Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez (1909 – 18 June 1939), popularly known by his nickname Marianet, was a Spanish anarcho-syndicalist politician who served as General Secretary of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War.
Born into a working-class Calé family in Barcelona, his mother died while he was young and his father subsequently abandoned him. He spent his teenage years in poverty and was often imprisoned. There, he first found connection with the Spanish anarchist movement and learnt to read and write. After his release, he joined the construction union of the CNT and began writing for its newspaper Solidaridad Obrera, where he debated anarchist feminism with Lucía Sánchez Saornil. Sánchez Saornil's criticisms of Vázquez's views on gender equality led her to establish the Mujeres Libres organisation.
Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Vázquez was elected the CNT's general secretary, becoming a leading advocate for anarchist collaboration with the Republican government. After the May Days, his support for collaboration and military discipline drew criticism from parts of the anarchist movement, which condemned his continued loyalty to the government of Juan Negrín. After the victory of the Nationalist forces, Vázquez fled to France, where he organised aid for Spanish refugees and the transfer of the CNT's archives to the International Institute of Social History. He also had a heated exchange with Emma Goldman, who, after supporting him during the war, questioned whether he had been "duped" by Negrín and the Communist Party of Spain, whom anarchists blamed for the Republican defeat. Vázquez held that the defeat was from insufficient support from Western democracies, and that the CNT had been premature in pursuing revolution before winning the war.
Vázquez drowned in the Marne river in June 1939. His memory soon became a target for anarchist critics of collaborationism, who held him personally responsible for the revolution's collapse. Allegations of moral and political corruption were made against him, sometimes infused with anti-Romani sentiment. In the 21st century, he has been cited as a notable example of Romani participation in the leadership of the Spanish anarchist movement.
Biography Early life and activism Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez was born in 1909 in Barcelona to a working class Calé family. Vázquez grew up in the neighbourhood of Hostafrancs, in Barcelona's Sants-Montjuïc district. His mother died while he was a child, and his father abandoned him to a children's shelter, which was well known for abusing children. When he was a teenager, he escaped the institution. Without a family or a job throughout the 1920s, he faced difficulties with poverty and was frequently imprisoned. In prison, he met members of the Spanish anarchist movement, who became his chosen family and taught him how to read and write. He subsequently dropped his patrilineal surname "Rodríguez" and began signing his name using only his matrilineal surname "Vázquez".
Following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, Vázquez was released from prison into a new political environment. He found work as a bricklayer and joined the construction union of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union confederation. He also joined the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), where he became popularly known by the nickname "Marianet". During the Republican years, he was frequently detained for his anarchist activism and served six prison sentences, totalling 29 months. On one occasion, in September 1931, he was arrested during a confrontation between his union and the police. He was imprisoned for a year and three months, which he spent studying anarchist theory and writing articles for the CNT's newspaper Solidaridad Obrera. After his release, he returned to political activism and quickly rose through the ranks of the CNT.
He became a frequent contributor to the anarchist press, in which he advocated for the establishment of a women's platform within the anarchist movement. In 1935, he published two articles on the subject in Solidaridad Obrera, demonstrating sympathy for the problems anarchist women faced within the movement and declaring that they were effectively "slaves of slaves" so long as the oppression of women persisted. He called for anarchist women to unite with their male counterparts to create a new society, where everyone has economic independence, which he believed would bring an end to gender inequality. This led to a public debate with the anarchist feminist Lucía Sánchez Saornil, who responded that male anarcho-syndicalists were largely disinterested in encouraging women's participation in the movement and proposed that women needed to be treated as equals by men if they were to be recruited into the movement. She also rejected Vázquez's plan to devote a page of Solidaridad Obrera to women's issues, as she had ambitions to create a separate journal for anarchist women. Saornil's plans culminated with her establishing the anarchist women's organisation Mujeres Libres.
