Salvador Puig Antich

The name Salvador Puig Antich and the events surrounding the so-called Transition from fascism are famous within Spain, but largely unknown elsewhere. This collection, originally published in Catalan on the forty-fifth anniversary of Puig Antich’s execution, remedies that.

In the early 1970s, Salvador Puig Antich of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL) was engaged in a fight to the death with Franco’s brutal fascist dictatorship over the future of Spain. They expropriated banks and smuggled clandestine literature in support of the growing movement of wildcat workers’ strikes. In 1974, the Franco regime garroted Puig Antich—literally strangled him to death. The charge was for shooting a policeman during his arrest, the details of which were contested. Puig Antich’s case became a cause célèbre internationally. This book makes sense of his life and death by placing them in their historical and political context. Some contributors describe the intensity of life in an armed group, others focus on the political debates in the MIL and the broader movement. Puig Antich’s comrades speak of the contemporary strike movement, his family members recount the wait for his execution. Sometimes perspectives clash, a testament to the conflicts, debates, and contradictions that form an integral part of this history of struggle. This edition also includes a new Introduction by Peter Gelderloos for English-language readers, as well as photos, documents, a glossary, and a selection of Puig Antich’s letters and other writings.

Praise for Salvador Puig Antich

“[Puig Antich], as well as his collective, were first and foremost anticapitalist revolutionaries with a libertarian orientation, firmly committed to self-organization, anti-authoritarianism, anti-Leninism, and workers’ autonomy. Through the experience it relates and rigorously documents, this book shows us that struggle is always possible if the political will exists to undertake it.”
—Tomás Ibañez, author of Anarchism is Movement

«The importance of this moving and informative book is to allow us to see Puig Antich as much more than a victim. It allows us to place him as part of a rich movement seeded by working-class militancy which was constantly assessing just how we can defeat capitalism and create a better world.»
—Barry Pateman, Kate Sharpley Library

Ricard de Vargas Golarons, former member of the Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación and prisoner of the Franco dictatorship, is now a movement historian.

Peter Gelderloos is a translator and author of The Solutions are Already Here, among other works, Worshiping Power.