Trotsky's assassin

Spanish police file from 1936 by Ramon Mercader del Rio (1914-1978)

Lev Trotski, a Russian communist theorist and one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, is mortally wounded with an ice ax by the Stalinist agent from Barcelona, Ramón Mercader del Río, at his home in Coyoacán, near Mexico City. He dies the next day. The NKVD agent, captured by his mother Caridad del Río - a fervent communist militant - never confessed his true identity

Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Trotsky was the surname of one of his jailers that he used for the first time, in 1902, in a false passport to escape from Siberia), prominent Russian communist theorist, one of the leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, brilliant The organizer of the Red Army during the civil war years, he lost to the cunning Stalin in the struggle to become Lenin's successor at the head of the Soviet Union. Deported to Kazakhstan in 1928 and exiled from the country in 1929, his exile was a pilgrimage through Turkey, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico, where he arrived in January 1937, thanks to the mediation of the Mexican muralist painter Diego Rivera. In reality, for the ideologue of the permanent revolution, exile and pilgrimage were inseparable companions of his political militancy.

Leon Trotsky with some friends, in Mexico

Three years after arriving in Mexico, aware of the Stalinist threat, Trotsky was practically secluded in a village in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City. The residence, known as the blue house, owned by the family of the painter Frida Kahlo, had been fortified, especially since May 24, 1940, when a group of almost twenty men, led by the Mexican painter David Siqueiros, attacked the villa in a crude attempt on Trostsky's life. Only one grandson of the revolutionary was slightly wounded in the foot by a ricocheted bullet, of the two hundred who fired wildly at the blue house.

But scarcely three months later, on Tuesday August 20, a young Canadian sympathizer, Frank Jackson, boyfriend of Sylvia Ageloff, sister of one of Trotsky's secretaries, a sporadic visitor to the village in recent months, managed to get into the office. of Trotsky with the excuse that he reviewed the draft of an article on the fourth international. Within minutes, a heartbreaking scream alerted the two bodyguards who stormed into the room. Trotsky, his face covered in blood, desperately clung to Jackson to avoid another mortal blow with the shortened-handled ice ax carried by the assailant. He was arrested - a pistol was also found on him, although it is assumed that he chose the silent ice ax in the hope of escaping. Brutally beaten by bodyguards, only the intervention of the communist leader saved his life "don't kill him, he has a story to tell."

Ramon Mercader in a hospital in Mexico City, after the attack.

Trotsky, who was seriously wounded in the skull by the blow of the ice ax, was treated at first by a neighbor, the Catalan doctor Wenceslao Dutrem. He was later transferred to the Cruz Verde hospital, where he underwent trepanation to try to extract the bone fragments from his brain. But the damage and intracranial pressure were so important that the old revolutionary died the next day, August 21, without having regained consciousness.

Frank Jackson, contrary to what Trotsky judged, said very little. He admitted that his name was Jacques Monard and did not deviate from the script he had learned: he had felt sincere admiration for Trotsky, but upon meeting him he had revealed himself to be responsible for the division of the international communist movement and had decided to kill him in an individual action. There was no way he would confess. Not during his tough stay at the police station, not at the trial, held almost three years later. Neither during the twenty years of his sentence, which he served in its entirety, nor after his release in May 1960. Later, almost another twenty years of solitary and anonymous life, accompanied only by his Mexican wife, Roquelia Mendoza, whom he had known in jail and his children. He was decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union, but lived in the USSR marginalized by the new leaders who sought to distance themselves from Stalinism. Later he worked as a translator in Czechoslovakia to finally land in Cuba, in search of a suitable climate for his health. He died in Havana on October 18, 1978. He was buried in the Moscow cemetery of Kúntsevo, under a tombstone in the name of Ramón Ivanovich López, the name he used during his last years, near the grave of another of the great spies of the 20th century, British double agent Kim Philby.

Ramón Mercader del Río

Frank Jackson's false identity lasted for hours after the attack. Sylvia Ageloff herself knew the alleged real identity of her boyfriend: that of Jacques Monard, the son of a Belgian diplomat who, to escape military service, took a false identity to move to America. Under the name of Jacques Monard, he was tried and sentenced despite serious doubts about his identification. He gave a version as detailed as it was suspicious and Belgian diplomats assured that, although he spoke perfectly French, and had undoubtedly been in Belgium, he did not seem to be a native of that country. Neither did some of the Catalan exiles, who later accepted that they had recognized him, reported his real name to the authorities or the press, out of fear or ideological affinity.

Twelve years later, a Mexican criminalist, Alfonso Quiroz, revealed that Trotski's murderer was actually Ramón Mercader del Río, from Barcelona. The definitive data of his investigation were Ramón's fingerprints taken by the Spanish police when he was arrested in Valencia in 1934. They coincided one hundred percent with the Monard ones.

Ramón Mercader was the son of the spy and communist agent Caridad del Río, daughter of Spanish diplomats, born in Santiago de Cuba, who had returned to Barcelona after the loss of the colony. In 1911 she married the industrialist Pablo Mercader and they had five children. But the placid and bourgeois life did not marry Caridad del Río, she frequented anarchist environments and allowed herself to be fascinated by the sexual liberation of the 1920s. The family locked him up in a mental hospital, but he escaped to the south of France with his children behind an attractive French aviator who years earlier had crash-landed on Mercader property. In France she came into contact with the communist movement, became a fervent militant and an effective agent for Moscow.

Caridad del Rio, mother of Ramon Mercader

Caridad captured her son Ramón, born on February 7, 1913, for espionage in the service of the Soviet Union. Ramón, a convinced communist, was a cultured young man, sportsman, lover of military discipline, polyglot, with elegant attitudes and enormously seductive. He joined the republican army at the outbreak of the Civil War, coming to command a battalion. However, in 1937 he was relieved of command - it is believed that he was in Moscow perfecting his training - and his track was lost until he reappeared in Paris in late 1938 to seduce the young American Trotskyist Sylvia Ageloff.

To enter the circles close to Trotsky was Ramón's mission, always under the baton of his mother and the agent of the NKVD, the security services of the Soviet state, Leonid Eitingon. Probably its initial task was to obtain information, only when the attack led by Siqueiros failed and Kahlo's blue house became a fortress, did Moscow assess the chances of success of an individual attack. And Jacques Monard was the right man. In the guise of a carefree rich young man, always ready to do small favors, he visited the blue house relatively frequently, but without taking much interest in the old revolutionary. When that August 20, 1940, he asked Trotsky to take a look at his article, he had no problem staying alone with him. Nobody suspected, not even that in the middle of August he was wearing a raincoat, where he hid the unusual deadly weapon, hanging from his arm.