The small town of Bossòst, in the Aran Valley, hosted an unusual scene 80 years ago in the middle of the post-war period, in the hardest years of Franco’s rule. Juan Socasau, baker, allowed himself to share talk and wine, in full view of everyone, with his neighbor Juan Blázquez Arroyo, republican mayor during the Civil War, general of the French Interior Forces and, at that time, a member of the State Major of the Spanish maquis army.
Blázquez, known at that time as the General Caesarwas the protagonist in those days of what was called Operation Reconquista de España, the invasion with more than 4,000 republican guerrillas from France, in October 1944, which pursued a change of regime in Spain taking advantage of the Nazi defeat. An almost suicidal mission encouraged by the communist Jesús Monzón and whose first stage was the capture of the Arán Valley, the Catalan Pyrenean region that borders the French country and Aragon. A resounding failure that lasted just ten days until they decreed the withdrawal.
“My mother perfectly remembered the two Blázquez 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 that same home. Little is known about General Caesar’s brief return to his Aran Valley, between October 19 and 27. He never wanted to remember it, perhaps out of shame for having taken part in a failed operation precisely in his home, among his people. “We will be left wondering if it was a stain for him,” observes Riera.
Doctor by profession and historian by vocation, writer of numerous books about the Aran Valley, Juan Carlos Riera Socasau is the author of Juan Blázquez ‘General César’ 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 time as exiles in Toulouse, followed by their fight against Nazism – with a film escape from the Le Vernet concentration camp -, a complicated political and personal survival in Prague and final retirement in Morocco.
A true odyssey, the one experienced by the Blázquez-Clavero couple, which ended for them in Rabat, where he died in 1974 and where he currently lies buried. “I tried to get the body repatriated, because they make it easier for those who have been French soldiers, but they told me no because he did not die as a member of the corps,” laments Riera. The woman, Lola Clavero, did live to return to Spain. After the death of Francisco Franco, he returned to his native Guipúzcoa, where he died in 2004.
Lola Clavero never hid her husband’s reluctance to remember those autumn days of 1944 in their Aran Valley, the guerrillas surrounded by snow-capped mountains and frightened Aranese. “Juanitu He opposed the operation on principle. “He said it was sacrificing young people uselessly,” he confessed to the historian Ferran Sánchez Agustí, who collected it in Maquis and Pyrenees. The Gramin Invasion (1944-1945). “He predicted failure, but recommended the Aran Valley as the center of the invasion,” he stated.
The Aranese orography was the most favorable to republican interests. After all, this region was the only one in the entire Pyrenees that had a simple evacuation 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 fleeting mayor and member of La Résistance
The story of the Blázquez-Clavero marriage is one of the investigations that are being disclosed these days in Viella during the conference October 1944, Operation reconquesta d’Espanya. Son of an Aranese woman and a mining engineer from Malaga, Blázquez Arroyo was born in 1914 and began militancy in the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU) during his student days in Madrid, where he met Lola Clavero from San Sebastián. She was a dentist, he had only half studied law, they lived through the outbreak of the Civil War from Bossòst. At only 23 years old, Blázquez was chosen in October 1936 as the mayor of that small town of 900 inhabitants.
From that stage he is remembered that he used to cross the border in search of weapons and that he helped the local priest, Agustí Nart, escape. “His attitude was very much of the people, of being from Bossòst, and of protecting his people above all else,” says Riera Socasau. The same attitude would guide him when he carried out the invasion of the valley in 1944, when the neighbors feared reprisals.
Blázquez left the mayor’s office at the beginning of 1937 to take up the position of political commissioner in the Republican Army, and at the end of the war he settled in the south of France, where he continued his communist militancy. He was founder of the Spanish National Union (UNE) and, while working as a bus driver or laborer in the countryside, he took part in the French resistance against the Nazis.
