New Book: La Guía del maquis llibertari a Catalunya 1939-1963 [Guide to the Libertarian Maquis in Catalonia 1939-1963]

Hail and farewell. Such is life. All that time spent hard at work and waiting for this book to come out and just a couple of weeks before it was sent to the printers, one of its three authors died unexpectedly. Delight and grief. Encounters and absences.

Back again, gang. Back again, although this time I could not stick to schedule and missed out on my entry for the month of May 2026. Due, not to laziness, but because I have been sculling about hither and thither during one of those mad months that I run across from time to time and I only made it back home last night. 

And every time I have a mad month, there are lots of novelties too. Just to give you a rough run-down of them, suffice to say that I dropped into Barna to see the gang and say goodbye to Paquita, Manuel Huet’s grand-daughter who made me so welcome into her home and briefed me on her family’s history: she passed away recently. My condolences to Kiku, Montse, Adela and the rest of the family. I also dropped by to ask after progress on the ‘child’ we had been waiting for over such a long time, the brainchild that will be the main item in today’s entry. After that, it was off to the Berguedà to find out about this year’s commemorations and the documentary about Joan Busquets, and to see the folks up there too of course. Next stop was Grenoble, where they had arranged for me to give a talk at the Peanut Butter Books bookstore, a short talk about the illegalists in France and the sort of things I get such a buzz out of. I was able to greet and spend a little time with some comrades I had not seen for quite a while and who live in that area.

I also availed of the opportunity to drop in on Dalia, the daughter of Juan Peñalver, militiaman and centurion with the Durruti Column before he went on to join the resistance in France; he was a good friend of Quico Sabaté. Dalia’s brother, Helios, was involved with the grupos autónomos in the 1970s and was seriously injured when an explosive device he was handling went off. A visit there and a little break from routine is always a pleasure, and you never can tell what papers or photographs you might get to see during the visit.

Next stop, Switzerland. I travelled from Grenoble to Lausanne along with the Giménologues on a visit we had arranged a long time ago to the CIRA in Lausanne. Since the death of Rolf (who handled the Los de la sierra website) in October last year, we have been busy with his archives, and his webpages, etc. The archives have been split between the CIRA in Marseilles and the CIRA in Lausanne and the webpages have been taken over by a number of people with established records as libertarian activists.

I was not familiar with the Lausanne CIRA, even though I had given a talk at the Espace Autogéré in the city a few years back; it had been set up for me by Kasu and it had left me quite stunned. By the scale of the stuff its holds, for one thing: impressive. And then by the warm welcome and facilities on offer to folk arriving there looking for information. They had a camper van beside the premises, where anybody visiting for the purposes of research can stop over, and, whether due to M. and V.’s friendship with Mariane (one of those running the library) or whether that is just the way they are, we were able to sit down to eat together beside the people working on the rehabilitation of the premises and the people who run the library. And don’t worry about language barriers. French, Italian, German, English and Spanish were spoken there … in short, reasons to feel jealous.

And the days passed and we drew up a half-day schedule, 12 short hours, as there were loads of materials, some from Rolf as well as whatever the library already held. I came away with loads and loads of good information, that I shall publish as soon as I have it sorted out and go through all the photographs I took and notes I made.

After Switzerland, and with my eyes still blurry from all the papers, I moved on to Germany, purely for fun and due to its being so close. First, there was Karlsruhe and then Hamburg. To look up people I know and check out the squats and other delights they look after. Actually, I was joined on my travels by my friend Alba, and as I am a bit useless when it comes to organizing things, we were very nearly a day late picking her up. Enough said. And all the while the sunshine accompanied us all the way from home, much appreciated by the folk I was visiting, especially the further north we went.

Finally, it was back to Barcelona, as, during my tour of Europe Ru had phoned me to say that what we had so long been looking forward to was now in our possession and that my return would coincide with a party that my pal Buruburu had organized in his home, followed by the events and celebrations that Ploma Negra was organizing in La Prospe.

