The Libertarian Underground in France: Part One: Forgery

A look at the MLE’s underground apparatus in 1940s France. We begin with the branch given over to counterfeiting documents and passports.

Sometimes a decent document could open more doors than a handgun.

Today I will be looking at one of my chosen topics. Bringing together matters and individuals for whom I have a fondness, so there will be a dash of forgery, some anti-Francoism, some internationalism and we will be featuring the likes of Laureano Cerrada or Luis Robla and above all, there will be underground activity. We will start off in France, pay a visit to Italy, but naturally, virtually all these roads ended up leading across the Pyrenees into the Spanish state.

Today our focus is on the first of our texts on the libertarian underground in France, focussing on the ‘orthodox’ faction of the MLE (Spanish Libertarian Movement). We shall be following the man who was to be the chief promoter of it up until he fell into disgrace – none other than Laureano Cerrada. We shall be following his “Sección Fomento” [Promotion Branch] and will begin by concentrating on the forgery branch.

It all started in 1943-44, at the height of the Nazi occupation of France. By then thousands of Spanish emigres were doing their bit for the Resistance. In the French capital, Paris, one resistance group – known to some as Resistencia Regional Norte (Northern Regional Resistance) – operating with resolution. That name derived from the fact that several of its members were affiliated to the Northern Regional of the MLE and were being orchestrated by Laureano Cerrada, its secretary. The group specialized in forging phoney papers and procuring weapons for the libertarian guerrillas.

And such is life that after the lean years, the fat years were swiftly upon us.

After the liberation of France, the MLE held a huge congress in Paris in May 1945. Cerrada had the funding but was something of an unknown so he teamed up with the “Holy Family”, meaning Germinal Esgleas and Federica Montseny. He supplied the cash and the couple brought their reputations and oratorical gifts to the endeavour. Everything was going swimmingly. Montseny and Esgleas would be he visible heads of the MLE and Cerrada would later be appointed to head its Coordination Branch, in charge of conspiratorial and underground actions.

Even as the congress was meeting, great news arrived. Following the liberation of Italy, some militants from the Milan-based Malatesta-Bruzzi Brigade happened to mention to Spanish anarchists that they had stumbled upon a great find. What they had found was nothing less than several plates used for printing Spanish currency, pesetas. These had been found during a raid on the Società Calcografia & Carte e Valori company in Milan, which is where pesetas were printed. This information was passed on to the person most likely to exploit it to the maximum, none other than Laureano Cerrada, secretary of the Paris regional committee at the time.

As soon as the congress ended, Laureano Cerrada was off to Italy, to Milan, with a couple of comrades and there he made contact with Umberto Marzocchi. Marzocchi had served in an Italian group attached to the Ascaso Column and had previously secured arms for the libertarians through his connections in Belgium. After returning to France [from Spain] again, Marzocchi found himself back in the front lines, but this time as a member of the La Crouzette maquis group before he moved on to the Del Rio Battalion, made up mostly of Spanish libertarian active in the Ariège department. Finally, after the liberation of France, he had returned to Italy and joined the afore-mentioned Malatesta-Bruzzi Brigade. So, between them, Cerrada, Luis Robla, Marzocchi and other comrades, went to the premises of the Società Calcografia & Carte e Valori, from which the authorities in Spain had ordered some of their paper money, and they brought the currency back to France. Let me include here one of the notes that Irene Lozano offers regarding the matter of the printing of bills in Italy: According to information from Ignacio Martínez from the Bank of Spain’s Press Office, in 1937 and 1938 the Italian Societa Coen e Cartevalori had produced a run of one-and two-peseta bills. In 1940, the firm, which had changed its name to Cartografia e Cartevalori, churned out some notes of greater face value. In one document from the Bank of Spain’s Investigation Department, it was recorded that, when Cerrada was arrested in France some years later, he was caught in possession of ‘plates prepared for the printing of phoney 25-peseta Bank of Spain notes with the issue date of 9 January 1940, and a run of 500-peseta bills with the issue date of 21 October 1940.’ These were undoubtedly the plates that Cerrada has fetched back from Milan after Mussolini’s downfall. The document was part of Cerrada’s police dossier (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Fondos Contemporáneos, Ministerio del Interior, Exp. H25403).

