What happened to the Galicians who hijacked the ship ‘Santa María’?

The act, claimed by a group called the Iberian Revolutionary Liberation Directorate (DRIL) had the objective of denouncing the dictatorships of Oliveira Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain before international public opinion. The main ideologue of the action had been Xosé Velo Mosquera, of whom Aser has just shot a biographical documentary entitled “O libertador iberico”, sponsored by the Pontevedra Provincial Council, which will be released at the end of this month, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Velo’s death.

The other Galician who led the activists was called José Fernandez, although throughout the kidnapping he identified himself as Commander Sotomayor. Both Velo and Fernández incorporated two of their children into the mission, Víctor Velo Pérez and Federico Fernández Ackerman, at that height two young men barely out of adolescence.

The kidnapping of the ‘Santa María’ did not succeed in overthrowing the dictatorships, but it did achieve a spectacular international media impact. Its outcome was more or less happy. There were no victims among those held and, through the mediation of the Brazilian government, the kidnappers were given a way out by letting them disembark in Recife. What happened to them from there?

Well, as far as Xosé Velo Mosquera, born in Celanova on April 21, 1916, a pro Galician, tireless fighter against Francoism during the civil war and exile, Alvarez relates that after landing, he and his son Víctor spent a few days in Recife, in a barracks that the regional government of Pernambuco gave them, but very soon they moved to Sao Paulo.

In 1962, Xovita Pérez, Pepe Velo’s wife, reunited with her husband, who had been teaching classes at an academy in Sao Paulo for some time while their other children, Lino and Manuela, remained in Venezuela. Encouraged by his wife, Velo founded the Nós bookstore, in the Paraíso neighborhood, and the publisher Galicia Ceibe, in which he published a translation of Rosalía de Castro into Portuguese and with which he planned to publish his own work, almost all unpublished. , when a misdiagnosed disease led to lung cancer that was fatal.

In his last years of life, he still had the strength to fight against the dictatorship in Brazil, create a neighborhood newspaper called Paraíso Sete Días, and start the script for an educational audiovisual project for the Ford Foundation, which was to be a documentary series on the history of humanity aimed at children and young people. Velo died in the city of São Paulo, surrounded by his family, on January 30, 1972, at the age of 55.

For his part, his son Victor, after the “Santa María” episode, he totally withdrew from politics, dedicating himself professionally to Nuclear Physics, coming to work in the powerful company Mattarazzo. For Aser Alvarez, the testimony of Víctor, whom he recently visited in Brazil, has been decisive in being able to tell the story of his father.

The one who did have a hazardous life after the kidnapping was Federico Fernandez Ackerman. Months after the “Santa María” kidnapping, he participated in another kidnapping, that of the “Anzoátegui” (to denounce the repression of the government of Rómulo Betancourt), as a member of the Venezuelan guerrilla, the result of a complicated and long preparation stay in Czechoslovakia. and Cuba.

Detained in a guerrilla training camp in Venezuela, he spent several years in prison and, once free, his anarchic spirit found a reason to live in photography, which he will make a powerful means of expressing his rebellious and artistic spirit.

In 1984 he traveled to Nicaragua, where he produced the series “Nicaragua in time of war” that recounts aspects of the Sandinista revolution and, three years later, he received the Henrique Avril award from the Arturo Michelena Hall. In 1994, he made the photographs for the book “The statues of Caracas. Footprints of history in the urban landscape” and in 1995 he made the series “Río Caribe” and was awarded the National Photography Award. Fernández participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Venezuela and Europe and took part as a speaker in international photography colloquiums.

In addition to his artistic and documentary photographs, he collected images of his father to rescue his memory in the form of collages, which illustrate the two parts into which the book written by Xurxo Martiz is divided THE ‘my father the exile. His son the photographer ‘. Federico died in 2014 in Caracas.

The life in struggle of José Fernández, the sotomayor commander

Born in Póvoa do Caramiñal in 1904, an early military vocation and, at the same time, a revolutionary ideology arose in him, which meant that, at 24 years of age, a ship’s lieutenant, he was confined in Morocco for his republican militancy during the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-30). In 1930 he left the army, joined first the PSOE and then the PCE, with the proclamation of the Second Republic, return to the Navy with the rank of ship’s lieutenant.

During the civil war (the 1936 coup caught him in Galicia), founded one of the first groups of anti-Francoist guerrillas but, in 1937, he crossed the line with Portugal, from where he continued the fight by intervening in the sinking of a German ship that was sailing through Portuguese waters loaded with weapons for the Francoist side. At the end of 1937, he arrived in France, but returned to Spain and rejoined the Republican Navy and participated in several naval actions in the Mediterranean, including the sinking of the “Baleares” in March 1938.

After the war in Spain, he settles in France, but not exactly to stay with his arms crossed. On the contrary, with the neighboring country occupied by the Germans, he participates in the resistance until, arrested by the Gestapo, he is deported as a prisoner to the fearsome auschwitz concentration camp.

When, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, José Fernández was one of the 7,000 survivors of that hell: He weighed, badly, 37 kilograms. Anyone could be satisfied with having lived what José lived with only 41 years, but Sotomayor was not exactly one of those. After residing in France, in 1948 he resigned from the PCE as a protest measure for the abandonment of the armed resistance by the Spanish communists, and decided to emigrate to Venezuela, where he came into contact with Xosé Velo Mosquera, who had founded the Union of Galician Nationalist Anti-Francoist Spanish Combatants, and with Henrique Galvao, an exiled anti-Salazarist soldier, thus constituting, in 1959, the founding nucleus of DRIL.

After a brief stay in Brazil, the commander could not resist stopping participating in the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro had triumphantly entered Havana on January 1, 1959 and, in 1961, Fernández was already on the island, this time not as a soldier but as a university professor, although it did not take him long to join the permanent secretariat of the Latin American Solidarity Organization.

He returned to Spain after Franco’s death, among other reasons, to present his book “Yo robé el Santa María” of which a Galician version was even published by Galaxia. But he was well aware that his place was no longer here. So he returned to America and settled permanently in Caracas, where he died in 1986.