The man who killed Leon Trotsky
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By m.p. - Dec 28, 2008 - 1:48 PM
Ramón Mercader from Barcelona killed Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico City.

On 20th August 1940, the exiled Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded at his home in a suburb of Mexico City when an ice axe was driven into his skull. He cried out to his guards as they burst into his study, ‘Don’t kill him! He must talk.’
Despite struggling fiercely, and even managing to bite the hand of his assassin, Trotsky died the next day, and the man who wielded the murder weapon was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He insisted throughout his trial and his years in prison that he was Jacques Mornard, a Belgian journalist and a disillusioned Trotskyite, who was born in Tehran when his father served there as a diplomat. He said he had reached the United States and then Mexico on a Canadian passport in the name of Franc Jacson which he had bought on the black market in Paris. He always claimed that he acted alone and that the idea to kill Trotsky was his and no-one else’s.
He never changed his story, but in 1950 Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, the criminologist who studied the assassin in prison, travelled to Barcelona to try and find proof of his suspicion that Mornard was not who he said he was, but was in reality a Catalan communist. He showed some photographs to Carlos Polo Borreguero, a former police commissioner who named him as Ramón Mercader, a man he had arrested in 1935. Police fingerprint records confirmed his identity as Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río.

Mercader was born in Barcelona on 7th February 1914. His mother was Caridad del Río Hernández, a woman born in Cuba whose family had returned to Spain when Spain lost her colony. She married Pau Mercader in Barcelona at the age of 19, but left Cataluña for France when the marriage began to go wrong, taking her children with her. She was introduced to communism by her French lover and is believed to have been key in recruiting her son as an agent for the Soviet NKVD.
Another lover, Leonid Eitington, was assigned by Lavrenty Beria, chief of the NKVD, to carry out Stalin’s order to kill Trotsky . It was Eitington who had recruited Caridad and her son for the NKVD, and Ramón Mercader spent some time in Moscow in 1937 for specialised training in assassination.

As Trotsky’s grandson, Vsevolod Volkov, wrote many years later, who had returned home from school at the age of 14 to see his grandfather lying mortally wounded in his study, ‘The plot proceeded in stages: Stalin, Beria, Leonid Eitingon, his lover Caridad Mercader and her son, the Catalan, Ramón Mercader (alias Jacson) were the people who murdered the founder of the Red Army and the comrade-in arms of Lenin.’

Ramón Mercader left prison in Mexico in May 1960, and was flown to Havana and later on to Moscow, where he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. He was allowed to leave in 1974 and returned to Cuba, his mother’s birthplace, where he lived with his wife and two children until his death in 1978.
He never saw his native Barcelona again, despite pleas for help to return made to Dolores Ibárrui – La Pasionaria – and to the then-leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo. Carrillo gave the condition that Mercader would have to write his memoirs and reveal who gave him the order to assassinate Trotsky. Mercader refused, saying he would ‘never betray’ his comrades.
His ashes now lie in the Kuntsevo cemetery in Moscow under the name of Ramón Ivanovich López. He also has a place of honour in the KGB museum.

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