
“Being an anarchist now is no different from 50 years ago. It’s a philosophy and a search for truth. What I want is unity, of Europe and, were it possible, of the whole world, without frontiers, a world in which we all understand each other.”
Joan Busquets Verges, The Guardian (03/12/2024)
During this month of November, Joan Busquets, ‘El Senzill’, has visited Spain to present his claim as a victim of Francoism.
In this post, you can find the chronicle of the event and the recording at the FAL (Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation) on the 19th, the press conference in Barcelona and a conversation between him and the historian and researcher Dolors Marín.
On the morning of 19 November, the CGT had called a rally in front of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid. A group of National Police officers, expressly warned, prevented Joan and several activists from unfurling a banner prepared for this rally. No member of parliament, no party, deigned to leave the building, the seat of the ‘sovereignty’ of the Spanish people, to welcome a person who gave years of his life for freedom.
Talk at the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation (CNT) in Madrid
“I spent more than 20 years in prison, but my comrades had worse luck and were shot”. At the age of 96, the Catalan maquis Joan Busquets, ‘El Senzill’, has travelled to Madrid to talk about his life experience as a libertarian guerrilla fighter and to demand recognition and financial compensation from the state for the suffering and persecution to which the Franco regime and authorities subjected him for most of his life. “I think I am the last one alive from that generation of comrades, who were seven or eight years older than me. If there are any left, which I don’t know, they must be over a hundred years old”. Joan, who still has a clear sense of the events and anecdotes he was involved in decades ago when he was only 18 or 20 years old, began to take direct action in France. He came into contact with anarchist groups and soon joined the guerrilla. Although he was born in July 1928, the fascist coup of 1936 caught him when he was only eight years old and the end of the war when he was eleven, he remembers perfectly the misery and hunger suffered by his people, as well as the brutal repression that followed Franco’s a “victory” (which they called “peace”). Joan was ‘’educated‘’ after the Civil War. He gradually became aware of and internalised libertarian ideas. His own father, who worked in a workshop when the Revolution began on 19 July 1936, was a member of the National Confederation of Labour. Joan’s account of how small businesses functioned during this period is curious. In the case of the place where his father was employed, the boss agreed to become just another worker, without objecting to anything. His father, whom he remembers during his talk, was responsible for the materials they used and needed in the workshop.
Busquets’ claim is entirely just. The state has to make full reparation and not just “symbolic” reparations to this man whose life has been in the service of freedom (or as the political class likes to say, “in the service of Democracy”). This is what the lawyer of the CGT’s Legal Office, Raúl Maíllo, is working on. They filed a complaint on the 19th of July 2024, and he is aware that the state is not going to respond to this procedure initiated by the anarcho-syndicalist organisation. “That’s twenty years of sentence served, five years of hard labour, and a lifetime of persecution for fighting for freedom. He was in great need and all this left him with psychological – physical – scars. It is time for the Spanish state to comply with Joan,” Maíllo argued. “The state has and must guarantee the principles of Truth, Justice and Reparation proposed precisely by the UN, and this is what we have focused on legally”.
The current Ley de Memoria Democrática/Democratic Memory Law represents a break not only with the previous law, but also with Francoist sentences, which are now all null and void. In addition, the current law recognises the fundamental role played by the guerrilla fighters or maquis in the fight against the fascist regime and its repression after the war. For the CGT lawyer, this new law is a victory for the Memorial Movement, “that is why we are now claiming the recognition of those who gave their lives and years fighting”.
The action of a maquis
“I made many trips with war material on me. Material that often weighed more than 40 kilos, and the journey lasted seven days or more, because we advanced at night”. Joan took this material from France to Catalonia, specifically to Manresa. With it, they planned and carried out sabotage of different types. The sabotage did a lot of damage to the regime, because sometimes they managed to disable the railways or leave entire territories without electricity. “These acts of sabotage hurt the regime and we also managed to get the foreign press to echo them, and therefore of an organised resistance against the dictator”. Joan always thought, at least during his first years in the guerrilla, that they would be able to overthrow the dictatorship. But then, with the passage of time and events, especially at the international level, he changed his mind and accepted, perhaps with a great deal of pain, that they were not going to be able to.
1949 was a year in which many anti-fascist guerrillas were wiped out. “There were guerrillas of different ideologies, such as socialists and communists, but the most numerous were the anarchists. Ramón Capdevila’s maquis group was well known and much admired in France. The libertarian or CNT guerrillas always acted independently of other maquis groups or collectives”. It was also because the organisation, the CNT itself in exile, was not in favour of this form of struggle. However, the anarchist maquis continued to fight on the ground, regardless of the views of the organisation’s International Committee.
Joan was arrested in 1949. He spent 20 years in prison, where he would not surrender either. He organised an escape, the “escape from San Miguel de los Reyes” (Valencia), in 1954. But this escape was unsuccessful, and when he fell from one of the facades, he broke his femur. Thus, with this serious injury, he was arrested and brutally beaten by the Guardia Civil, and then transferred to a punishment cell, where he would spend more than a week without medical attention. “My comrades in prison protested, they protested a lot and this influenced others. The regime did not want this to go any further and so they took me to the hospital where I was medically treated, but in prison, the prison authorities did not even want to let me sleep on a bed”. These physical wounds were open for more than 50 years. “They stopped festering in 2000”, Joan explained during his talk.
When he was released in 1969, he acknowledged that he had great problems integrating back into the dynamics of society at the time. Although he tried to “start” again, looking for a job, the Brigada Político-Social/Political-Social Brigade literally did not let him live in peace. He was continually harassed and persecuted, insulted and accused. All this was a determining factor in Joan’s decision to leave for France and settle there.
Macarena Amores for CGT 20 November 2024
(Source: CGT – Confederación General del Trabajo/Memoria libertaria – 30/11/2024)