So now we have Cerrada where he needed to be, we have the peseta plates, we have the underground presses churning out papers for the resistance, plus which we have a stack of male and female comrades ready for underground ventures. Now all that was needed was to ease up slightly on the clandestinity and attract as little attention as possible from the authorities.

The presses were lawfully registered for the purpose of printing the CNT’s newspapers and lorries and garages were purchased and some haulage firms were lawfully established. But the forgery branch was not narrow-minded; currency was one important concern, but phoney papers quite another. They were fearless. Safe conduct passes, lottery tickets, work certificates and death certificates, even football tickets or tickets to the bullfights were handled by Cerrada’s presses. They quickly learnt that as long as they were not forging French francs, the penalties – should the gendarmes find out – were a lot less. No sooner said than done. Presses churning out Solidaridad Obrera or Cultura Ferroviaria by day, were churning out Spanish pesetas, German marks, US dollars, and francs by night (as long as those francs were not French) giving us some clue as to the imaginations and skill involved in counterfeiting.

But counterfeiting notes is one thing and putting such bills into circulation quite another. As well as de-centralizing, the venture was split up into specialist branches. On the one hand, there was this counterfeiting set-up, connected to which we find a range of names, more or less well-known: Cerrada’s own name, that of the French illustrator Madeleine Lamberet, Jesús Guillén Bertolín or the engineer Antonio Verardini – all of them part of the creative team in charge of the watermarking. On the other hand were the likes of Bautista Agustí, José Calpe, José Ballús, Diego Fornís, Eduardo Rey, Pedro Abella or Vicente Gallego. This latter team set about printing off on Cerrada’s presses whatever was produced by the creative team, be it lottery tickets, paper money, a range of certificates or any sort of documentation. 

Let us move on from the forgers and printers to the team dedicated to distribution of the money or sundry forgeries. Some were arrested inside Spain and some inside France whilst others managed to dodge the repression and most of them we will never know about. Among the ones we do know about there was the Catalan Juan Villalba, Nino Santi aka Santini – one of the ones tasked with smuggling counterfeit notes into Spain (he appears to have been caught and was imprisoned for a long time), Pedro Ordás Fernández, Justo Sánchez Mulas aka el Kino, Juan Romera de Lucas, Antonio Francisco Aguilar Molías, Dámaso Hucha Enrique aka el Maño, Enrique Guillermo Todaro Armengüal, Jorge Roos, Carlos Enrique Rodríguez Caeiro, Salvador Héctor Menvielle, plus, of course, Luis Robla, Laureano Cerrada’s right hand man. And I am happy to include the name of another woman from the squad, thanks to the testimony of Paco Ríos. This was none other than Concha Liaño, of whom Rios stated that she may well have been the woman who had smuggled the most counterfeit currency into Spain. On every occasion on which she crossed the border during the late 1940s, she crossed carrying a suitcase filled with phoney pesetas churned out on Cerrada’s presses. The Francoist police’s machismo was a help in this, as they never saw her as a suspect and this was exploited.

In the case of Todaro and Rodríguez Caeiro (both Argentineans) they had both crossed into Spain several times in order to pass on counterfeit currency; in December 1952, they had brought in 250 500-peseta notes with an issue date of 21 October 1940. They went back in January 1953 and passed a further 180 bills in the north of Spain. Todaro and Rodríguez were arrested in February 1953 and they named Menvielle, another member of the Argentinean line-up. The fourth Argentinean was Jorge Roos who had sent them the counterfeit notes through the post. When the Spanish police travelled to Paris, they contacted their French colleagues and they arrested Menvielle. The Argentinean cell had obtained the currency through Dámaso Hucha Enrique aka el Maño. He used to trade 1,000 genuine francs for every counterfeit 500-peseta note. 

