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 led 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.
Return to Asturias
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]
Works
Eleuterio Quintanilla (vida y obra del maestro) (1973)
José María Martínez. Símbolo ejemplar del obrerismo militante (1990)
Historia negra de una crisis libertaria (1982)
Rebelión militar y revolución en Asturias. Un protagonista libertario. (1995)
References
^ abcdefghijklmGirón Garrote, José (2011). "Ramón Álvarez Palomo". Diccionario biográfico español (in Spanish). Vol. Identificador del Diccionario Biográfico Español: 61353. Real Academia de la Historia. OCLC729345746. Retrieved 9 October 2017.
Conti, Carlo (2002). "Biografía de un sindicalista cenetista: Ramón Álvarez Palomo". Homenaje a Ramón Álvarez Palomo. Cuadernos de Historia, nº3: La CNT en la historia española del siglo xx. Oviedo: Facultad de Geografía e Historia. pp. 9–28.