Joan Busquets Vergés has not reconciled with his hometown, Barcelona, nor with Spain. He is one of the last maquis still alive, among the thousands of ambushed guerrillas who clandestinely fought the Franco regime. At 95 years old, living in Normandy (France), he is convinced that the State has not repaired the damage it has caused and that it is worth fighting to achieve this.
“I am fighting for freedom, it is a continuous fight and until death,” this former Catalan guerrilla declared this Tuesday during an interview with several media. These days he traveled from his home in northern France to Barcelona to publicly explain the million-euro compensation claim he has requested from the government.
His memory remains almost intact, as do his anarchist convictions, and he can look back in detail on his journey: from his escape from Franco’s Spain when he was young to the 20 years and six days in prison he served. , passing through a brief and intense period in the maquis His stay in prison left him with physical consequences, such as a leg injury which persisted for 50 years, and psychological, such as the “trauma” of having been sentenced to death – commuted sentence – and to see how they shot his companions.
This is why Busquets is now calling 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 more other victims of Franco’s reprisals. “What I didn’t want was to ask for recognition as a victim because it would have been granted to me immediately, but for me it has no moral value,” explains this man.
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. “It was like at the time of the Inquisition, we had to get out of this black Spain,” he remembers of the first years of his youth. In 1947, he went into exile in France, worked in a coal mine in Aveyron, joined the CNT and fell in love with the “fabulous” atmosphere of the Republicans in Toulouse.
“But I had the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, that I had to go further,” he says today. After meeting one of the most experienced resistance fighters in Catalonia, Marcel·lí Massana, he took the plunge into guerrilla warfare. “He gave me the idea of fighting directly against Franco,” he said, while explaining that later the guerrilla leader did not want him in his ranks because he was too young. “In the end, he caught me and spoiled me quite like his little brother,” he smiles.
Busquets joined the maquis in 1948, just as the decline of this resistance movement began after the civil war. The operation to reconquer Val d’Aran was a failure and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) abandoned this type of armed struggle. The toll of this conflict would reach more than 2,000 guerrillas killed and 3,000 imprisoned.
“The guerrillas thought that by helping the democracies, they would help them liberate Spain. I too believed in it at the beginning, but later, I no longer did it,” he emphasizes. This nonagenarian claims to have always known that he would not succeed in overthrowing Franco with his raids and sabotage . “I thought I had to do as much damage to the regime as possible, but I also had my feet on the ground,” he explains. “I never thought they would kill me either. young man never thinks about it,” he said.
For about a year since he participated in the guerrilla war, both in France and within Catalonia, he remembers above all the discipline that reigned in the group. “We had anarchist ideas, but we had a self-discipline that can be difficult to understand today. This is 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 explosive sabotage which succeeded in bringing down fifty high-voltage pylons in Terrassa. He passed through the dungeons of the Via Laietana police station, where he was tortured, then transferred to the Model and subjected to a summary trial for which he was sentenced to death.
“When we are young, we face terrible resistance,” Busquets says today. “I came to the conclusion that if they killed me, I should die with dignity. It’s difficult to come to this conclusion at 20 years old,” he concludes.
Ultimately, 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 their capture in February 1950.
Of the 20 years he spent in prison, 15 of which in San Miguel de los Reyes, in Valencia, and the rest in Burgos, he assures that he remains with the hope of having cultivated more than with the trials. “Evil is forgotten,” he said. However, he recounts the hunger, illness and mistreatment inflicted by the guards. But the worst episode was when he unsuccessfully tried to escape in 1956. While jumping over one of the prison walls, he fell into a ditch and fractured his femur.
They took him to the disciplinary cell without properly treating his injury. “I stayed on the ground for seven days in the middle of winter covered only by 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. Following protests from other prisoners, he was finally transferred to the Valencia provincial hospital for surgery. Years later, already in France, he was declared unfit for work due to leg problems caused by the negligence suffered in those days.
The fight continues from France
Joan Busquets was released from prison in 1969 at the age of 41 and spent half her life behind bars. He returned to his Barcelona, but could not adapt. “My head was like a drum,” he sums up. It even impressed him to see a traffic light for the first time in his life. “I went red and they yelled at me ‘idiot!’” he said.
He found a good, well-paid job in a publishing house, but the socio-political police squad harassed him, he says. In reality, he was on probation because his sentence did not officially expire until 1974. This is how in 1971 he decided to flee and went to France, where he obtained the status of political exile and ended up founding 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 he remembers with the greatest pride is that of the visit of Kings Juan Carlos I and Sofia to Paris in 1976, under the French presidency of Giscard d’Estaing. “They arrested me and others because they considered us dangerous and sent us to Brittany,” he explains. “We were kidnapped for seven days,” he adds.
Victim of Francoism, Busquets sent letters to the president of the government, Felipe González, then to the president of the Generalitat, José Montilla, to demand recognition and reparation for the guerrillas. But he never received a response. He has also recently participated in campaigns to demand that the Catalan Police Headquarters, located in Via Laietana, become a center of historical memory. In this regard, he does not hide his antipathy for the socialists: “It is the firefighters who benefit and cover the putschists”.
Until today, Busquets continued to travel in Catalonia, both in Barcelona and in the Berguedà region, where he maintains friendships, but he refused to return to live in Spain. “Until I saw the democracy I fought for coming,” he said. And he specifies that he is referring to the republic for which he fought “although an anarchist”.
If the Ministry of Justice refuses financial compensation, it does not rule out pursuing legal action. And faced with a world where democracies are in decline, he affirms: “The fight continues, and if it continues for me… I do not want to tell young people what they must do, but they must know that the Freedom is a fight that lasts until the end of days.
