Esperanza Martínez García, “Sole” (1927)

Esperanza Martínez García was born on 27 April 1927 in Villar del Saz de Arcas (Cuenca). The daughter of a politicised left-wing family, she had four sisters: Amancia, Prudencia, Amada and Angelina. The siblings were mainly raised by their father, Nicolás Martínez, as their mother, Matilde García, had died giving birth to Angelina, shortly before the end of the civil war.

She spent her childhood in the Caserio Atalaya farmhouse, where her father worked the land. She had to walk 4 or 5 km to get to and from school, and that long distance, together with her father’s difficulties in looking after her sisters, made her drop out of school. Her family was republican and voted for the Popular Front, and once the war was over, she decided to join the Resistance.

As Esperanza recounts, at first, they thought that their father had a mistress he kept secret. “Every morning, my father’s pillow looked sunken on both sides. Mum had died in childbirth and the girls suspected he might have a mistress. Food was also missing, so it was clear that someone else was sleeping under our roof”. Soon they discovered that it was not a woman but a guerrilla who was living in their house. His father had decided to help the Resistance and was using the house and the barn as guerrilla hiding places. Although at first, he tried to prevent his daughters from knowing it for fear of repression, once they knew the truth, they also decided to help.

Then Herminio Montero, a Republican enlisted in the guerrilla, contacted Esperanza’s father and he decided to help him. Shortly after, the house became a logistical point for the AGLA (Agrupación Guerrillera de Levante y Aragón). It was 1947 and the dictator Francisco Franco had just approved the Decree-Law on Banditry and Terrorism aimed at combating the guerrilla struggle of the Maquis, which had increased since 1945 due to the Allied victory in the Second World War.

Esperanza was 19 years old. At that time, she was acting as a liaison and, as she told in her own words: “The guerrillas would order things from me and I would go to Cuenca to buy what they asked and bring it home; they often stayed at home, but sometimes they would pick it up and leave. Whenever they came to our house, they always asked me to go buy them things and I always went to Cuenca and bought them what they needed. I rode on a donkey, because back then we had no cars or anything else like that.” Esperanza walked more than 15 km a day to go shopping in Cuenca or other towns, where nobody could question her as to why she bought so many things.

Herminio’s sister was Remedios Montero, who was a close friend of Esperanza’s, but she had never talked to her about these questions for fear of repression and informers. Remedios herself was surprised to find out that her friend was doing the same as she was, as there were several families that helped the guerrillas: “Esperanza was a good friend of mine. She had never said anything to me about helping the people up in the mountains, and had I had said nothing to her either. My surprise was that, one day, when we were talking, we found out that we were both doing the same thing: they were also helping them at home”.

Once they were aware of the reality they were sharing, they decided to help each other with their errands. “Knowing this did us a lot of good, because we came to an agree-ment and together we could do more things. We looked less suspicious”. They began a family collaboration as members of the AGLA in the hardest period of repression of the Guardia Civil against the Resistance.

Despite the secrecy of their actions, the pressure was getting worse by the day. The Guardia Civil disguised themselves as guerrillas and went to the farmhouses pretending to be escaped prisoners trying to communicate with the guerrillas. Esperanza resisted until 1949, when the harassment they were subjected to by the police became too hard to endure.

The whole family was fully aware of what it would mean to be arrested, so they had no choice but to flee to the mountains and join a guerrilla group that was almost dismantled due to the repression. Their lives were in danger. Her father Nicolás, would be Enrique. Her brother-in-law, Hilario, would be Loreto. Amada, would be Rosita. Angelina, would be Blanca. Her friend Reme, would be Celia. Herminio, Reme’s brother, who had been the first to leave, would be Argelio. And Esperanza would be Sole. The Martínez Montero family joined the AGLA together. In Esperanza’s own words: “I was forced to flee to avoid being arrested and shot, but when I joined the guerrillas, they were about to disband […] My mission? To save my life and to resist until the end”. So, she went from being a liaison to becoming a Maquis.

