Joan Busquets Vergés has not reconciled with his hometown, Barcelona, or with Spain. He is one of the last maquis still alive, of the thousands of ambushed guerrillas who fought Franco’s regime from clandestinity. At 95 years old, living in Normandy (France), he is convinced that the State has not repaired the damage it caused him and that it is worth fighting to achieve it.
“I fight for freedom, it is a continuous fight and until death,” this former Catalan guerrilla said this Tuesday during an interview with several media. These days he has traveled from his home in the north of France to Barcelona to publicly explain his request for compensation of one million euros that he has requested from the Government.
His memory remains almost intact, as well as his anarchist convictions, and he is able to review his career in detail: from his escape from Franco’s Spain as a young man to the 20 years and six days in prison he served, passing through a brief and intense period in the maquis His time in prison left him with physical consequences, such as a wound in his leg that festered for 50 years, and psychological ones, such as the “trauma” of having been sentenced to death – a sentence that was commuted – and of seeing how they shot his companions.
Hence, Busquets is now asking for economic reparation, something that goes beyond what is established in the Democratic Memory Law of 2022, and which he hopes will serve to pave the way for other victims of Franco’s retaliation. “What I have not wanted to do is request recognition as a victim because it would have been granted to me immediately, but for me it has no moral value,” this man reasons.
Against Franco without fear of death
Born in Barcelona in 1928, Busquets grew up in a humble and politicized family, with a father who was a CNT delegate, and quickly came into contact with figures opposed to the regime. “The feeling was like the time of the Inquisition, you had to get out of that black Spain,” he remembers about the first years of his youth. In 1947 he went into exile in France, worked in a coal mine in the Aveyron region, joined the CNT and fell in love with the “fabulous” atmosphere of the Republicans in Toulouse.
“However, my feeling was that I wasn’t doing enough, that I had to go further,” he says today. After meeting one of the most experienced maquis in Catalonia, Marcel·lí Massana, he made the leap to the guerrilla. “He gave me the idea of fighting directly against Franco,” he says, although he explains that later the guerrilla leader did not want him in his ranks because he was too young. “In the end he caught me and had me quite spoiled, like his little brother,” he smiles.
Busquets joined the maquis in 1948, actually when the decline of this resistance movement after the Civil War began. The reconquest operation through the Aran Valley had been a failure and the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) was giving up that type of armed struggle. The balance of that conflict would reach more than 2,000 guerrillas killed and 3,000 imprisoned.
“The guerrillas believed that since they had helped the democracies, they would help them liberate Spain. I also believed it at first, but later I didn’t,” he points out. This nonagenarian claims that he always knew that he would not be able to overthrow Franco with his raids and sabotage. “I believed that we had to do as much damage as possible to the regime, but I also had my feet on the ground,” he explains. “I never thought they would kill me either. A young man never thinks about it,” he says.
From the year or so that he was in the guerrilla, both in France and in the interior of Catalonia, he especially remembers the discipline that reigned in the group. “We had anarchist ideas, but we had a self-discipline that today can be difficult to understand. It was not the army, where discipline is imposed, but we disciplined ourselves and from there our strength was born.”
The fall and the times he thought he would die
At just 20 years old, Busquets was arrested in October 1949 in Barcelona, after having participated in sabotage with explosives that managed to bring down fifty high-voltage towers in Terrassa. He went through the dungeons of the Via Laietana police station, where he was tortured, and then he was transferred to the Model and subjected to a summary trial for which he received the death penalty.
“When you are young you have terrible resistance,” Busquets now reflects. “I came to the conclusion that if they killed me, I had to die with dignity. It is hard to come to this conclusion at 20 years old,” he concludes.
In the end, his death sentence was commuted to 30 years in prison, of which he served 20 and six days. But his two main companions, Manolo Sabaté and Saturnino Culebras, were shot shortly after being captured, in February 1950.
Of the 20 years he spent in prison, 15 of them in San Miguel de los Reyes, in Valencia, and the rest in Burgos, he assures that he remains with the hope that he cultivated more than with the hardships. “The bad is forgotten,” he says. Even so, he recounts hunger, illness, and mistreatment by guards. But the worst episode was when he tried unsuccessfully to escape in 1956. While jumping over one of the prison walls, he fell into a ditch and broke the head of his femur.
They took him to the punishment cell without properly treating his wound. “I was on the ground for seven days in the middle of winter covered only with a blanket, I had nothing to say, I was locked up and I thought I was going to die and that’s it,” he remembers. A protest from the other prisoners caused him to finally be transferred to the Provincial Hospital of Valencia for surgery. Years later, already in France, he was declared unfit for work due to his leg problems due to the negligence suffered those days.
The fight continues from France
Joan Busquets was released from prison in 1969 at the age of 41 and had half a life behind bars. He returned to his Barcelona, but could not adapt. “My head was like a drum,” he summarizes. It even made an impression on him to see a traffic light for the first time in his life. “I passed on red and they yelled at me ‘you idiot!’” he says.
He found a good, well-paid job in a publishing house, but the Social Political Brigade of the Police harassed him, he claims. In reality, he was on probation because his sentence did not officially expire until 1974. So in 1971 he decided to flee and went to France, where he received the status of political exile and ended up starting a family.
Since then, The Senzill He has maintained his links with anarcho-syndicalist circles, both in France and in Catalonia, where he continues to collaborate with the CGT in the Berguedà region. It was this union that provided legal advice on his recent claim.
One of the episodes that he remembers with greatest pride is that of the visit of Kings Juan Carlos I and Sofia to Paris in 1976, during the French presidency of Giscard d’Estaing. “They detained me and others because they considered us dangerous and sent us to Brittany,” he explains. “We were kidnapped for seven days,” he adds.
As a victim of Francoism, Busquets sent letters to the President of the Government, Felipe González, and then to the President of the Generalitat, José Montilla, to demand recognition and reparation for the guerrillas. But he never got a response. He has also recently participated in campaigns to request that the Catalan Police Headquarters, on Via Laietana, become a center of historical memory. In this aspect he does not hide his antipathy for the socialists: “They have been the firefighters who benefit and cover up the coup plotters.”
Until today, Busquets has continued to travel to Catalonia, both to Barcelona and especially to the Berguedà region, where he maintains ties of friendship, but he has refused to return to live in Spain. “Until I see the democracy that I fought for coming…”, he says. And he specifies that he refers to the republic for which he fought “despite being an anarchist.”
If the Ministry of Justice denies financial compensation, it does not rule out continuing through judicial means. And in the face of a world with democracies in decline, he claims: “The fight continues, and if it continues for me… I don’t want to tell young people what they have to do, but they should know that freedom is a fight that lasts until the end. end of days.”
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