Ramón Álvarez Palomo

He was one of the Asturian leaders of the anarchist insurrection of January 1933 and was locked up in jail, where he met Buenaventura Durruti, Cipriano Mera and Isaac Puente.[3] After receiving amnesty from Alejandro Lerroux in April 1934, he actively participated in the Asturian Revolution,[1] becoming secretary of the Gijón Revolutionary Committee (Asturian: Comité Revolucionariu de Xixón, CRX).[3] When the revolt was crushed, he fled through the mountains until in March 1935 he managed to reach France,[3] where he remained until he was granted amnesty after the victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 general election.[1]

When the coup d'état took place on July 18, 1936, he became a member of the Gijón War Committee, and later a fisheries councilor and representative of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Spanish: Federación Anarquista Ibérica, FAI) in the Sovereign Council of Asturias and León.[1][3] After the fall of Asturias into the hands of the nationalist forces in 1937, he fled to Catalunya, where he acted as secretary of Segundo Blanco, the Minister of Education in the first Negrín government.[1][3]

At the end of the civil war he fled to France and settled in Paris, where his first wife, Carmen Cadavieco, died shortly after.[3] When the Wehrmacht troops occupied Paris in 1940 he fled to Orleans and from there to Chartres, where in 1942 he managed to gather around 500 exiled CNT militants and maintained contact with the French Resistance.[3]

In 1945 he participated in the CNT Congress in Toulouse, where he restructured the Regional Committee of Asturias in exile.[1][3] He also lead the possibilist section (in favor of collaborating with the governments of the Spanish Republican government in exile) to split from the impossibilist sector headed by Germinal Esgleas Jaume and Federica Montseny.[1][3] Finally the split was consummated and he became Secretary General of the possibilist CNT, until the 1st Regional Plenary held in Toulouse in December 1947. In 1949 he moved back to Paris.[3]

At the end of the 1960s, together with UGT leaders, he founded the Unified Workers' Solidarity Fund to help imprisoned or fired workers.

He returned to Asturias for the first time in 1972 and, definitively, in 1976.[3] Once returned, he participated in the different congresses of the CNT and in 1978 he was elected regional secretary for Asturias, also directing the magazine Acción Libertaria until 1994.[1][3]

During the 5th congress of the union he defended the participation of the CNT in collective bargaining and union elections in works councils,[1] opposing national leaders such as José Luis García Rúa. These discrepancies led him to break with the CNT and approach the General Confederation of Labor (Spanish: Confederación General del Trabajo, CGT), of which he was one of the founders in 1989.[1]