Rise to the CNT leadership By the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Vázquez had become secretary of the CNT's regional committee in Catalonia. During the July 1936 military uprising in Barcelona, he and other members of the CNT leadership stormed the Atarazanas barracks, seizing weapons to fight the Nationalists. The Nationalists were beaten in Catalonia, which became a centre for a social revolution that saw the widespread collectivisation of property by the anarcho-syndicalists. Vázquez, with Buenaventura Durruti and Joan Garcia i Oliver, met the Catalan president Lluis Companys, who appeared to have accepted the anarchist control over Barcelona. Vázquez then oversaw the formation of an anti-fascist alliance with the government of Catalonia, arguing for the necessity of anarcho-syndicalists fighting alongside the Popular Front against the Nationalists. Within weeks, the Catalan government – composed of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) – attempted to sideline the newly-established Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia (CCMA) and bring the Civil Guard into Barcelona. But Vázquez, along with Durruti and Garcia i Oliver, launched an armed defence of anarchist control of the capital, demanding the government's immediate dissolution. To appease the anarchists and avoid armed confrontation, the Catalan prime minister excluded the PSUC from his administration, first seeking the approval of Vázquez before publicly announcing the move. By September 1936, Vázquez had overseen the integration of several members of the CNT into the Catalan government, taking three ministries and other posts associated with defence and public order.
Vázquez became a leading advocate of anarchist collaboration with the governments of Catalonia and the Spanish Republic. He moved to Madrid, and oversaw the integration of anarchists into the Republican government. He initially opposed immediate integration into the government, aiming to secure proportional representation for the CNT in a government presided over by the trade union leader Francisco Largo Caballero. Vázquez secured four ministries for the CNT in the new government and convinced the intransigent Joan Garcia i Oliver to take a ministerial post. He then moved to Valencia, where the government had sought refuge from the Nationalist's siege of Madrid. The government's move to Valencia provoked discontent from the CNT's membership, many of whom accused the government and their own general secretary, Horacio Prieto, of "cowardice". Prieto responded on 18 November 1936, by tendering his "irrevocable resignation". In his place, Vázquez was elected as the General Secretary of the CNT. In his first address to the CNT, on 20 November, Vázquez appealed for "individual and collective discipline" in the face of the circumstances that drove them to collaboration with the government. He quickly appointed as editor-in-chief of Solidaridad Obrera, replacing , who had a more lax editorial line, and charged Toryho with adapting the newspaper to the strict discipline he saw as necessary. When Toryho was criticised by Callejas and , who accused him of expelling "true anarchists" from the paper and replacing them with "suspect journalists", Vázquez publicly defended him as having worked in service of the CNT's political line.
Throughout the war, Vázquez concerned himself with the activities of the Durruti Column, engaged in diplomacy with Mexico and international volunteers, and publicised the deaths of anarchists fighting on the frontlines. When Málaga fell in early 1937, Vázquez called for each party on the Republican side to examine their own responsibility in the defeat. In April 1937, when the militarisation of the CNT militias was decreed, he defended the policy in an interview with the anti-statist magazine Nosotros, which had opposed calls for militarisation. He promised that the militarisation would not be an authoritarian implementation, and that anarchists would maintain control of their own units, although they would be integrated into a coordinated and unified force, under strict military discipline. Vázquez believed that organisational discipline within the anarchist movement was the best way that they could counter the "tidal wave of confusion" caused by the rise of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). To impose the military discipline of the frontline onto the anarchist rearguard, he reorganised the CNT's syndicates into sections that could better support the war effort. He also announced military recruitment drives, holding particular contempt for the "señoritos" (young bourgeois men) that spent their time relaxing in cafés rather than fighting on the frontline.
Conflict and mediation In the early months of the war, both the anarchists and the government of Largo Caballero had wanted equitable collaboration, with anarchist leaders such as Vázquez, Federica Montseny and Joan Peiró giving a speech on the matter in Valencia on International Workers' Day. However, civil conflict between the anarchists and communists had come to a head in early 1937, as the latter faction (which opposed anarchist collectivisation policies) increasingly attacked the former. In April, Vázquez publicly denounced the communists for killing anarcho-syndicalists in Toledo. During the May Days, when fighting between the two factions broke out over control of Barcelona, Vázquez went to the city to mediate a ceasefire. He and Montseny secured an armistice, in exchange for the dismissal of the Catalan communist police chief Eusebio Rodríguez Salas. Vázquez believed that the communists had sought to provoke the anarchists into open conflict. Diego Abad de Santillán expressed regret to Vázquez over their response to the provocation, saying that the CNT leadership had made an error "in bringing an end to the firing without having resolved the pending problems."