Rebel code? The transnational imaginary of ‘armed struggle’ in the fall of Southern European dictatorships

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on armed organizations of the extreme left during and after the fall of Southern European dictatorships in the mid-1970s. It explores the transnational connections between revolutionary terrorist organizations of diverse background in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, looking at the ways in which political violence and its semantics ‘travelled’ across borders and beyond national characteristics and specificities. The article explores solidarity campaigns for so-called political prisoners of said organizations and the transnational impact of certain key texts, such as ‘Ogro’, the infamous record of the assassination of Franco’s right-hand man Carrero Blanco by ETA in 1973. Looking at how the latter’s translation was received in Greece and Portugal, the article traces elements of transnational circulation beyond borders, making a point about how the space of revolutionary knowledge dissemination operated. By focusing on both sympathizers and militants of groupings involved in revolutionary violence and their perceptions, the article attempts to highlight the existence of both imaginary and actual transnational links between the three countries, and the occasional lack thereof. While it demonstrates a lack of direct transnational channels of communication, the article argues that young people belonging to the far left across the post-authoritarian European South in the mid-1970s imagined themselves as parts of the same contour. In terms of actual spaces, the very revolutionary situation Portugal was going through, turned Lisbon into a very specific locus of both imaginary and actual revolutionary potential, including Spanish activists who finally crossed the border to militate.