A-Infos (en) Spain, Obituary, Luis Andrés Edo - Anarchist activist whose life was dedicated to the ‘Idea’ and the struggle for liberty by Stuart Christie

With the death of Luis Andrés Edo, aged 83, in Barcelona, the anarchist movement has lost 
an outstanding militant and original thinker, and I have lost a comrade-in-arms, a former 
cell-mate - and an irreplaceable friend. ---- The son of a Guardia Civil, Luis was born in 
the benemérita barracks in Caspe (Zaragoza) in 1925, but the family moved to Barcelona the 
following year when his father, Román, was transferred to a new cuartel in the Sants 
district of Barcelona, where the young boy grew up, educated by nuns, monks and priests. 
Later, after the social revolution of July 19 1936, the ten-year old Luis became not only 
a ‘child of the barricades’, but also a ‘son of the CENU’ (el Consell de l’Escola Nova 
Unificada), the successor rationalist schools to the Modern School launched by Francisco 
Ferrer I Guardia in 1901 (and forced to close in 1906).

The education he received there and on the streets of revolutionary Barcelona was to prove 
life-changing. Luis’s working life began in 1939, at the age of 14, cleaning machinery and 
odd-jobbing with Spain’s National Railway company, RENFE, where he was apprenticed two 
years later as a locomotive engineer and, in 1941, aged 16, he affiliated to the 
underground anarcho-syndicalist labour union, the National Confederation of Labour (CNT). 
He remained with RENFE until 1946 when, after completing his apprenticeship at the age of 
21, he was arrested and spent a short time in prison accused of ‘stealing potatoes’ from 
trains as part of the CNT’s ‘ food redistribution’ campaign during those years of terrible 
hunger. On his release he became a glassworker, manufacturing thermometers, a job that was 
to cause him serious and enduring health problems from ingesting mercury and hydrofluoric 
acid.

Luis was called up in October 1947 to do his National Service, but by December he had had 
enough of Franco’s army and deserted, crossing clandestinely into France, still dressed in 
his military uniform. In 1952 he returned to Barcelona following a serious crackdown by 
the French authorities on the activities of the CNT in exile. This was the result of a 
bungled train robbery in Lyon the previous year in which three people were killed and nine 
others injured. Luis was not involved in the Lyon robbery, but the French police went out 
of their way to make life intolerable for all Spanish anarchist exiles at the time.
Back in Spain Luis was arrested on desertion charges in August 1952 and was not freed 
until October 1953 when he was returned to the ranks — promptly deserting again early in 
1954. Re-arrested, he served a further six months in the dungeons of the notorious 
Castillo de Figueres, a military prison in Gerona, after which, like so many others, he 
went into permanent exile in France where he threw himself whole-heartedly into the 
libertarian anti-Francoist resistance movement. In Paris in 1955, Luis became closely 
involved with Laureano Cerrada Santos, another former RENFE employee and a key figure in 
the WWII anti-Nazi Resistance and escape and evasion networks. Cerrada was also a master 
forger and an influential figure in France’s criminal demi-monde, especially the Parisian 
and Marseilles milieux, and was, undoubtedly, one of the most problematic, enigmatic and 
mysterious figures of the Spanish anarchist diaspora.
It was Cerrada who, in 1947, had purchased a powerful US Navy Vedette speedboat used by 
the CNT’s defence committee to transport arms, propaganda and militants from France into 
Spain; he also bought the plane used in the aerial attack on Franco’s yacht in San 
Sebastian in September 1948. After the fallout from the Lyon robbery in 1951, however, 
Cerrada was expelled and ostracised by the official CNT for ‘bringing the organisation 
into disrepute’ because of his ‘criminal connections’. Cerrada had, in fact, been in 
custody in France on forgery charges for a month prior to the Lyon robbery. That cut no 
ice with the CNT National Committee in exile in Toulouse who wanted rid of all the 
‘Apache’ elements in the organisation who threatened the legality of their comfortable 
existence in France. In Paris, Luis’s involvement with the Juventudes Libertarias, the 
Spanish anarchist youth organisation also brought him into contact with most of the other 
well-known ‘faces’ of the anti-Franco Resistance, men such as ‘Quico’ Sabaté, the 
near-legendary urban guerrilla, and José Pascual Palacios of the CNT’s Defence Commission, 
the man responsible for coordinating all the action groups operating in Spain and 
described by Barcelona police chief Eduardo Quintela as Spain’s ‘Public enemy number one’.
It was Luis who organised a meeting between ‘el Quico’ and the former Communist Party army 
general, ‘El Campesino’ at the latter’s request in 1959, shortly before Sabaté’s death at 
the hands of the Francoist security services. During this time in Paris he worked at the 
Alhambra Maurice Chevalier Theatre as assistant scene painter to Rafael Aguilera, the 
famous Andalusian artist from Ronda. What few people knew, however, was that Aguilera — a 
hero of the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance who had been imprisoned by the Nazis — 
was also responsible for maintaining an important arms deposit in Paris for CNT Defence 
Commission. One of these caches was in his workshop in the attic of the Alhambra. When 
there was no work to be done in the theatre, Edo and Lucio Urtubia, a close friend and a 
protégé of Quico Sabaté, would clean and oil these weapons. On one dramatic occasion Lucio 
was conscientiously cleaning an old Mauser pistol when it went off in his hand, almost 
blowing Luis’s brains out. By the early 1960s Luis was secretary of the Alianza Obrera 
(CNT-UGT-STV), propaganda secretary of the National Committee of the CNT, secretary of 
Paris Local Federation of the CNT, secretary general of the Peninsular Committee of the 
FIJL in Exile, and was closely involved with, among others, Octavio Alberola, García 
Oliver and Cipriano Mera in the setting up of Defensa Interior, the clandestine section of 
the Spanish Libertarian Movement in Exile (MLE). The function of Defensa Interior was to 
plan and implement subversive actions targeting the Francoist regime and to assassinate 
Franco himself; it was in this role that I first encountered Luis in Paris in 1964, prior 
to setting off for Madrid with plastic explosives intended for that very purpose.

