The fact about Salvador Puig Antich and a police officer killed in Barcelona | Culture | EUROtoday

They had been two armed males. Salvador Puig Antich, a revolutionary militant, had fallen into an ambush by the police, who had been ready for him on the bar on Consejo de Ciento road (Barcelona) the place he had met with two fellow fighters. He didn’t permit himself to be caught, he supplied resistance that the brokers didn’t depend on, who barely managed to get him into the adjoining doorway, the place a life-or-death battle started. Already on the bottom, he took maintain of a 9-millimeter Astra that he hid prepared. There had been photographs fired. One hit the staircase, leaving a gap that may be seen immediately, and three others hit the physique of sub-inspector Francisco Anguas, who died earlier than reaching the Clinical Hospital. He was 24 years previous. One lower than the anarchist, executed simply 5 months later, on March 2, 1974, with the vile membership of the dictatorship.

The journalist Manuel Calderón traces in Until the final breath (Tusquets), Comillas Prize for History, Biography and Memoirs, in bookstores since March 6, the trajectories of Salvador and Francisco that converge of their tragic assembly. “They had more in common than one might think,” he explains at his dwelling in Madrid. The Puig Antichs had been six brothers. Salvador belonged to a rich household within the Gothic neighborhood of Barcelona and began Económicas. Accused of Anguas' dying, he remained in solitary confinement within the Modelo jail for 4 months, awaiting a court-martial that sentenced him to capital punishment. The books that he saved in cell 443, and that had been returned to his household, reveal disparate pursuits, by no means aligned with the leftist orthodoxy of the time. I used to be there In Search of Lost Time (1908), by Marcel Proust, “then considered a bourgeois novel,” Calderón provides. EITHER The interpretation of desires (1900), by Freud.

Nor does Anguas lend itself to stereotypes. He was the primary of 4 youngsters of a civil guard who needed to work a number of jobs to assist them. When Radio Taxi was based in Seville, he arrange the station and served as considered one of its first announcers. The household lived within the El Tardón neighborhood of Triana, the birthplace of flamenco after which additionally the nerve heart of retail, which stuffed younger Francisco, a member of the Narcotics Brigade, with ethical dilemmas. Stopping chasing pals and acquaintances was the principle motive for his departure to Barcelona. There he continued to domesticate his love for cinema, “and became an expert in the work of François Truffaut,” says Calderón. He crossed to Perpignan steadily to see movies banned in Spain, akin to The candy life (1960) by Federico Fellini or The final Tango in Paris (1972), by Bernardo Bertolucci. He treasured numerous books, beginning with the biography that Francisco Aranda wrote about Luis Buñuel.

Sub-inspector Anguas was not a part of the Political-Social Brigade in Barcelona, ​​however slightly the Criminal Brigade, a division that additionally investigated robberies in financial institution branches akin to these carried out by the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL), to which Puig Antich belonged. “The police were slow to realize that they had ideological motivations,” says Calderón, and solely then was a particular group shaped to pursue them with brokers from completely different backgrounds. The story of Until the final breath It is predicated on the abstract file, saved in a secure of the Civil Government of Barcelona. The information describe in lots of particulars the transient historical past of the group, its youthful daring, the secure homes, the anti-authoritarian propaganda of Situationist inspiration. Although what occurred on Consejo de Ciento Street continues to be the topic of a number of interpretations.

It was troublesome for Salvador to make his first assertion on the Clinic. His mouth had simply been pierced by a police shot, in keeping with experiences. Salvador Puig Antich, open case (2015), by Jordi Panyella. One of the docs from the identical hospital who extracted the bullets from Anguas' physique assured Calderón that he counted 5 holes, and never three, though he didn’t report it on the time, because it was a particular forensic space. That Anguas was a sufferer of pleasant fireplace is the authorized loophole that the protection took benefit of and what the household nonetheless defends. The journalist doesn’t enter into disquisitions: “I restrict myself to telling what is understood, to not making fabrications. Salvador's colleagues confirmed to me that the abstract was true.” He also does not value the attempts of the Argentine justice system to reopen the case and extradite the then minister José Utrera Molina, who reviewed the sentence, as well as the military auditor Carlos Rey, present at the court martial and one of his sources.

Juan Carlos Anguas and Carme Puig Antich, brothers of the deceased, collaborated in the preparation of the book, along with the three main survivors of the MIL, who believe that Puig Antich shot because he saw real options to flee. “If he had surrendered, probably in three years he would have been out on the streets with the amnesty,” says Calderón. If his book ignores procedural irregularities, it has the virtue of entering fully into the clandestine life of the revolutionaries. It reflects the alternation between extreme security measures and the errors that precipitated his arrest. It was Puig Antich who was the protagonist of the worst of those mistakes at Caspolino, a small amusement park where he had met with his partner Xavier Garriga to together decipher instructions from Tolousse, the group's other base. They played foosball to hide it and, after the encounter, Salvador forgot a bag there with everything the police needed to hunt them down.

There were two pistols, false documentation with real photographs, a telegram and several sets of keys. The anti-MIL Brigade did not even have to break down the doors of their safe houses. It was the beginning of the end. After that, the different members of the organization fell one by one. Calderón maintains that he lost a certain classism. “They came from wealthier families. They considered the police to be dead, incapable of doing their job, but they did it.” Emerging in the heat of May '68 and other urban guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof (Germany) or the Italian Red Brigades, the group never exceeded a dozen militants. “They lived doubly isolated. On the one hand, due to the dynamics of the armed struggle and, on the other, because they did not focus on the dictatorship, they were anti-capitalist, which distanced them from the rest of the left,” the journalist adds.

Calderón ventures to say that Francisco and Salvador wanted to change their lives, but they did not have time. The first was contemplating whether to enroll at the Central University to study Philosophy, he even took a walk around the campus. The second had already shown ideological doubts to some colleagues in the organization. He spent three months in Switzerland, away from all political activity, but returned after the arrest of Oriol Solé Sugranyes, who three years later was involved in the escape from the Segovia prison and died shot dead in Burguete. The other escapees, most of them members of ETA, managed to survive. “I am not interested in revisionism at all,” says the journalist. “I just wanted to tell this story with all its pieces, so that there are no first-rate and second-rate deaths.”

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