Puro Anabitarte

Synopsis

In 1977, ten months after the military coup that brought Videla's dictatorship to power, Héctor Anabitarte boarded a ship called the Marconi in the port of Buenos Aires together with Ricardo Lorenzo, his partner of barely a few months. He was leaving behind a life of political commitment: union delegate at the Argentine postal service, founder in 1971 of the collective 'Nuestro Mundo' and later of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual, and survivor of a psychiatric detention in which he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy for raising the question of homosexuality within the Communist Youth. He arrived in Spain as a political refugee and never stopped writing or organising. Almost five decades on, at 85, Anabitarte is still filing a weekly column — first in the now-defunct print weekly Más and in its digital edition. Puro Anabitarte brings together sixty of those pieces, published between 2020 and 2025, arranged year by year as an unintentional chronicle of the period: the pandemic and the denialists, the Euthanasia Law, the homophobic murder of Samuel Luiz, the Rubiales and Jenni Hermoso case, the Valencia DANA floods and Carlos Mazón's disinformation, the re-election of Trump, the war in Ukraine. Anabitarte writes about what he knows at first hand: the public health system that saved his life when AIDS was killing his friends, housing as a denied right, the racism that pursues migrants on the pateras and in football stadiums, the homophobia resurging in new political disguises. He does so with hard data — Amnesty International figures, WHO reports, statistics from the Interior Ministry — alongside an irony that the author of the prologue compares to Roberto Arlt's aguafuertes and the wry humour of Julio Camba. The book opens with an extended biographical prologue by Jesús Valbuena Blanco, who coordinated the selection of texts and reconstructed, with the help of Ricardo Lorenzo — Anabitarte's partner since 1976 and co-author of several of his books — the trajectory of a man who arrived in Spain without papers, found refuge in the AIDS activism of the 1980s, edited the international section of the Diario de Barcelona and La Voz de Euskadi, and ended up a member of the PSOE in Aranjuez, where he remains a Red Cross volunteer and co-founder of the immigrants' association 'Hombro con Hombro'. A photographic album closes the volume, a visual record of a life devoted, in Anabitarte's own words, to a single addiction: militancy.

Machine translation, pending review.