My next encounter with Luis was two years later, in Carabanchel Prison in Madrid as a 
result of a betrayal by a police agent, Inocencio Martínez. He and four other comrades 
were arrested in October 1966 by Franco’s secret police, the Brigada Político-Social (BPS) 
and accused of planning to kidnap the head of the US armed forces in Spain, Rear Admiral 
Norman Gillette and, allegedly, the exiled Argentinean politician Juan Perón. He was also 
accused of complicity in the Rome kidnapping, six months earlier, of Monsignor Marcos 
Ussiá, the 40-year old Spanish ecclesiastical attaché to the Vatican. These actions were 
carried out under the auspices of the First of May Group, the autonomous international 
anarchist action group, which succeeded Defensa Interior following its dissolution by the 
CNT-FAI’s Toulouse leadership subsequent to my arrest in 1964.

Luis and I shared a cell in the infamous sixth gallery of Carabanchel, the political wing. 
I had just turned twenty at the time and in fact it was he who first taught me how to 
shave. During that time we became close friends as well as comrades. I often recall, with 
pleasure, the lengthy discussions we had each evening after lock-up until ‘lights-out’ in 
which we seemed to cover every conceivable subject under the sun. Many of these strands of 
thought he dedicated to fine onion paper in minuscule hand which we later smuggled out of 
prison. Some of these theses appeared forty years later in his collection of theoretical 
essays La Corriente. Certainly, for an inexperienced and naïve youth such as myself, Luis, 
with his charisma and strong personality was the ideal teacher, mentor, and role model. 
They were interesting and educational times indeed and involved two escape attempts which 
were organised by Luis with help from an action group from Paris. The discovery of the 
plan, just before his trial, led to our separation and my transfer to the penitentiary of 
Alcalá de Henares in the summer of 1967. Tried by a civil Public Order Tribunal, something 
unusual in itself for anarchists who, like myself, were normally charged under military 
law with ‘Banditry and Terrorism’ and tried by a drumhead court-martial, Luis was 
sentenced to three years imprisonment for illegal association (membership of the 
Juventudes Libertarias), six years for illegal possession of arms, and a 25,000 peseta 
fine for possessing false identity documents. The sentence would have been considerably 
harsher had he been tried by a ‘Council of War’. Luis was released from Jaén prison in 
1972, having run the gamut of many of Franco’s maximum security penitentiaries — including 
Soria and Segovia in which he organised escape committees and mounted a number of hunger 
strikes and mutinies, for which he spent months in the punishment cells. Arrested again in 
1974 on charges of illegal association with the anarchist action groups of the GARI 
(Grupos de Acción Revolucionaria Internacional) and with complicity in the Paris 
kidnapping of Spanish banker Baltasar Suárez, Luis received a five-year prison sentence in 
February 1975 of which he served a little over two years, after being released in 1976 
under a royal amnesty during the post-Francoist transition, in spite of having led the 
first major mutiny during his time in Barcelona’s Model Prison. It was a particularly 
painful period of imprisonment as he was separated from his partner, Rosita, and his two 
small children, Helios and Violeta who remained in Paris.

