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Ramón Mercader

Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández (February 7, 1914October 18, 1978) was a Spanish Communist who served as a foreign agent of the NKVD during Joseph Stalin's time as ruler of the USSR. In that role, he became famous as the assassin of Stalin's great rival, Leon Trotsky. The 1940 Leon Trotsky assassination in Mexico which is reported very differently by the numerous sides involved , .


Trotsky’s assassin, Jaime Ramón Mercader, born in 1914 in Barcelona the son of Caridad Mercader (Eustacia María Caridad del Río Hernández) said to born in Cuba , this does not conflict with the her commonly thought, Spanish or specifically Catalan origens because she was born, as was Alberto Bayo, in Cuba before Cuban Independence. Moving from Spain Mercader spent much of his youth in France with his mother. after his parents separated.


As a young man, he embraced Communism, helping leftist organizations in Spain during the mid-1930s. He was briefly imprisoned for his activities, but was released when a far left-wing government took control of the country in 1936. By this time (see citations above), his mother had become a Soviet agent herself, and Ramón followed in her footsteps, traveling to Moscow shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to train in the arts of sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassination. He was given the codename "Gnome" by his superiors.


Caridad Mercader is also said to have been involved in planning ot an earlier failed assault on the Trotsky residence in Mexico City, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Vittorio Vidali . This datum very strongly suggests that she held a seniority among Stalin's wet agents in Mexico; this has potential conflict with reports she was not a communist until after her son became one.


The elaborate assault in a trap set by Caridad Mercader, Vittorio Vidale and other NKVD operatives in Mexico City failed on May 24, 1940, and a second attempt was planned in which Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich was involved.


His superiors at the NKVD selected him to assassinate Trotsky, who had left the USSR many years earlier after losing a power struggle to Stalin, but who had continued to antagonize the Soviet leader with his writings from exile. In October 1939, Mercader slipped into Mexico with a fake passport identifying himself as "Frank Jacson" (sic), a Canadian citizen. Alberto Bayo see Fidel Castro, was part of the exiled Spanish Republican colony in Mexico City at that time, however, there is no common knowledge of any linkage as yet been established in this regard.


This time, "Jacson", who had avoided raising suspicion during the first attempt on Trotsky's life, befriended an unmarried secretary of Trotsky's. Through her, he began to meet with Trotsky personally, in the guise of a Canadian supporter of Trotsky's ideas. On August 20, Mercader fatally wounded Trotsky with an ice axe in his study at his home in Coyoacán (then a village on the southern fringes of Mexico City). Trotsky's guards burst in and nearly killed Mercader, but their leader ordered them to spare his life, yelling "Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell."


He was turned over to the Mexican authorities, to whom he refused to give up his real identity. Nevertheless, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was not until August 1953 that his true identity was discovered, and his NKVD connections were not revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

After the first few years in prison, he requested release on parole, which was denied by Dr. Jesús Siordia and criminologist Q. Cuarón. He was released from Mexico City's Lecumberri prison on May 6, 1960 and moved to Havana, where Fidel Castro's Communist government welcomed him. Jaime Ramón Mercader, after release from Mexican prison, went to Castro-Cuba and lived, it is said, at least some time in the FOCSA residence of senior Cuban communist Carlos Rafael Rodríguez (anon, 2005). In 1961, he moved to the USSR and was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal, one of the country's highest decorations. He split time between Cuba and the USSR for the rest of his life, revered by the KGB (the successor to the NKVD), and died in Havana in 1978.

He is buried (under the name of Ramón Ivanovich López) in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery and has a place of honor in the KGB's museum in the Russian capital.

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