| Ramón Mercader | |
|---|---|
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| Born | February 7, 1914 Barcelona, Spain |
| Died | October 18, 1978 (aged 64) Havana, Cuba |
| Alias(es) | Jacques Mornard, Frank Jacson |
| Conviction(s) | Murder |
| Penalty | 20 years imprisonment |
| Status | deceased |
| Occupation | NKVD agent |
| Parents | Pau Mercader Marina (father) and Eustaquia María Caridad del Río Hernández (mother) |
Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández (February 7, 1914 – October 18, 1978) was a Spanish communist who became famous as the murderer of Leon Trotsky. Declassified archives have shown that he was a Soviet agent.[1][2] Some supporters of Joseph Stalin argue that he was simply a disgruntled former follower of Trotsky[3] though Vyacheslav Molotov said that Stalin had ordered the killing.[4]
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Mercader was born in 1914 in Barcelona, but spent much of his youth in France with his mother, Eustaquia María Caridad del Río Hernández, after she separated from his father, Pau Mercader Marina. Cuban-born Caridad was an ardent communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and served the Soviet international underground. 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 in 1936 when the left-wing coalition Popular Front won in the elections of that year. During the civil war in Spain, Mercader was recruited by NKVD officer Nahum Eitingon and trained in Moscow as a Soviet agent.[5]
In 1938, while he was a student at the Sorbonne, Mercader befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a confidant of Trotsky in Paris, assuming the identity 'Jacques Mornard' , son of a Belgian diplomat. A year later he was contacted by a representative of the "Bureau of the Fourth International."[6] Ageloff returned to her native Brooklyn in September that same year and Mercader joined her, assuming the identity of Canadian 'Frank Jacson' . He was given a passport which had originally belonged to a Canadian citizen named Tony Babich, a member of the Spanish Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War. Babich's photograph was removed and Mercader's was inserted in its place.[7][8] He explained to Ageloff that he purchased forged documents to avoid military service. In October Mercader moved to Mexico City where Trotsky lived with his family, to tend to business affairs (a cover provided by Eitingon) and persuading Ageloff to join him. Through her, he began to meet with Trotsky personally, posing as a supporter of Trotsky's ideas.
On August 20, 1940 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).[9] Trotsky's guards burst in and nearly killed Mercader, but Trotsky ordered them to spare his life, shouting, "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell."
Caridad and Eitingon, having arrived in Mexico City shortly after Mercader, waited outside the compound in separate cars to provide a getaway; but when Mercader didn't return they fled the country.
Mercader was turned over to the Mexican authorities, to whom he refused to give up his real identity. He would only identify himself as 'Jacques Mornard' . Mercader said he had wanted to marry Ageloff, and that Trotsky had forbidden the marriage. He alleged that a violent quarrel with Trotsky had led to his wanting to murder Trotsky. He stated that "... instead of finding myself face to face with a political chief who was directing the struggle for the liberation of the working class, I found myself before a man who desired nothing more than to satisfy his needs and desires of vengeance and of hate and who did not utilize the workers' struggle for anything more than a means of hiding his own paltriness and despicable calculations.... It was Trotsky who destroyed my nature, my future and all my affections. He converted me into a man without a name, without country, into an instrument of Trotsky. I was in a blind alley.... Trotsky crushed me in his hands as if I had been paper."[10]
It was not until September 1950 that fingerprint evidence proved the assassin's true identity. Nevertheless he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Ageloff was initially arrested as an accomplice, as the two had lived together on and off for about two years at the time of the assassination, but charges were quickly dropped.
Shortly after the assassination Stalin presented Ramón's mother Caridad with the Order of Lenin for her part in the plot.[11]
After the first few years in prison, he requested release on parole, which was denied by Dr. Jesús Siordia and the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón. After almost 20 years in jail, he was eventually released from Mexico City's Palacio de Lecumberri prison on May 6, 1960 and moved to Havana, Cuba, where Fidel Castro's new revolutionary government welcomed him. In 1961, he moved to the Soviet Union and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal from the then head of the KGB Alexander Shelepin. The order of Hero was the Soviet Union's highest decoration. He split his time between Cuba and the Soviet Union for the rest of his life and died in Havana in 1978.
He is buried (under the name of 'Ramon Ivanovich Lopez' (Рамон Иванович Лопес)) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery and has a place of honor in the museum of the KGB in the Russian capital.[12]
A novel by Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes: "El hombre que amaba a los perros" (Tusquets, Barcelona, 2009)covers the life of both Trotsky and Mercader.
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