Ramón Mercader
Encyclopedia : R : RA : RAM : Ramón Mercader
| Ramón Mercader | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | February 7, 1914 Barcelona, Spain |
| Died | October 18, 1978 Havana, Cuba |
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández (February 7 1914 – October 18 1978) was a Catalan Communist who served as a foreign agent of the NKVD during Joseph Stalin's time as ruler of the Soviet Union. In that role, he became famous as the assassin of Stalin's great rival, Leon Trotsky.
Mercader was born in 1914 in Barcelona, but spent much of his youth in France with his mother, Eustacia María Caridad del Río Hernández, after she separated from his father, Don Pablo Mercader Marina. As a young man, he embraced Communism, working for leftist organizations in Spain during the mid-1930s. He was briefly imprisoned for his activities, but was released when a left-wing coalition government took control of the country in 1936.
By this time, his mother had become a Soviet agent herself, and Ramón followed in her footsteps, traveling to Moscow shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to train in the arts of sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassination. He was given the codename Gnome by his superiors.
Mercader's superiors at the NKVD selected him to assassinate Trotsky, who had left the Soviet Union in 1929, after losing a power struggle to Stalin, but who had continued to antagonize the Soviet leader with his writings and political activities in exile. In October 1939, Mercader slipped into Mexico with a fake passport identifying him as Frank Jacson
After this first attempt, Mercader, who had avoided raising suspicion during the May 1940 attack, befriended an unmarried secretary of Trotsky's. Through her, he began to meet with Trotsky personally, in the guise of a Canadian supporter of Trotsky's ideas. On August 20, Mercader fatally wounded Trotsky with an ice axe in his study at his home in Coyoacán (then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City). Trotsky's guards burst in and nearly killed Mercader, but their leader ordered them to spare his life, yelling, "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell."
He was turned over to the Mexican authorities, to whom he refused to give up his real identity. Nevertheless, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was not until August 1953 that his true identity was discovered, and his NKVD connections were not revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union.
After the first few years in prison, he requested release on parole, which was denied by Dr. Jesús Siordia and criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. He was eventually released from Mexico City's Palacio de Lecumberri prison on May 6, 1960 and moved to Havana, where Fidel Castro's Communist government welcomed him. In 1961, he moved to the USSR and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal - the country's highest decoration - one of only four non-Soviet citizens to receive the award. He split his time between Cuba and the USSR for the rest of his life, revered by the KGB (the successor to the NKVD), and died in Havana in 1978.
He is buried (under the name of Ramón Ivanovich López) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery and has a place of honor in the KGB museum in the Russian capital.
Notes
- ↑ Walsh, Lynn (1980). [Forty years since Leon Trotsky's assassination] Militant International Review. Summer.
External links
- [Mumblage Magazine: The Least Known Assassin: The story of Ramon Mercader]
- [Asaltar los Cielos (An spanish documentary about the life of Ramón Mercader]
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