77 Facts About Caridad Mercader

Eustacia Maria Caridad del Rio Hernandez, better known as Caridad del Rio, Caridad Mercader or Caritat Mercader, was a Spanish communist militant and an agent of the Soviet NKVD.

Caridad Mercader is known for being the mother of Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Leon Trotsky, and for having personally participated in the operation.

Caridad Mercader belonged to a wealthy family from Barcelona of Indiano origin in the early 20th century.

Caridad Mercader married Pablo Mercader, a member of Barcelona's industrial upper class, from whom she took the name, and with whom she had five children.

Caridad Mercader began to frequent anarchist circles and soon embraced communist ideology.

Caridad Mercader achieved some notoriety as a member of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia.

Under orders from Josef Stalin, as part of Operation Utka, Ramon Caridad Mercader was enlisted and trained to assassinate Leon Trotsky, who was in exile in Mexico.

Caridad Mercader, who had settled in Paris some time in 1937, participated in the operation.

When Ramon was arrested after murdering Trotsky, Caridad Mercader managed to leave Mexico and escape to the Soviet Union, where she was received with honors, awarded the Order of Lenin.

Caridad Mercader found conditions in the Soviet Union disappointing and never adapted to life there.

Caridad Mercader bitterly told her son Luis and confidante Enrique Castro Delgado that they had fought for "Utopia" but were living in "Hell".

Caridad Mercader expressed that she felt deluded and that she had turned her son Ramon into a murder, her son Luis into a hostage, and her other two children into ruins.

Caridad Mercader felt their only recompense had been "cuatro porquerias", referring to the medals.

In 1944, with some difficulty, Caridad Mercader obtained a permit to leave the Soviet Union.

The awkward intervention of Caridad Mercader was counterproductive, causing the Mexican authorities to toughen Ramon's prison conditions and the Soviets to abandon their operation.

Caridad Mercader occasionally traveled to the Soviet Union to visit her sons, Luis, as well as Ramon, who had settled there after serving his sentence in Mexico.

Eustacia Maria Caridad Mercader del Rio Hernandez was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1892 into a wealthy family.

Nor, contrary to what Caridad Mercader asserted, had her mother sympathized with the Cuban independence movement.

Caridad Mercader studied at the Catholic school of the Sacred Heart of Sarria, spending time in the centers that the congregation had in Paris and London.

When Caridad was barely 16 years old, on June 13,1908, the Barcelona press announced the engagement of Caridad del Rio to Pablo Mercader Marina, seven years older than her and a member of a prosperous family in the textile business.

Pablo's father, Narciso Caridad Mercader Sacanella, had started his business with a factory in Badalona, expanding it with several more factories in Barcelona.

Caridad Mercader had an affable character, politically aligning himself with conservative Catalan nationalism and having been a member of the somaten.

Until this point in time, Caridad Mercader had lived according to the conventions of her social circle.

At the height of "Pistolerismo" in Barcelona, Caridad frequented anarchist circles, even going so far as to provide them with information with which to attack the business interests of the Mercader.

Since her brother, Jose del Rio, was a municipal judge and knew which magistrates were in charge of a specific case, Caridad Mercader informed the anarchists of the identity of the judges who were handling each trial for terrorist acts against their comrades.

However, Juan Caridad Mercader's administration was ruinous, the business collapsed, and he finally fled with his family to Argentina.

The rest of the Caridad Mercader family was left in a precarious economic position, and the Caridad Mercader-Del Rio couple had to move to a more modest apartment on Ancha Street, in the Gothic Quarter, next to the Basilica of La Merced.

Pablo Caridad Mercader worked as an accountant, primarily for small publishing companies.

Coincidentally, Caridad Mercader was staying at a family property in the area.

Delrieu was the godfather of Caridad Mercader's youngest son, Luis, who was born in 1923.

One night in 1923, nurses from the Nueva Belen de Sant Gervasi Asylum, accompanied by Caridad Mercader's brothers, entered her house, put a straitjacket on her, and admitted her.

Caridad Mercader never forgave her family for this traumatic experience.

Caridad Mercader told her son Luis that it was her anarchist friends who, after finding out where she was, sent her husband and her brothers death threats if they did not let her leave the mental institution, to which they finally agreed.

Some accounts postulate that it was at this time that Caridad Mercader came in contact with Soviet espionage.

Levine maintained that Caridad Mercader enjoyed telling those closest to her how Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the PCF, Jacques Duclos, and other French communist leaders behaved in bed.

In 1935 Caridad Mercader was arrested and, as she told Luis, the police brutally beat her, resulting in her loss of vision for 15 days.

Caridad Mercader participated in the process of confluence of almost all the Catalan workers' parties that gave rise to the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, and at the beginning of July 1936 she was appointed by the PCC, along with Pere Ardiaca, a member of the Treball editorial team, which would be the organ of expression of the new party.

