El Pais Leon Trotsky’s killer Ramón Mercader dies of bone cancer in Cuba National Hero of the Soviet Union 20/10/1978 A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. “Qué li donarem al noi de la mare? Qué li donarem que Ii sápiga bo?” On hearing this Catalan lullaby, a Mexican prison guard raised his head in amazement. The words, sung in perfect Catalan, were coming from the cell of the “Belgian” Jacques Mornard, who was serving 20 years for the murder of Leon Trotsky. As chance would have it, this event in 1952 would lead to the identification of one of the 20th century’s more mysterious personalities: Ramón Mercader del Río, born in Barcelona, Spain, on February 7, 1913. His parents, who bore a total of five children (Jordi, Ramón, Pau, Lluis and Montserrat), were Pau Mercader –a fervent Catholic opposed to communism– and Caritat del Río, a woman of character who became popular in the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) as Caritat Mercader soon after she embraced Marxism and greatly influenced Ramón’s life. In the 1920s she separated from her husband and took her children to France, where she came into contact with important Stalinist sectors and is said to have become an agent of the Soviet secret police (GPU). Back in Barcelona when the Spanish Republic was founded, Ramón joined the PSUC, as most of his brothers had done. Caritat was then the secretary of the Women’s Communist League and, when the war broke out, she was appointed leader of a communist brigade in the Aragon Front. At 23, Ramón had made it to lieutenant and political commissar. Mother and son were wounded during an air raid and in combat, respectively, and taken to the same hospital in Barcelona. But what Ramón did between then and the day of Trotsky’s assassination in Coyoacan in 1940 remains unclear. What we know about the plan to kill the Russian revolutionary comes mostly from statements made by the Soviet spy Nikolai Khokhlov after he was arrested in Bonn in 1954 and taken to the United States. This secret agent revealed that Trotsky’s death had been plotted by GPU General Leonid Eitingon, who lived in Spain under the pseudonym Kotov and was possibly very close to Caritat del Río. Eilingon was the GPU’s second man in Catalonia and, according to Khokhlov, “recruited a Spaniard who was taken to the USSR for training and then sent to Mexico with the code name Mornard.” In 1952, La Tribune de Généve reported that Leon Trotsky’s killer had been a Spaniard called Ramón Mercader. That same year, a Mexican police inspector at Madrid’s General Security Division was studying Mercader’s file and checking his fingerprints. According to recent declarations, Mercader traveled to Paris in 1938, befriended Trotsky’s secretary and confidant Sylvia Ageloff, and went with her to the United States and from there to Mexico. After two years living together, Sylvia took him to Trotsky’s home in Coyoacan, where he soon ingratiated himself with both family and guards. On August 20, 1940 he was alone for the second time with “the prophet unarmed”, a move he had rehearsed days before by asking Leon to review some documents. All he needed was a second visit to his study, this time with an ice axe under his coat. Mercader never revealed his true identity, repeating for 20 years the same version he gave the Mexican police since he was arrested for his action: his name was “Mornard”. He had come to terms with the tragic fate so tragically drawn by his mother’s influence. Suffice it to keep in mind the words he shouted in fear when Trotsky’s guards heard the commotion and burst in the scene of the crime: “Don’t kill me! They made me do it! They’re holding my mother hostage!” In 1977, thirty-seven years after the assassination, the Soviet Union awarded him a Hero of the Soviet Union medal. |
||||
El asesino de León Trotski, Ramón
Mercader,
|