With Franco dead but his cohorts still in the driving seats of power, Luis played a key 
role in the CNT’s re-construction in Catalonia and was one of the organisers of the 
‘Montjuic Meeting’, the first legal public gathering of the CNT since 1939 — an event 
which attracted 300,000 people, most of them a new generation of young libertarians. He 
was also a prime mover in organising the ‘Libertarian Days’, the Jornadas Libertarias, a 
week-long international anarchist festival which followed the Montjuic meeting and, for 
five extraordinary days in July, turned Barcelona into a international showcase for — and 
celebration — of anarchism.

Luís Andrés Edo in 2008But the transition period between 1976 and 1981 was also a time of 
major provocations by the rump of the Francoist power elite, the Búnker, desperate to hang 
on to their power and privileges, and avoid being brought to justice for their reign of 
criminality and terror. They and their new social-democratic partners were also anxious to 
discredit and neutralise the radical elements of the nascent CNT and the FAI — the 
so-called ‘Apache sector’. Again it was Luis who was in the forefront of exposing the 
Spanish State’s ‘Strategy of Tension’, which began in earnest in January 1977 with the 
massacre of five leftist lawyers in their offices in Atocha and leaving four others 
seriously injured, by the same Italian neo-fascists responsible for a similar terror 
campaign under way in Italy since 1968. These terrorists, and other parapoliticals of the 
SCOE (Servicio de Coordinación, Organización y Enlace), operated under the control of 
Rodolfo Martín Villa, Adolfo Suárez’s fascist minister of the interior and his notorious 
police commissioner, Roberto Conesa Escudero. The hands of Martin Villa and Escudero were 
also to be seen in the Scala fire of 15 January 1978 in which four people died, and the 
blame for which was laid at the door of the CNT.

Luis was arrested again in 1980 and charged with ‘formación terrorista‘ (organising a 
terrorist group) — conveniently shortly before the trial of the accused in the Scala case 
— with the prosecutor asking for a sentence of twenty years, but he was released on 
provisional liberty in August 1981 after the attempted Tejero coup. The case against Luis 
was finally dropped in 1984 due to lack of evidence.

In the subsequent twenty five years — right up until the moment of his death, and in spite 
of a seriously debilitating seven year illness — Luis was supported throughout by his 
soulmate and partner, Doris Ensinger, with whom he shared his life after finally 
separating from his first partner, Rosita, in 1981. Luis and Rosita had effectively 
separated in 1976 when he refused to return to Paris at such a pivotal moment in Spain’s 
history, while she and the children refused to live in Barcelona. Luis and Doris began 
their relationship in 1978, living together as a couple from the day he was released from 
prison in August 1981.

Luis Andrés Edo remained always both an untiring activist and an intellectual dynamo of 
the international libertarian movement, constantly provoking thought and developing new 
anti-authoritarian ideas. His was the voice — the conscience if you like — of what he was 
proud to call ‘the Apache sector’, defending the anarchist principles of the CNT and 
fighting untiringly for the restoration of the union’s property and assets seized by the 
Francoists in 1939, and for justice for the victims of Francoism, particularly the cases 
of Delgado and Granado the two young anarchists garrotted in 1963 for a crime of which 
they were innocent. And for at least two generations of young Spanish anarchists who came 
into contact with him, Luis Andrés Edo was undoubtedly the inspirational role model of the 
post-Francoist era. He was, to the clandestine libertarian anti-Francoist movement, what 
Jean Moulin was to the French Resistance.

Luís Andrés Edo with 'La CNT En La Encrucijada'In 2002 Luis published La Corriente, 
(originally entitled El pensamiento antiautoritario) an anthology of his prison essays in 
which he explores his ideas on thought and action. and in 2006 he published his 
autobiographical memoirs: La CNT En La Encrucijada: Aventuras de un Heterodoxo (The CNT at 
the Crossroads: Adventures of a Maverick) in which he traces the trajectory of his 
extraordinary life as a militant.

Although Luis Andrés’s death has left those whose lives he touched with a massive sense of 
regret and loss, he has also left present and future generations a valuable legacy, his 
memory and his example — Écrasez l’Infâme!

Luis is survived by his partner, Doris Ensinger, and his two children, Helios and Violeta.

Luis Andrés Edo, anarcho-syndicalist, born 7 November 1925; died 14 February 2009.

An edited version of this obituary was published in the Independent: Luís Andrés Edo: 
Anarchist who fought the repressions of Franco’s Spain. Reposted by KSL from 
www.katesharpleylibrary.net
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