25 years ago, Salvador Puig Antich, anarchist and member of the M.I.L.(Iberian Liberation Movement) was murdered by the Spanish state: he was one of many. Below we publish a statement from the FAI and the Local Federation of Anarchist Groups (Barcelona) distributed in Barcelona in 1974. It hints at a history of Anarchist militancy in the '60s still to be heard…
Remember these names. They are part of our history.
THE WAR GOES ON…
FAI - IFA
So, you Platonic philosophers, you would emancipate a people exploited by such methods? (…) The revolutionary Congress declares that the bourgeoisie ought not to be regarded as like other beings, declares it to beyond the Pale of peoples. Thus, suffering humanity should defend itself against such pernicious creatures by trampling underfoot any who would raise their heads in order to bite, and show no compassion at the sound of the whimpering that attends its extinction.
Manifesto of the Disinherited (Cadiz 1848)
Nothing will save you. Our struggle in the countryside and in the cities will put paid to the entire bourgeois estate. A purifying fire will cleanse the secular carrion which has overpowered and brutalised peoples.
Verbo Rojo (David Antona) writing in Madrid's CNT on 7 January 1933
Salvador PUIG ANTICH, strangled by garrote vil on the morning of 2 March 1974 in the courtyard of the Modelo Prison in Barcelona, was a scapegoat whom the capitalists dispatched an executioner to murder, an executioner who travelled from the far side of the Spanish State, after a month and a half's suspense, time during which the State mulled over and over the value of such a spectacular measure. In the end it did what it logically had to do. IT HAS DECLARED REVOLUTIONARIES DENIED THE RIGHT TO SURVIVE WITHIN THEPROCESS OF CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT… obviously, when the enemy of the State is the People's friend, the State must exterminate its enemy. That is nothing more than a new chapter in the Class War raging violently since 19 July 1936.
(…)And so PUIG ANTICH has been done to death. Remember that the cops did their best to do away with him at the time of arrest… and thousands of libertarians have lost their lives for the same reasons ever since THIS revolutionary class war became widespread in 1936. After the physical annihilation of the workers who had fought to defend their collectives and their essays in undiluted Communism, came the Calvary of thousands of exiles through the concentration camps of democratic, Popular Front France, through the Nazi-fascist whirlwind with its death camps and labour camps where the CNT's revolutionary masses lost their lives (perishing under a regimen of the most primitive slavery), at the same time as the internationalist fight put up through the European resistance by numerous comrades who died with their weapons in their hands, after the first stirrings of Iberian workers in the 1940s which were defended by the libertarian guerrillas and coordinated by the CNT-FAI, with the most combative sections of anarchist youth being sentenced to die, mown down in the streets and in the hills in the '40s and '50s, after the interminable prison sentences passed in the '60s on a fresh crop of the libertarian communist movement, as well as the slaughter of an entire libertarian combat group at the start of 1960 - Sabate and his friends. After the police frame-up of Granados and Delgado, who were murdered in 1963 by garrote vil (as was comrade Puig) and the criminal gunning down of another anarchist armed group, Ramón Vila Capdevila and his comrades… after a protracted silence punctuated by an avalanche of arrests of Libertarian Youth members (Edo, Alicia, Urbano…) until another upswing in the shape of the present RESURGENCE opened with a series of arrests among student circles in Madrid, the Acratas, the action groups (in 1968), an FUR (Queremos la Universidad), the editorial team from the review Panorama-CNT (in Madrid), the Valencian group of the FIJL (outstanding among them, on account of his being held in intolerable prison conditions, Floreal Rodriguez), the 18 year sentence passed on Francesc Tubau Subira, the youngster from Ampurda, the chicanery against Julio Millan…
In the 1970s, the repression against Iberian anarchism has reached figures that bear comparison with those of the 1940s. Thus, dozens of comrades have been rounded up at demonstrations and in clashes with police: we have the arrests and harassment visited upon Terra Libre Valencia), on three occasions upon the teams from Autogestión Obrera (Madrid), after Andrés Ruiz (Barcelona) and Navarro (L'Hospitalet del Llobregat), David Urbano again (Barcelona), the ex-members of MIL, some thirty youths from Zaragoza (the pursuit of the Acción Directa groups) and in recent weeks the wave of tough repression unleashed against various libertarian organisations in Catalonia even among individualists and sympathisers of a thousand different outlooks. The police communiqué talks of TWENTY TWO comrades, but we reckon that there must have been many more than that, and that this is NOTHING MORE THAN A FRESH POLICE MACHINATION, after the fashion of the State tension in Italy (we now find the Sixth Brigade's Special Social Investigation Anarchist-hunting Squad, one of whom Salvador Puig was fortunate enough to EXECUTE with his gun) aping their Italian colleagues and, should that fail, picking up the telephone and asking for Inspector Bond in London, the inventor of anti-anarchist methods in England). We ask comrades the world over to step up their campaign ON BEHALF OF SALVADOR PUG ANTICH in the light of the recent events in Barcelona, linking the trial of Valpreda and his comrades with that of Marini, the forthcoming court martial of Oriol SOLE SUGRANYES, upon whom they are going to pass another death sentence (the garrote vil having been deployed against us) and the judicial mockeries mounted against Enrique CONDE and Nuria BALLART, as well as against the Italian student who has been languishing in prison for three months now and all the comrades still behind bars.. (…)
Let the cry rise from every side THEY HAVE KILLED PUIG ANTICH: WE MUST SAVE ORIOL SOLE! as a thousand workers chanted in the streets of Badalona only a few days ago.
In spite of the incessant arrests, in spite of the implacable persecution visited upon our libertarian circles, LET US FORGE AHEAD, for we have nothing to lose, whereas the Spanish and Portuguese States are in crisis. THE WAR CARRIES ON.. THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION OF '36 IS STILL IN SUSPENDED ANIMATION. WE HAVE TO GET TO A WORLDWIDE REVOLUTIONARY EXPLOSION THROUGH OUR EVERYDAY STRUGGLES, ALONGSIDE THE CNT, ALONGSIDE ALL REVOLUTIONARIES AND FOR LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM.
The Local Federation of Anarchist Groups (Barcelona) March 1974
FAI IFA
Feed