La Jornada: They will evoke in tribute the fascinating life of the dissident Antonio José Palós Palma

The republican doctor Antonio José Palós Palma (1911-1977) fought from his native Puente Genil against Franco, in the Dominican Republic in opposition to the dictator Trujillo, and in Mexico alongside Lucio Cabañas. “He always believed in freedom, rights and democracy. He was tireless and did what he wanted with his life,” said his grandson Miguel Ángel Muñoz Palós.

The fascinating life of Palós Palma will be the center of the tribute that will be paid to this figure on the left on July 25 at 12 noon at the Ateneo Español de México (Hamburgo 6, Colonia Juárez).

Muñoz Palós recalled that he had contact with his grandfather when he was five years old. “Some time later he had to leave Mexico. They forced him to leave, because they were going to kill Cabañas. I remember when we went to say goodbye to him at the airport.” He went to Venezuela, where he died in Ciudad Bolívar.

Many of the militant’s diaries and other assets were lost on that forced trip due to “such an onslaught from the government to make him leave.”

The memory of the doctor and fighter, who in his youth joined the Socialist Group of Córdoba, was that of “a very big and robust man. We always talked to my mother a lot about his accent and his hard voice.

“Being a military doctor from the beginning, I had that tone and that character, which my mother adopted; she was also a doctor and was very strict. It marked all the Palós, even with my family who lives in Spain, the hardness of the military doctor was very marked.”

The fighter’s story shared something that many families in Spain experienced during the civil war: confrontation and division. His brother was a Franco general. “My uncles told me that my grandfather had to run away because they were going to go after him, and when they went to look for him his sisters had to deny that they knew him so they wouldn’t catch him.”

A daughter of the Francoist, Muñoz Palós said, confessed that her father “told my great-grandmother that she wanted me to bring him my grandfather’s head” at the time when Franco’s dictatorship began. That’s why he fled to France.

The socialist spent some time in the European country, then traveled to the Maghreb; He was in Morocco and Algiers. He decided to travel to the Dominican Republic, where there was an important group of Spanish exiles.

The Spanish Pablo Iglesias Foundation records that Antonio José Palós studied medicine at the universities of Salamanca and Seville. He was director of the socialist weekly Forward, in Córdoba.

In the war in his country he joined the Córdoba Militia Battalion and then moved to the Aviation Battalion, where he reached the rank of captain. He carried out military studies in the Soviet Union. He received wounds on the Ebro front. The war ended in the Special Defense Against Aircraft Group.

After a time of transfers, he arrived in the Dominican Republic in 1939; Two years later he married the Dominican Mercedes Angélica Alburquerque Frías. After being expelled by Leónidas Trujillo he traveled to Venezuela, where he had to leave when there was a coup d’état in 1948.

He was in Guatemala, where he collaborated with General Juan Rodríguez García, founder of an organization that fought to overthrow Trujillo. There he met the Spanish republican general Alberto Bayo, in whose book Storm in the Caribbean, Palós Palma described the result: “I have been a victim of lead in the line of duty.”

“Painful exiles”

The man from Cordoba says: “I was expelled from Santo Domingo as a ‘rebel’ and then from Venezuela, by the Venezuelan Military Junta that tyrannizes my current homeland, and the elements of the Junta were not happy with my expulsion, with the seizure of all my assets acquired through work where my son was born, they sent some gunmen to Guatemala to assassinate me for an article I wrote in Our Diary.”

Regarding the journey, he concluded: “I brought two wounds to my left leg to Mexico as my only economic wealth. All that I have left of assets and fortune revolves around me: my wife and my three children, one born in Spain, one in Santo Domingo, the little one in Venezuela. Three affections that console me from my three painful exiles.”

Regarding the tribute next Saturday, Miguel Ángel Muñoz announced that he will talk about the participation of women alongside social fighters. She said that her grandmother, Mercedes Angélica Alburquerque, belonged to the upper class and abandoned her to continue with her husband.

Antonio José Palós joined the opposition to Trujillo. He participated in the Luperón expedition, which tried to kill the autocrat. After the failure of the operation and the death of some of his companions, he returned wounded. Accompanied by Alburquerque he traveled to Guatemala, they crossed the Suchiate River and arrived in Mexico City.

The journalist Luis Hernández Navarro, Opinion coordinator of this publishing house, will talk about the importance of Palós Palma, “his adventures in Cuba, his visit to That Guevara, from his great friend: General Alberto Bayo, a very important man in the expedition to kill Trujillo,” said Muñoz.

On the other hand, the researcher and lawyer Gloria Maldonado will talk about the role of women in the Spanish exile, the historian and researcher René Cristóbal García Galeana will address the character’s experience in Atoyac and with Lucio Cabañas, while the specialist in exiles in Latin America and security issues Laura Beatriz Moreno will discuss the Luperón expedition.

Miguel Ángel Muñoz summarized that “it will be a very open theme of the grandfather’s life and the social events in which he moved, from the Spanish civil war to the guerrilla with Cabañas.”

Alberto Bayo, military instructor in Mexico of the July 26 Movement, led by Fidel Castro, invited Palós Palma to Havana, where he met Guevara.

He remembered that Hernández Navarro told him: “your grandfather was someone who lived free, lived his moment and his ideals and fought and died with them.”

The grandson of the faithful socialist concluded: “it was what he liked, all those movements, until the end of his life.”