, five are buried in a tomb in ès Bordes, while the Grave Plan of the Generalitat plans to locate the others.
Although the main skirmishes took place in ès Bordes and Salardú, two police officers died in Bossòst. Later, the then sergeant of the Civil Guard in Salardú would highlight Blázquez’s “noble” gesture by presiding over the burial of the two guards. The ceremony was presided over by Agustí Nart, the same priest whose life he saved in 1936.
After General Moscardó assembled 50,000 soldiers in the valley, the maquis staff, accompanied by Santiago Carrillo – who had gone there – decided to retreat. in the book The invasion of the maquisby journalist Daniel Arasa, includes the last mention of Blázquez during Operation Reconquista. “They gave us a sealed envelope for the General Caesarsaid an officer, “we had to go to the valley and hand it over to him. We did not open it, but from what we learned at headquarters, it contained a withdrawal order.” Blázquez retreated to the south of France with thousands of other guerrillas and never returned to his small Aranese homeland.
Purge in Prague and rest in Rabat
“Perhaps his most difficult moment was leaving Prague. The one with the greatest happiness, Morocco. This is how Riera Socasau summarizes the journey of Juan Blázquez and Lola Clavero at the end of the Second World War. After being decorated with the Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre and the Resistance Medal by General De Gaulle, the couple settled in Prague, capital of Czechoslovakia, a satellite of the USSR. They did so following party orders to avoid falling into the French government’s Boléro-Paprika operation against communist organizations.
Clavero worked as a dentist and Blázquez found a job teaching Spanish at Charles University in Prague, in addition to hosting a Catalan-language show on Radio Prague with writer Teresa Pàmies. There, the Blázquez-Clavero couple met some of their best friends and interacted with poets Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén. But his years in the Czechoslovak capital were marked by the control of the communist apparatus.
“We were living very well until they made Juan, and I say they did it because he was not, a Catalan nationalist,” said his wife. He was Aranese and not Catalan, she would insist years later. It was his identity. But accusations began against the couple, considering them little involved in the party. Enrique Líster, of the PCE Political Bureau, wrote about Lola: “She is a comrade with petty-bourgeois tendencies.” “It should be added that she is the companion of comrade Juan Blázquez, whose attitude and behavior are quite questionable,” indicates a note dated 1952.
Blázquez was kicked out of the university shortly after and they even confiscated his ration card, so they had to throw away Lola’s. Not without complications, in 1958 they managed to leave Czechoslovakia and settle in Morocco. There, Lola continued to work as a dentist and Juan worked for the Moroccan government as an agricultural engineer – a university degree he obtained growing up, unlike law. He died on December 10, 1974.
Far from the cemetery where his body rests, in the middle of the Aranese mountains, Juan Blázquez Arroyo is today synonymous with the maquis. “At Bossòst, I would dare to say that he is an emblematic figure,” says Riera Socasau. But paradoxically, in the region, there are still few references to Operation Reconquista. “It is still difficult to advance democratic memory in the Val d’Aran,” says this doctor and historian.
