Ramón Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río (Catalan pronunciation: [rəˈmom məɾkəˈðe]; 7 February 1913 – 18 October 1978) was a Spanish communist and NKVD secret agent who assassinated the revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940 with an ice axe, for which Mercader was imprisoned for 19 years and 8 months.

In 1960, after release from Mexican imprisonment, Mercader was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal and the Order of Lenin medal, and lived at different times in Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia.

Life

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río was born on 7 February 1913 in the town of Argentona, in Maresme county, Catalonia, Spain to Eustacia María Caridad del Río Hernández (aka Caridad Mercader), daughter of a Cantabrian merchant who became rich from his business in the Captaincy General of Cuba, and Pablo Mercader Marina, son of a Catalonian textile industrialist. Jaime Ramón was raised in France by his mother Caridad, who also was a communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and also served in the Soviet international underground.

In the mid-1930s, young Mercader became a Communist and worked for leftist organizations during the existence of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939). He was imprisoned for his political activities, but then was freed when the left-wing coalition of the Popular Front were elected as the government of Spain in 1936. During the civil war, he was recruited by Nahum Eitingon, an officer of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the Soviet secret police), who sent Mercader for secret agent training in the USSR.

Mercader befriended and infiltrated the Trotskyist communist faction during the Spanish Civil War. As a secret agent of the NKVD, Mercader met with the war correspondent David Crook, an English communist and volunteer soldier for the Republican side, in the city of Albacete, Castilla–La Mancha, and there taught him the Spanish language and trained him in the techniques of espionage. Moreover, as a correspondent for the News Chronicle, Crook spied on fellow volunteer George Orwell and other militiamen of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) and the Independent Labour Party.

Assassination of Trotsky

In 1938, whilst a student at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), with the help of NKVD Agent Mark Zborowski, Mercader befriended Sylvia Ageloff, a young intellectual from Brooklyn, New York, who also was a confidante of Trotsky in Paris.