Joan Busquets, 96, suffered torture, forced labour and 20 years in prison under the Franco regime and seeks reparations
One of the last surviving fighters from the guerrilla war waged against the Franco dictatorship in the 1940s is suing the Spanish government for €1m in reparations.
Barcelona-born Joan Busquets, 96, suffered torture, forced labour and 20 years in prison at the hands of the Franco regime. The case comes in response to Spain’s Democratic Memory law, passed in 2022, which offers “moral reparations” to the regime’s victims.
“The law offers to help victims of torture, forced labour and exile under the dictatorship but the small print says they are not entitled to financial compensation,” Busquets said. “It’s symbolic, but my imprisonment wasn’t symbolic.”
After the fascist victory in the civil war in 1939, thousands of republicans fled to France, many of whom went on to fight with the French resistance, popularly known as the maquis, during the Nazi occupation.
At the end of the second world war a number of them returned to Spain where they established guerrilla groups – also called maquis – dedicated to undermining the Franco regime.
After the Spanish civil war, thousands of republicans (pictured) fled to France to fight with the French resistance during the second world war, with a number later returning to Spain to establish guerrilla groups. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Busquets, then 20, joined the group led by Marcel·lí Massana in Berguedà in northern Catalonia, which smuggled arms and explosives over the Pyrenees on foot.
Carrying 40kg packs, they made the six-day journey from France to the town of Manresa by night. “I bought a pair of boots but it turned out they were both for the same foot so I spent two and half days crossing the mountains barefoot,” said Busquets. “My feet were a wreck.”
His life as a guerrilla was short-lived. After a year in the mountains he was arrested and taken to the notorious torture centre on Vía Laietana in Barcelona.
There, he and his comrades were subjected to three weeks of sleep deprivation before being sentenced to death by a military court. Busquets’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment – he doesn’t know why – while the others were executed by firing squad at Camp de la Bota, now the site of the Primavera Sound music festival.
In 1956 Busquets broke his leg in a failed escape from prison in Valencia. When two Guardia Civil officers came across him, they assumed he was dead, and one of them kicked him in the face, splitting his nose in two.
Later two prisoners brought him back to jail where he was denied medical help and left on a concrete floor for seven days before being finally taken to hospital. As a result, he believes, he has suffered a variety of lifelong health problems.
