They were both very young. Both died violently, prematurely, horribly. Francisco Anguas was murdered by Salvador Puig Antich, who fatally shot him three times. Salvador Puig Antich died executed with a garrote. He was one of the last sentenced to death under Franco.
Manuel Calderón reviews the tragic story of the two men in Hasta el Último Breath (Tusquets), the book that won the Comillas 2024 Prize. The lives of Puig Antich and Anguas had very little in common. Their deaths were closely linked.
“Salvador came from a Catholic family registered in Catalanism. His father worked for a pharmaceutical company and his mother was a teacher. The family of six children lived near Ferran Street. All the children studied in good schools,” explains Calderón in an interview with La Vanguardia.
“Francisco Jesús Anguas was born in Seville into a humble family. His father was a civil guard. He is a mother, a housewife. They lived in the El Tardón neighborhood, a canonical model of developmentalism blocks. “There were four brothers,” he adds.
Puig Antich's childhood was spent at La Salle Bonanova until the boy had an incident, "hit a teacher, and was expelled." His parents enrolled him in the Salesians. He later studied at the Pompeya School and then at the Joan Maragall Institute, a place that marked his destiny.
There he came into contact with the Solé Sugranyes boys, founders of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL), “a group inherited from May 1968 that was fascinated by armed struggle.” “The MIL did not become a terrorist group, it had only a dozen members: an armed wing, which included three of the Solé brothers and Puig Antich; a theoretical one, which was made up of Xavier Garriga and Santi Soler Amigó, and a treasury, which was managed by another of the Solé family, Ignasi.”
The group took its first hit in Bellver, because the Solé brothers spent their summers in Cerdanya. Puig Antich joined them a little later. “The MIL robbed banks. Puig Antich was in charge of driving the escape car. The gang carried out 12 robberies in one year. The loot would amount to about 13 million pesetas, a fortune at the time.”
While Puig Antich embarked on his criminal career, Anguas joined the Police after “obtaining a good score in the competitive examinations.” He was assigned as an escort to the princes of Spain, Juan Carlos and Sofia, and later requested a transfer to Barcelona. “He fell in love with the city. Anguas was a film buff, passionate about the New Wave, and a stamp collector. He wanted to study Philosophy and planned to enroll at the Central University. “He had met a girl, María Luisa, and he was going to marry her.” He was 24 years old.
In the summer of '73, while planning his wedding, Anguas began to investigate the Sten Gang, as the Police had named the MIL after the submachine gun that the group used in their robberies. Meanwhile, the MIL were already planning to disband. In July, Puig Antich met with Garriga at Caspolino, an amusement venue in Gala Placidia. "During that meeting Salvador made a fatal mistake: he left his wallet with 90,000 pesetas, addresses, telephone numbers..."
The police investigation took a giant step thanks to that material that led the agents to the Funicular bar, at the confluence of Consejo de Ciento and Gerona, on September 25.
“Santi Soler Amigó and Xavi Garriga had met there. The police were going to arrest them. Puig Antich suddenly appeared, carrying two pistols and a knife. The agents subdued Soler and Garriga. Salvador resisted. He entered the adjacent portal with three police officers. They took a gun and a knife from him. They struggled. He pulled out the other gun and fired four shots, one hitting a step. The others, in the heart, lung and other viscera of Anguas.”
The murderer and the victim were taken in the same vehicle to the Clinical Hospital. Anguas, 24, had his body brought in. Puig Antich died a few months later, on March 2, 1974, in the Modelo prison in Barcelona with a garrote, he was 25 years old. The tragedy did not end there for the Anguas. “Dolores, the mother of the murdered police officer, fell into a depression and some time later threw herself into the void from the eighth floor.”
Calderón has written the definitive biography of these two men, although, “at first the subject did not seem pleasant to me.” "But one day I heard that the execution of Puig Antich was used as a political weapon against the adversary and I understood that I had to relate the facts because what happened was no longer interesting, only to replay the roles, that of the revolutionary unjustly executed and that of the Francoist police officer. deservedly killed in the line of duty,” he concludes.
