FRANCAISSecours populaire français - History
1960-1969
-1960, Morocco: the SPF gets more involved in international relief and sends essential items to Agadir, wrecked after an earthquake.
-1961, Spain: the SPF campaigns to pardon Julian Grimau, one of the leaders of the Spanish communist party, who is finally executed by Francisco Franco’s junta. The SPF also helps political prisoners detained in Burgos and Barcelona.
-1962, France: the SPF supports strikers in Decazeville city. In his book, Julien Laupêtre, who joined the SPF as a secretary general in 1955, acknowledges that at that time, first-aid workers are “the revolution’s carriers”.
-September 1963, Yugoslavia: the SPF sends parcels to the victims of an earthquake in Skopje.
-26 July 1964, Cuba: shortly after sending aid to the victims of hurricane Flora, the SPF takes part in the 11th anniversary of the attack on Moncada barracks by Fidel Castro in Santiago de Cuba. The commemoration enables Castro’s regime to break its diplomatic isolation against the American embargo.
-1965, France: during its congress in Grenoble, the SPF widens its basis by giving all donors a membership card. This enables to have the number of members grow from 20,000 in 1945 to 900,000 in the 1990s.
-Since 1967, Vietnam: the SPF provides an ambulance to the northern part of the country, which is bombed by the Americans. In Paris, the representative of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam gives his thanks by saying he would have preferred his people to receive weapons directly! In 1968 and 1969, the SPF then sends a boat and 31 ambulances to North Vietnam. The organisation supports political prisoners in the South, not in the North. In July 1970 especially, it starts to campaign for the liberation of Jean-Pierre Debris and André Menras, two French volunteers imprisoned in Chi Hoa because they protested against General Nguyen Van Thieu’s dictatorship by putting up a Viet-Cong flag on Saigon’s Lam Sou Square. Thanks to constant pressures, the two volunteers are released in December 1972. After the communist victory in 1975, the SPF proceeds with its aid, in particular in Nih Dong 2, a former Saigon’s French military hospital run by Doctor Quynh Hoa, the minister of Health in the revolutionary provisional government.
-May 1968, France: the SPF organises people’s canteens to support the strikers.