Caridad Mercader actively participated in the fighting against the rebel troops, notably in the assault on the Captaincy General of Barcelona, spearheaded by the leader of the rebels in Barcelona, General Manuel Goded, who had arrived from Palma de Mallorca a few hours before.

Eight weeks after being wounded at the front, Caridad Mercader left the hospital.

Caridad Mercader did not return to the front, but was charged with leading a propaganda mission by the Generalitat of Catalonia, the PSUC, and the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia to Mexico and the United States with the intent to acquire weapons and money.

Caridad Mercader then asked Luis to move in with her, to which he agreed, abandoning his father.

At that time, Caridad Mercader was named head of the Anti-Fascist Women's Group, but she progressively disengaged from mobilization and propaganda tasks as she became more involved in work related to the Soviet political police, which had recruited her at the beginning of that year.

The information available in the former Soviet archives on Caridad Mercader has not been systematically explored.

An episode narrated by Luis Caridad Mercader refers to him and his mother, shortly after returning from Mexico in the winter of 1937, visiting Ramon in the Madrid front where he was located.

Ramon and Caridad Mercader had a long conversation, the purpose of which, according to Luis, was to convince Ramon to join the NKVD.

Caridad Mercader lived for several seasons during the war in Barcelona.

Ramon Caridad Mercader used the false identity of Jacques Mornard, the supposed son of a Belgian diplomat.

Caridad Mercader did not know that her chance meeting with Mornard-Mercader had been arranged by Soviet intelligence.

Caridad Mercader seduced Sylvia Ageloff and continued his relationship with her until she left for New York in February 1939.

Caridad Mercader would have asked her to help him find a house near Trotsky's home in Coyoacan, on the outskirts of Mexico City, which Kahlo refused to do.

Later, in mid-1938, Caridad Mercader forced Luis to go live at Daniel Beranger's mother's house.

In March 1939, Caridad Mercader arranged with Eitingon to transfer her son Luis to the Soviet Union, anticipating the start of the Second World War.

From New York, it is believed that Caridad Mercader traveled to Mexico via Cuba.

From documentation in FSB possession, it is known that Eitingon, after spending some time in New York, traveled to Mexico, and that Caridad Mercader, who was in Mexico, left the country and temporarily returned to New York with a stopover in Cuba after having been recognized.

Caridad Mercader is the son of a dear comrade who is outside of Mexico, and I, because of that friendship with his mother, have come to request that you take charge of his defense.

The route followed by Caridad Mercader according to the FSB files is similar.

Caridad Mercader was the first foreign woman to obtain it.

Caridad Mercader received an apartment that, by Moscow standards, was a luxury; She lived there with her son Luis, who had been in the country for almost 2 years.

Caridad Mercader spent a few weeks with them at the company's training camp, but, according to the memoirs of Sebastia Piera, a PSUC activist, she disappeared before the end of the battle of Moscow.

Luis Mercader gave the date of 1943 for Lena Imbert's death and stated that, after time in a sanatorium, she died in Caridad's house.

Caridad Mercader had a penetrating, dominating look and that was surely what impressed people.

Caridad Mercader was forty-eight years old and weighed 82 kilos.

Caridad Mercader had great taste and was always well dressed.

Various testimonies attested to Caridad Mercader having intervened so Spanish exiles could leave the Soviet Union.

Manuel Taguena asserted that Caridad Mercader helped Spaniards who wanted to leave the country to join the NKVD, thus enabling them to leave the Soviet Union.

Caridad Mercader did not manage to do so until the end of 1945.

Finally, in February 1945, Caridad Mercader received authorization to leave the Soviet Union.

Caridad Mercader knows that I hate all of this and that I would give half my life to leave.

Caridad Mercader ignored it and once outside the USSR traveled, via Turkey, to Mexico.

The operation, Code Name Gnome, the name assigned to Caridad Mercader, studied various strategies for Caridad Mercader to escape from prison, in which Soviet agents and Mexican and Spanish communists exiled in the country had to intervene.

Caridad Mercader personally embarked on a series of negotiations with Mexican authorities to obtain her son's the freedom.

Caridad Mercader cited how his brother had told him that it was he who volunteered to commit the murder, simply to help Eitingon accomplish his mission.

Caridad Mercader left Mexico in November 1945, and received authorization to settle in Paris, where she lived with a Cuban passport until her death.

Caridad Mercader settled in an apartment at 25 Rennequin Street, near the Arc de Triomphe and received a pension from the Soviet government throughout her life.

On May 6,1960, Ramon Caridad Mercader completed his sentence and was able to travel to Moscow with a Czechoslovakian passport.

Caridad Mercader died in 1975, aged 82, months before the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in Spain.

Caridad Mercader was buried in the Parisian cemetery of Pantin, in a tomb that she shared with her son-in-law, the husband of her daughter Montserrat.