He was arrested in December 1942 and remained locked up in several concentration camps until he escaped from Le Vernet in October 1943. He escaped to avoid deportation to the Nazi death camps. Two Romanian inmates fled with him, one of them Mihail Florescu, who would end up being a minister of his country’s socialist republic. They cut the wire at night and crossed rivers and crops, seeking shelter in houses and farms. They remained underground practically until the liberation of Paris.
The Aranese days of the Reconquista
In 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 coming from within and the rejection of De Gaulle himself or the United Kingdom, the leadership of the Communist Party in France decided to activate Operation Reconquest of Spain.
“The decision to enter through the Arán Valley seems to have been made by Juan Blázquez, due to his direct knowledge of the place,” said Gregorio Morán in Misery and Greatness of the Communist Party of Spainin tune with the memory of Lola Clavero. Even so, he expressed his reservations about the foreseeable failure. And he wasn’t the only one. More notable than his was the opposition of the operation’s leader himself, Colonel Vicente López Tovar, who also did not see it clearly, proof of the extent to which it was destined to fail.
Before D-Day, the misguided 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 towns, but they did not reach the capital, Viella, nor did any popular uprising occur in favor of the republicans. “People in general were afraid, they had left the war behind, 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 this doesn’t go well?” ?”
The guerrillas were careful not to punish the local population regardless of their political affiliation. There were also no major clashes with Franco’s Army, whose large troops were led by General Moscardó. The balance was 32 Francoist army soldiers killed compared to 129 maquis. Of the latter, five are buried in a tomb in Ès Bordes, while the Generalitat’s Grave Plan contemplates locating the others.
Although the main skirmishes occurred 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 of presiding over the burial of the two guards. The ceremony was officiated by Agustí Nart, the same priest whose life he saved in ’36.
After General Moscardó amassed 50,000 soldiers in the Valley, the Maquis General Staff, together with Santiago Carrillo – who had traveled to the place – decided to back down. 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 according to what we were informed at the General Staff, it contained a withdrawal order.” Blázquez retreated to the south of France along with the other thousands of guerrillas and would never return 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 that Juan Blázquez and Lola Clavero faced at the end of the Second World War. After being decorated with the Legion of Honor, Croix de Guerre and Medaille de la Resistance by General De Gaulle, the couple moved to Prague, capital of Czechoslovakia, satellite of the USSR. They did so following the party’s orders to avoid falling into the French Government’s Bolero-Paprika operation against communist organizations.
Clavero worked as a dentist and Blázquez found a position teaching Spanish at the Charles University of Prague, in addition to hosting a program in Catalan on Radio Prague with the writer Teresa Pàmies. There the Blázquez-Clavero couple met some of their best friends, and they interacted with the poets Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén. But his years in the capital of Czechoslovakia were marked by the control of the communist apparatus.
“We lived very well until they made Juan, and I say they made him because he was not, a Catalan nationalist,” said his wife. He was Aranese and not Catalan, she would insist years later. That was his identity. But accusations began against the couple, considering them little involved with the party. Enrique Líster, of the Political Bureau of the PCE, wrote about Lola: “She is a comrade with petty-bourgeois tendencies.” “To this must be added that she is the companion of Comrade Juan Blázquez, whose attitude and behavior are quite dubious,” said a note dated 1952.
Blázquez was kicked out of college shortly after and they even took away his ration card, so they had to throw away Lola’s card. Not without complications, in 1958 they managed to leave Czechoslovakia and settle in Morocco. There Lola continued working as a dentist and Juan worked for the Moroccan government as an agricultural engineer – an academic degree that he did obtain when he grew up, unlike law. He died on December 10, 1974.
Far from the cemetery where his body lies, among the Aranese mountains, today Juan Blázquez Arroyo is synonymous with maquis. “In Bossòst I would dare to say that he is an iconic figure,” says Riera Socasau. However, paradoxically, in the region there are still few references to Operation Reconquista. “It is still difficult to advance democratic memory in the Aran Valley,” claims this doctor and historian.
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