Esperanza refers to those years as extremely hard times due to the living conditions and the persecution. This is how she recounts them: “Those times were extremely hard […] No matter what people may say, the mountains cannot be portrayed. We would go from one place to another and, when we least expected it, the camp was attacked and we had to flee the persecution rushing for cover and hiding in the pine trees. It was terrible.” From 1949 onwards, “It was all about resistance. At other times it had been about keeping active, going to the villages, campaigning here and there, and there was a lot of guerrilla activity, but at that time, in 1949, it was more about guerrilla evacuation, and if by chance there was an attack on the camp that caught us unawares, we could only give a defensive response, but we could not attack, we could never fight back. Although that happened only that year. Before, we could fight back, but not then. I once found myself in the middle of an attack on the camp we were staying in and there was a lot of shooting and a lot of things happened. A couple of the Guardia Civil accidentally ran into the camp and everyone started shooting at each other… One of us got wounded and some of them got wounded too, and one was also killed, a death which they later charged us with in our criminal record. Half an hour later the place was packed with Guardia Civil officers… Then we took refuge in a thicket –under the sun, because it was June or July; nobody could imagine that we were in the thicket, it wasn’t a bush or anything–, until night came and, after communicating with the guerrillas, we regrouped at an assembly point. There was always an assembly point so that, if something happened, we could meet there… It was quite complicated, you know…”

Reme talks in her biography about the way she dealt with the guerrilla men: “Our life in the mountains was the same as theirs, the rucksack always on our backs and the weapon ready in case we needed it. Fortunately, we never had to use it. We were not treated differently or discriminated against for being women. We had good teachers and we gave classes on cultural training, politics and anything else that could cultivate us more and better.”

The guerrilla women were in charge of providing the information, supply and care needed for the survival of the resistors, and at the same time they received training. “Our life consisted mainly in reading, studying, participating in meetings and political discussions, and informing ourselves about the situation whenever we could get some information through the radio, because there was a lot of interference…. But in all of that, and the points of support people used to supply the guerrillas, women never went anywhere to supply. The Guardia Civil was not supposed to know where we were, so we didn’t go anywhere to supply, but the men did it, and through the points we always received news and information that was later discussed in the camps. It was difficult, it was complicated: sometimes there was food, sometimes there wasn’t. You had to live in the pine trees, in the forests, only like that”.

Esperanza became increasingly politicised and joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in 1950. “I immediately joined the party because I had read documents, I had listened to a lot of information about the guerrilla struggle and the reasons for defending the Republic. It all caught my attention and I wanted to be part of that fight, I wanted to feel complicit in all that”. Her sisters learned to read and write.

In 1951, her father and brother-in-law died in an ambush by the Guardia Civil. She and Reme managed to escape and went into exile in Paris, at the home of French communists. There, they received orders from the PCE, for which they continued to work as a liaison. Their mission was to evacuate guerrillas who were still in Spain. “The party sent me to pick up guerrillas and I came [to Spain] to do it […] Of course I don’t regret it. I wasn’t tricked into it, I did it of my own free will. I joined a cause, I defended it and I continue to defend it”. And she did, she joined it, although the plans went askew. During a train journey to Salamanca, her guide ended up being an infiltrator. She was arrested in 1952 on the outskirts of Miranda de Ebro, and Remedios also fell.

After being tortured, she was tried in two court-martials in Valencia and Burgos. She was sentenced to five years and one day for “banditry and terrorism” and to twenty-three years and four months for “espionage and communism”. She ended up spending 15 years in the prisons of Burgos, Madrid, Valencia and Alcalá de Henares, where she would meet with Reme and her sister Amada. During her time in prison, she worked making uniforms for the police to have her sentence reduced. She was released from prison in 1967 and ended up marrying Manuel Gil in 1970, in the prison of Zaragoza. It was the first civil marriage in prison under Franco’s regime. She was strongly involved in the Democratic Women’s Movement of Saragossa.

Once under democracy, she never stopped fighting for the memory of the Resistance and the anti-Francoist struggle, and she participated in several associations and lectures on this subject. Her life inspired the book La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón, which was later brought to the big screen by Benito Zambrano (El Silencio Roto, 2001).