Joan Busquets Vergés, the last Catalan Maquis
From Memoria Libertaria
November 30, 2024
During this November, Joan Busquets, “El Senzill” visited the Spanish State 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 (Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo) on the 19th, the press conference in Barcelona, and a conversation between him and the historian and researcher Dolors Marín.
On the morning of November 19, the CGT had called for a rally in front of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid. A group of National Police officers, who had been specifically warned, prevented Joan and several activists from unfurling a banner prepared for this rally. No deputy, no party, deigned to leave the building, the seat of the “sovereignty” of the Spanish people, and receive 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 companions had worse luck and were shot.” At 96 years old, the Catalan maquis Joan Busquets, “El Senzill”, has travelled to Madrid to tell his life experience as a libertarian guerrilla and to demand recognition from the State and financial compensation for the suffering and persecution to which the Franco regime and authorities subjected him for almost his entire life. “I think I am the last one left alive from that generation of companions, who were seven or eight years older than me. If there are any left, which I don’t know, they must be more than a hundred years old.” Joan, who still has completely clear events and anecdotes that he experienced decades ago when he was barely 18 or 20 years old, began to take direct action in France. He contacted anarchist groups and soon joined the guerrilla. Although he was born in July 1928, the fascist coup of 1936 caught him at just eight years of age and the end of the war at eleven, he perfectly remembers the misery and hunger that his people suffered, as well as the brutal repression that came with Franco's "victory" (which they called "peace"). Joan "formed" himself after the Civil War. Little by little he became aware of and internalized libertarian ideas. His own father, who worked in a workshop when the Revolution began on July 19, 1936, was affiliated with the National Confederation of Labor. The information that Joan provides about how things worked during this stage in small businesses is curious. In the case of the place where his father was employed, the boss agreed to become another worker, without objecting to anything. His father, whom he remembers during his talk, was responsible for the materials that were used and needed in the workshop.
Busquets' claim is completely fair. The State must fully and not just "symbolically" compensate this man whose life has been at the service of freedom (or as the political class likes to say, "at the service of Democracy"). This is what the lawyer of the Legal Office of CGT, Raúl Maíllo, is working on. They filed a claim on July 19, 2024, and he is aware that the State is not going to respond to this procedure that the anarcho-syndicalist organization has initiated. "It is twenty years of sentence served, five years of forced labor, and a lifetime of persecution for fighting for freedom. He went through a lot of need and all this left him with psychological and physical consequences. It is time for the Spanish State to comply with Joan ," argued Maíllo. "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 through legal means."
The current Law on Democratic Memory represents a break not only with the previous law, but also with the Francoist sentences, which are all null and void. In addition, the current law recognises the fundamental role played by the guerrillas 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 Memorialist Movement, “that is why we are now demanding recognition of those who gave their lives and their 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 trip took seven days or more, because we advanced at night.” Joan dedicated himself to getting this material from France to Catalonia, specifically to Manresa. They used it to plan and carry out sabotage of different kinds. The sabotage did a lot of damage to the regime, because sometimes they managed to disable the railway or leave entire territories without electricity. “These sabotages did damage to the regime and we also managed to get the foreign press to echo them, and therefore an organised resistance against the dictator.” Joan always thought, or at least during the 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 an international level, he changed his mind and accepted, perhaps with great pain, that they were not going to be able to.
1949 was a year in which many anti-fascist guerrillas were eliminated. “There were guerrillas of other ideologies, such as socialists and communists, but the most numerous were the anarchists. Ramón Capdevila’s group of maquis was very well known and greatly admired in France. The libertarian guerrillas or those of the CNT always acted independently of other groups or collectives of maquis.” This was also due to the fact that the organization, the CNT itself in exile, was not in favor of this form of struggle. However, the anarchist maquis continued fighting on the ground, independently of the vision of the International Committee of the organization.
Joan was arrested in 1949. He spent 20 years in prison, where he would not surrender either. He would organize an escape, the “escape from San Miguel de los Reyes (Valencia),” in 1954. But this action would go wrong, and when he climbed down one of the facades he had a fall and broke his femur. Thus, with this serious injury, he was arrested and brutally beaten by the Civil Guard, and then he was transferred to a punishment cell, where he would spend more than a week without medical attention. “My fellow prisoners protested, they protested a lot and infected others. The regime did not want this to go any further and so they took me to the hospital where they treated me medically, but in prison, the prison officials did not even want to let me sleep on a bed.” These physical wounds were open for more than 50 years. “They stopped oozing in the year 2000,” Joan explained during his talk.
When he was released in 1969, he admitted that he had great difficulty in reintegrating into the dynamics of society at that time. Although he tried to “start” over again by looking for a job, the Political and Social Brigade literally did not let him live in peace. He was continually harassed and persecuted, insulted and accused. All of this was decisive in Joan's decision to go to France and settle there.
Macarena Amores for the CGT November 20, 2024
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