As for Dámaso Hucha, I have uncovered a few things of interest. First, that that was not his real name, it being one of the names bestowed by Cerrada, his real name being Dámaso Navarra Sánchez aka el Maño. Secondly, that he had been involved in forged Spanish currency since 1943, at which time he was living in Andorra (bear in mind that Andorra was one of the strongholds of the Ponzán Network; in fact, he had been declared to be a fugitive in a court case alongside Tomás Tolosana, a Ponzán Network courier and member) and he used to pass counterfeit pesetas on to those crossing the border. The police also linked him with the same sort of activity in 1949 and 1950.

In January 1947, a number of counterfeit 5-, 100- and 1,000-peseta notes were picked up in several towns in the Basses Pyrénées (or Iparralde department) of France, The 100- and 1,000-peseta notes were of poor quality and had an issue date of 15 July 1945.

On 1 April 1949, two natives of Fuenterrabia were picked up in St Jean de Luz after they were caught boarding a ship with 40,000 counterfeit pesetas in 5-peseta notes.

In May 1949, an underground printshop was discovered in Paris with 40,000 phoney lottery tickets. And when the police burst in, they faced the drawn pistols of the people already there – six Spanish anarchists. The guns were swiftly lowered once they were sure that they were dealing with French police officers. A significant cache of arms was also found in the printshop.

In August 1949, French gendarmes raided an apartment at 92, Rue Folie Medicour, whilst tailing an undocumented person. His trail led them to an illegal printshop producing counterfeit Spanish currency as well as dollars, Belgian and Swiss francs, pounds sterling and German petrol vouchers. Also found were some ‘French Republic’ stamps and French-Spanish border visas. Antonio Fajardo and Antonio Xirardines, who ran the printshop, were arrested. 

In January 1951 Cerrada himself was arrested and placed in Evreux prison after he had been caught forging currency with Calpe and Ballús and he was put in prison on 18 January 1951.

Counterfeit 100-pesetas notes popped up again in Spain in late April 1951. Once in La Garriga, when Joaquín Navarro Litago (who would later be active alongside Facerías) and his comrades Miguel Ortola Jané, Jesús González Pellet and Antonio Salvador Franco attempted to use one of the notes to pay for petrol and they were arrested. In the other instance, Eugenio Otaño Baroja and French national José Bergue tried to exchange another bill in Barcelona.

November 1951 saw further arrests for passing counterfeit bills in Madrid. Those arrested this time were Justo Sanchez Mulas aka el Kino, Juan Romera de Lucas and Antonio Francisco Aguilar Molías. It was the last named of these who had brought in counterfeit dollar bills from France and he was due to link up with Justo Sánchez in Madrid. Naturally, when Sanchez was arrested it came to light that he had taken part in an armed robbery on 26 September 1947 at 55, Calle Embajadores, in the course of which the police officer Pedro Ortega Domínguez had been killed. He and Alfonso Fernández were charged.

Cerrada’s teams ranged far and wide. According to the newspaper Sur three anarchists had been arrested in Malaga in August 1947, having arrived with upwards of 100,000 in counterfeit peseta notes and the arrests came as they were passing the notes in question. They had of course come down from France via Andorra. Those arrested were José Aguilar Urbaneja, Antonio Peña Sánchez and José Martín Martín. If anything went awry, the plan was for them to join the fight up in the hills. But they never had time.

Knowing how boring long texts can be, I shall leave it there. But more about the libertarian underground in France will follow in articles to come. 

El Salto, 24 November 2024 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/clandestinidad-libertaria-francia-1a-parte-falsificacion

Photo: On the right, Bautista Agustí, one of the network’s printers. Source: Imanol

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.