“Neither God nor master.” Salvador Puig Antich soon came to the libertarian cry that he sang to the French singer-songwriter Léo Ferré and that led him to his death half a century ago today. On March 2, 1974, the Franco regime executed him with a garrote in the Modelo prison in Barcelona. He was 25 years old. The accusation: shooting to death sub-inspector Francisco Anguas in September of the previous year, in a doorway on Girona Street in the struggle between him and a colleague with five police officers during his arrest.
The Political-Social Brigade followed the trail of the revolutionary communists with anarchist influences of the Iberian Liberation Movement-Autonomous Combat Groups (MIL-GAC) for the robbery of a branch of the Hispano-American Bank, in March 1973.
La Vanguardia has had access to over a hundred pages of Salvador's intimate diary from the period 1964-1970, which his sisters kept. More than twenty years ago, Francesc Escribano consulted him for Countdown. The story of Salvador Puig Antich (Edicions 62, 2001). Reading the entire diary allows us to clearly trace the ideological evolution of the young man.
Salvador was born in Barcelona in 1948 into a “progressive Christian bourgeois” working family. Son of a commercial agent with a Republican past, “a perfect case of incommunicability.” At home, he says, he lived in a “matriarchy,” with his grandmother, his mother, his four sisters, and a brother.
At the age of twelve, La Salle Bonanova expelled him for hitting a teacher. Interned in the Salesians of Mataró, he begins his personal diary, in Spanish, in February 1964. At the age of sixteen he is a boy worried about passing, but his behavior always lowers his grade. The pages could be signed by the protagonist of the same age and equally bored with his surroundings, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger.
The abuse, physical and mental, of the priests distances him from God. “He had me punished on a stick all day,” he notes. “I'm fed up with the fact that these faggot priests are doing some shit to me every day.” One of them tells him, “don't make that bully face if you don't want me to break it.”
When his mother—influential in his education—takes him out, he works as an office worker and studies night pre-university at the Joan Maragall Institute. He knows the core of the future MIL. Ignasi Solé Sugranyes and Xavier Garriga introduce him to anti-Leninist Marxism. But at the moment, about politics, “I don't understand a thing.” The effluvia of May 68 reaches him and he enrolls in Economics.
Puig Antich began to write in Catalan at the beginning of his military service, which he did between Palma and Ibiza. In the empty hours he becomes a voracious reader. From the Italian neorealist Vasco Pratolini he is passionate about Metello, “a critical exposition of the daily life of the working class.” Manuel de Pedrolo, left-wing and pro-independence, becomes his reference Catalan author with works such as Avui es parla de mi.
Doing the military he discovers himself “more real” because he stops interacting with “closed and flawed circles” and meets working-class and town boys, beyond “student-administrative” city people like him. And the click comes. “My political future is something very important and I will have to think about it with all 100 senses or more. "I can't play with politics."
He is enthusiastic about a report in Triumfo magazine about the Austrian Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Sigmund Freud who makes psychoanalysis compatible with Marxism. “Another world must be born from man and he will only be able to give birth to it when society has been destroyed and a new one created,” he writes. He reflects on the role of women in the mass struggle and the “loneliness, insecurity and dependence” to which they are subjected. He also concludes that people have to participate in decision-making bodies and “take concepts from anarchism and update them.” Contrary to the parties, he is increasingly in favor of the government of the autonomous workers' councils.
Read Camilo José Cela, Miguel Delibes, Latin American novel, media scholar Marshall McLuhan, Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosíc, and German sociologist Herbert Marcuse, influential in the leftist movement of the 1960s. “Society prevails over the individual,” he writes, and he assumes himself to be “idealistic.” As a teenager, Puig Antich had left God behind, now he also buries his master.
His high school classmates have focused him on a political quadrant, but with his readings he goes deeper on his own. With an intellectual or agitating Marxism, sooner or later you will burn out. There is only one “valid and scientific way out, revolutionary praxis.” In the late 1970s he is ready for what will come when he returns to Barcelona. Robbing banks—“expropriating them,” in their jargon—to allocate the money to the workers' struggle and to finance ideological publications, “making a library.”
The adventure will barely last three years. The court martial that judges him is irregular. The summary is altered. Evidence that could spare him the death penalty is made to disappear. Today it is still unclear where the shots that killed the police officer came from. Jordi Panyella demonstrates this in Salvador Puig Antich. Open Case (Quadrilateral Books, 2013).
On December 20, 1973, Puig Antich found out in his cell that Luis Carrero Blanco had jumped into the air. “ETA has killed me.” He understands that the regime will avenge the attack against the president of the government of Spain. But not only for that. The pardon, three years ago, of the members of ETA in the Burgos trial has unnerved his hard-liners.
Unlike then, the anti-Franco forces hardly mobilized for his pardon. Taking positions for regime change, they do not want to be linked to armed violence, nor to a communist revolutionary who wants to end Franco, but also capitalism. It is explained by the historian Gutmaro Gómez Bravo in Puig Antich. The unfinished transition (Taurus, 2014).
In mid-February 1974, however, Josep Tarradellas and Joan Casanelles, acting as president of the Republican Cortes in exile, sent telegrams to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, to ask for a pardon. The president of the Generalitat gets angry when a correspondent in Paris asks him about an attack against Spanish communists. “Why do you want my opinion, if you haven't asked me about Puig Antich?” It's obvious, his fight was different. Half a century later, Salvador is still waiting for the Spanish justice system to review his case.
