Octavio Alberola


Octavio Alberola Suriñach was a Spanish physicist and anti-Francoist activist. Forced into exile as a child, he became interested in physics and anarchism, seeing the two as interlinked. After growing up, he moved to France, where he became involved in militant activism. In 1962, he attempted to assassinate Francisco Franco, and in 1966, he kidnapped Spanish diplomat Marcos Ussia. He remained in France for the rest of his life, even after the Spanish transition to democracy.

Life and career

Octavio Alberola Suriñach was born in Menorca in 1928, the son of the Catalan rationalist schoolteacher. In 1933, the family moved to the Aragonese town of Fraga, where a young Octavio Alberola witnessed the Spanish Revolution of 1936. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Alberola and his family were forced into exile in Mexico. Through other Spanish anarchist exiles, Alberola was introduced to the works of Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, who inspired him to study physics at university. He believed physics and anarchism were interlinked, stating that society was a stage of evolution. He came to view humans as "intelligent water", or as matter made conscious from the water created by the Big Bang.
During his years in Mexico, he collaborated on the publications of the National Confederation of Labour and met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, then still planning their guerrilla insurgency. In 1957, he moved to France and joined the Libertarian Youth. He was part of a new generation of anarchist activists who had grown up in exile and were radicalised into taking direct action against the Francoist dictatorship.
Alberola joined the anarchist militant group Defensa Interior, within which he carried out symbolic attacks against the dictatorship and collaborated with the Algerian independence movement. In 1962, he unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Francisco Franco. He later the First of May Group, within which he participated in the kidnapping of Spanish diplomat Marcos Ussia in Rome in May 1966. The kidnapping was inspired by the earlier kidnapping of Isu Elías by Italian anarchists, and had the aim of securing the commutation of the death penalty for Catalan anarchist. The Francoist government commuted the sentence and Alberola released Ussia unharmed. Although a militant at a time of rising left-wing terrorism, Alberola rejected the anarchist use of violence, believing it to be senseless.
Even after the death of Franco in 1975 and the subsequent Spanish transition to democracy, Alberola decided to remain in France, unlike many of the other Spanish anarchists who returned to the country. He nevertheless continued to contribute to the anarchist movement's publications, and in 2019, he wrote an open letter to prime minister Pedro Sánchez demanding respect for anti-Francoist fighters in recognition of the Historical Memory Law.
Alberola died in Perpinyà, Northern Catalonia on 24 July 2025, at the age of 97.

Selected works

;Articles
  • ""
  • ""
;Obituaries
  • "Salvador Gurucharri aka Salva, Comrade and Friend
  • "David Graeber and Anarchism"
  • "Goodbye to Stuart Christie"
;Books