The death of Pedro Fructuoso (Pedro El Gorrión) has deprived us of the last man socially committed to Los Montesinos.
Pedro was hurt by the individual problems of so many of his friends and neighbours.
For this reason, since we recovered public freedoms in 1978, he dedicated himself to organising workers: from organising crews to work in the fields, expeditions to the grape harvest in France in coordination with Paco “El Cundo”, Secretary of the Socialist Party and member from UGT.
His fundamental principle in the labour issue was always that you had to give first, unconditionally, to claim back later. He was the first to put that principle into practice.
He had the courage to organise trips to France leading entire families. At the train stations, where workers spent many hours waiting for the next train, he was an active negotiator with the station masters to urge the organisation or departure of the train. Once in France he acted as manager, driver, liaison with the bosses, etc. Many families in the town benefited from those outings that brought good income to their battered economies. He and other families were able to acquire homes thanks to those campaigns.
From the first days of the democratic transition he aligned himself with the PSOE of which he was General Secretary for a short time and a member of the UGT. He departed (several of us departed) from these acronyms when at the Casa del Pueblo we had to distribute labor to patch roads in collaboration with the Neighborhood Association; It was understood that there were neighbors in the Association who were from UCD and were not welcome. Also in UGT they saw it as bad that workers who were supposedly right-wing voters were registering. Pedro did not share those exclusions because he was always an integrator.
From there he began to serve in the United Left, a formation in which he remained until his death.
His fundamental principle in the social issue and for which he always fought was to unify the left. He always said that he was the same whether we were members of the PSOE or the PCE; in UGT or CCOO, because in the end we all led to the same project of social change.
He participated, without exception, in all municipal elections from 1979 until this year. With his usual clarity of ideas, he offered us his rally, always encouraging us to vote, to work together and, ultimately, to improve the town.
As a member of the Pro Segregation Commission he was a convinced and active worker, from the initial collection of signatures with his “partner” Jesús Zafra, to the 4 or 5 final meals that we celebrated until they incomprehensibly stopped calling them.
He went to those meals with his wife, Fina, whose company fate deprived him of as absurdly as it was unfairly in the last years of his life.
He was part of the Board of Directors of the Neighbourhood Association in the second stage of his life and that served only to challenge the resolution by which they did not grant us segregation with the entire municipal area that belonged to us.
For posterity, the photo remains of digging the hole where to plant the oak tree on the promenade and the work to save the first oak tree that he helped transplant from Los Miras to San Lucas Street.
In short, the last man who, without holding any position, without receiving official salaries, was socially committed to Los Montesinos and whose figure, unfortunately, as in other cases, will go unnoticed in the eyes of history. Although, following Silvio Rodríguez’s phrase: Men without history are History.
However, his example and effort, although they have not been recognised, have not been in vain: his rebellion against injustice, his fight to unite the left and his attitude towards life conditioned by the fact that he never forgot his humble origins has It has been a mirror in which many of us have looked and a code that we follow.
May he rest in peace who worked so hard for everyone.
