The two-and-a-half-day festival drew thousands of youth and others from around the country to the grounds of Casa del Campo, a major park, where many of the youth attending camped out for their stay. Along with rock concerts, cultural events, arts and crafts displays, meetings, and presentations, a range of bookstores and political organizations displayed and sold their literature in stands set up for that purpose. Members of Pathfinder’s volunteer team hailed from London and Manchester in the United Kingdom and from Boston in the United States.

Pathfinder’s top seller, and the title that prompted the most discussion, was Nueva Internacional no. 1, which contains the article "Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq." Many were interested in the magazine’s description of the roots and ramifications of the 1990-91 U.S. war in the Arab-Persian Gulf and the example set by socialist workers in the United States and other countries with their ongoing campaign against imperialism and war. A number of fair goers made up their mind to buy the issue after seeing the article "1945: When U.S. Troops Said No" by Mary-Alice Waters, which tells the hidden history of the mass protests by GIs overseas at the end of World War II demanding to be brought home--a movement that defeated Washington’s plans to keep them in the Pacific to protect U.S. imperialist interests from the growing colonial revolutions.

Some came to the festival looking for the Pathfinder stand, having visited it in previous years. Iván José Pires, a university student and Militant reader, was one. As he renewed his subscription, he said that he appreciates following the "international news, the situation in the United States, the Middle East, and the point of view of U.S. socialists, which is not well-known." A truck driver who also stopped by to renew his subscription, which had lapsed a while before, said that he values the paper’s reports of workers’ resistance in the United States. Many of those coming by the Pathfinder stand for the first time checked out the books offering a Marxist analysis of world politics, and those giving readers an otherwise unavailable picture of the class struggle in the United States. "What do you have on unions in the United States and the struggles of working people there?" asked one worker. He left with a copy of Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes and later returned to buy Lenin’s Final Fight, containing articles by V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Russian Revolution.

Paqui, a garment worker, traded experiences in the industry with volunteers from London and Boston while picking up a copy of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, also by Barnes.  
 
Two-way political exchanges
The political exchanges were very much two-way. As the Pathfinder staffers talked about union battles that they had taken part in or helped to build solidarity with in the United Kingdom and the United States, visitors to the booth described their experiences of union battles and other political developments in this country.

As in other imperialist countries, workers in Spain are confronting endemic joblessness and attacks on their rights. While the country’s unemployment rate has dipped from its previous high of 20 percent, many noted the growth in part-time work and temporary labor agencies.

Meanwhile, the government is stepping up attempts to pass legislation restricting democratic rights, especially targeting immigrants and those supporting Basque independence.

Workers told of strong participation from their workplaces and unions in the June 20 general strike. Some 10 million workers participated in the one-day action, which was called jointly by Spain’s two largest trade union federations. The strike opposed a law imposing new restrictions on the right to unemployment benefits and on access to wage payments for fired workers.

A group of cleaners from the Rámon y Cajal Hospital, in the La Paz area of northern Madrid, circulated flyers to festivalgoers as part of a broader effort to build solidarity with their fight to defend union rights. "We are victims of privatization pushed by the alliance of the [governing] Popular Party and big business," explained the flyer. The workers said that they planned to begin a strike on September 16.

Abuy Mfubes, one of a group of fighters from Equatorial Guinea, told the Pathfinder volunteers about a mid-September march protesting a new measure giving the government powers to expel all migrant workers found guilty of crimes carrying penalties of less than six years. Mfubes said that he had picked up Pathfinder titles on trips to New York and on other occasions, His library includes books of speeches by Malcolm X, Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism, and Thomas Sankara Speaks. He later brought others to the stand, pointing them toward Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, a pamphlet containing a speech by Sankara. He was interested in "The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop," the lead article in the English-language New Internacional no. 6, and other material on the 1979-83 revolution in Grenada.

The top sellers at the Pathfinder stand covered a wide breadth of topics. Thirty-four people bought Nueva Internacional no. 1; also popular were Malcolm X Speaks, Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle, Capitalism World Disorder, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, and Their Trotsky and Ours. The stand completely sold out of History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38: Report of a Participant by James P. Cannon. Total sales came in at 151 books at a value of just under $1,500.

In the days following the festival the team of volunteers visited Madrid bookstores to gain orders for the revolutionary publisher’s titles. Bookstores in Madrid, Barcelona, and--for the first time--Bilbao in the Basque country drew up lists totaling more than 80 books.  
 
 
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