At 95 years old, Joan Busquets Vergés, former anti-Franco guerrilla, has traveled from Normandy, where he lives, to Barcelona, to announce a claim against the Spanish State. He has requested compensation of one million euros for the damages suffered during the 20 years he spent in prison, especially for the illnesses and physical injuries whose consequences he has suffered until today.
Busquets is one of the last maquis still alive in Spain, a member of those resistance cells that dedicated themselves to harassing the Franco regime during the post-war period. At the age of 20 he joined the Marcel·lí Massana group, in the Catalan region of Berguedà, but he was soon arrested. He served time from 1949 to 1969, almost all of it in the Valencian prison of San Miguel de los Reyes.
More than half a century later, Busquets has decided to settle accounts with the State. With the legal support of the CGT union, it processed the claim with the Ministry of Justice on July 24, and this Tuesday it held a press conference at the Popular Encyclopedic Athenaeum of Barcelona to tell the story. He has been accompanied by Pep Cara, general secretary of the union in Berguedà, and Raúl Maíllo, lawyer from the legal office, who has detailed that his request seeks not only economic compensation, but above all also one that has to do with the “guarantees of non-repetition.”
Busquets has appealed to international law to support his claim for economic reparation, since the Democratic Memory Law of 2022 does not provide for it. The law declares convictions for political reasons during the Franco era null and illegitimate, but adds that these cannot give rise to financial compensation. In this sense, the request prepared by CGT lawyers refers to the United Nations resolution of the State responsibility for internationally illicit actswhich does include compensation as part of the repair.
Sentenced to the death penalty for the crimes of military rebellion, banditry and terrorism, his sentence was commuted to 30 years in prison, which he officially began to serve on February 24, 1950. There were 20 years and six days of deprivation of liberty, until 1969, to which was added a period of technically supervised freedom until October 1974. However, after a few months in which he was unable to adapt to daily life in Barcelona, in In 1971 he ended up clandestinely exiled to France, where he has maintained his anarcho-syndicalist activism.
In his recitation, Busquets recounts the suffering of his years in prison, from when he was 20 until he turned 40. He points out the “devastating consequences” of hunger and “forced labor” to which he was subjected for five years. In 1956 he tried to escape, but broke his femur trying to jump over a wall. When they intercepted him on the ground, the civil guards hit him with a rifle butt that broke his nose and they took him to a punishment cell. Days later he had to be transferred to the Provincial Hospital of Valencia for surgery.
The injuries and effects resulting from that and other episodes have caused him “serious health problems and limitations in his ability to work,” Busquets alleges. Chronic colitis, varicose veins, multiple fractures of the left femur, heart failure or lameness are some of the consequences listed.
Busquets also contrasts the treatment received in Spain when he was released from prison, with the harassment of the Political Social Brigade in Barcelona, with that in France in 1971. “As soon as I arrived I was recognized as a political exile by the Office Français de Protection de Réfugies Apatri (OFPRA)”, he points out.
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