It has taken the Santander City Council 17 years to place the plaque with the name of Matilde Zapata on the city street that commemorates this journalist, who was director of the newspaper La Región after the execution of her husband, Luciano Malumbres, and who was retaliated and later executed by the coup plotters of the rebel side during the Civil War.
Thus, after the insistent requests from the residents of the Cueto area, -where the street granted to Matilde Zapata by the Corporation on March 29, 2007 and until now without a sign is located-, and from political parties such as Izquierda Unida, which has claimed it on several occasions in the municipal plenary session of Santander, finally the commemorative plaque has been placed without any institutional announcement being made by the government team led by the mayor, Gema Igua (PP) as happens on other occasions.
Izquierda Unida de Santander in its , and which had been pending for almost two decades. IU, already in 2023, when Miguel Saro was its spokesperson, asked the municipal government team to place the plaque, a request that was repeated again by councilor Keruin P. Martínez in the last plenary session.
Martínez has valued what happened as “a small gesture but one that is important. Matilde Zapata, like other figures, are part of the best in our history and also deserve a prominent place in the public space. This case also demonstrates that all that is needed is political will. In that sense, we will continue working to clean up the Francoist streets and ensure that the Democratic Memory Law is complied with in our city,” he noted.
Reference of journalism, feminism and the workers’ struggle
Matilde Zapata was born in Seville in 1906 and was still a child when her family settled in Santander. At a very young age, she joined the PSOE and became president of the organization’s Children’s Group in Santander. From there he went to the Socialist Youth, according to Miguel Ángel Chica in his section ‘Cantabrians with History’.
The proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931 changed the life of Matilde Zapata. Her husband, Luciano Malumbres, was director of the newspaper La Región and they shared ideas and a common project, which was based on the newspaper’s editorial line: making the city’s labor movement visible, giving a voice to those who had never had a voice and denouncing the impunity of big businessmen.
Matilde Zapata became one of the newspaper’s main collaborators. Through her articles she claimed women’s rights and defended effective equality in the workplace and cultural sphere. Her writings in La Región and her work in the Socialist Party turned her into an archetype of the leftist, free, cultured and fighting woman.
Luciano Malumbres was murdered in Santander at the hands of a gunman, a Falange militant, on June 3, 1936, in the La Zanguina bar, while he was playing a game of dominoes with some friends. During the entire month of June the newspaper did not stop publishing a single day. Matilde Zapata became the unofficial director of the media and combined the position with her work as an assistant at the Santander Municipal Library. From the pages of La Región she investigated the death of her husband, pointed out those responsible, denounced impunity and continued to act as a spokesperson for the workers.
The newspaper published its last issue on June 29, 1937. Matilde Zapata was among the hundreds of people who marched towards Asturias. On August 26, General Varela’s troops entered the Cantabrian capital and in the following days they detained 17,000 people. At the beginning of 1938, Zapata embarked for France, on her way to exile, but was detained by Franco’s fleet.
They took her back to Santander, where she was subjected to a Court Martial. He was accused of supporting the Marxist cause and haranguing the masses and was sentenced to two death sentences. She spent the last days of her life in an improvised women’s prison in the Ramón Pelayo School Group in Santander, until she was taken to the Ciriego cemetery in the early hours of May 28, 1938 and shot when she was 32 years old.
Family linked to Cueto
Matilde Zapata and her family are closely linked to Cueto. His brother Antonio, who also worked as an administrator at the newspaper La Región, fought against fascism in the Luciano Malumbres battalion. When Santander fell into the hands of the coup plotters, he was arrested and locked up in the Tabacalera prison. He spent 26 years in prison, the longest prison stay known among Franco’s prisoners. When democracy arrived, he tried without success to take steps to recover the head of the newspaper La Región, but he died in 1981 without having succeeded.
In 1968, the police entered the home of his daughter, Carmen Zapata, Matilde’s niece. They destroyed doors, broke furniture and clothes, until they found a multicopier, a typewriter and an issue of Mundo Obrero magazine that Carmen and her husband, Veridiano Rojo, printed in their home in Cueto. They were taken into custody and Veridiano Rojo carried the consequences of the torture he suffered in the police station all his life, but he reported it and got the guilty convicted. For many years he was president of the Cueto Neighborhood Association, a place where 17 years after being granted that recognition, the plaque dedicated to Matilde Zapata is displayed on the street.
#journalist #Matilde #Zapata #retaliated #Franco #regime #badge #years #entering #Santander #street