My undying thanks to all the folks who offered me so much affection and lodgings and ferried me between one place and another or organized my talks and saw to it that my trip went as smoothly as possible. You know who you are and you know that the ferrying, my home and my cooperation are yours for the asking whenever you need them.

And now, on to the main protagonist of today’s entry. Actually not a single main feature but upwards of 500 protagonists. 

500? How come? Slow down and let me explain.

For one thing, one protagonist is Víctor [García Matarrodona], who was taken from us, just as were about to savour the fruits of our more than 6 years of effort. The EquipMemòria is a three-legged stool – Víctor, Ru and myself. I have already told you that, unexpectedly, Víctor passed away in late April, just as our book was going to the printers. Curses, grief and then emptiness. I am still not quite sure how we are going to handle his absence when we come to do the book launches. Nor what it is going to be like when, at some launch, we meet up with Guiomar, Nil and Arán, his family. What Ru and I do know is that the book is dedicated to Víctor and he is part of it, given the time, care, intensity and dedication he invested in it throughout.

That is one point. For another thing, there are 503 protagonists cited in the book. Alas, only 38 of them are female. Once again, it has proved much harder tracing them than tracing the men. Which is classic, but no excuse of course. We shall carry on searching for them, no matter how well hidden they may be.

For openers, it has to be said that what has just come out is the Catalan version of the Guide and, if all goes well, a Spanish-language version will be next. The publishing house that gave us the green light is the FAL, the Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo and we have broken new ground there, as this is the very first book from that imprint not written in Spanish. It is always fun breaking through walls and we hope it will be the first of many and that the FAL will now set about publishing stuff in Gallego, or Basque, or Asturian Fabla, or what have you.

The guide contains nearly 600 pages dedicated to the Catalan anarchist maquis. The period we have examined covers the years from ’39 to ’63. From the Francoist occupation of Barcelona to the death of the last of the Catalan maquis to die in action, Ramón Vila Capdevila.

The book is broken up into 4 sections, a chronology, a biographical section, a section dealing with court records and finally, a statistical section. I can tell you right now that only the first section allows for normal reading, listing all the actions we have been able to discover relating to the anarchist maquis during the years concerned. The other three sections contain listings regarding a specific person or court proceedings. In the end, we came up with 503 biographies, mostly of people active in the guerrilla war, as well as some who were auxiliaries to it. Also included are biographical entries for those who operated as contacts as well as the guides. The court guide is intended to help with future information searches, by providing the numbering of the records in which this or that person was mentioned, who was indicted, alongside whom and the sentences handed down to them. Finally, given the enormous amount of information amassed whilst the work was in progress, there is a section that focusses on statistics, because, once that information has been collated and put into order, the examination, comparison and working out of those statistics were made a lot more straightforward. Moreover, the book has a photographic section, in addition to the personal photographs we were able to accumulate regarding the protagonists of the book. And, the icing on the cake,  an introduction written by what might well be our last surviving guerrilla, Joan Busquets. A year in the guerrilla war. Arrested. Sentenced to death, later commuted to a 20-year prison sentence, served in a range of Francoist prisons. A relentless guerrilla-fighter and campaigner for remembrance.

What more can I say? The idea came originally from Víctor; he was the pioneer and he must have spun a good yarn to suck in Ru and me and get us involved in his hare-brained adventure. It all began in Berga around 2020, on one of the ‘Homage to the Maquis’ walks, at which he showed up with TrinxeraMemoria pamphlets and a huge bibliography on the guerrillas. That is where I met him. And where he roped me in. After that – and I know not how – he roped Ru in too; I will leave it to Ru to tell that story himself. After that came thousands of emails, phone calls and whatsapp messages too, but I was spared the latter as I am a bit of a techno-peasant. We had a few face-to-face meetings, as I normally live in La Rioja. As I mentioned in another article, we do not even have a photograph of the three of us together. As luck would have it, Víctor showed me the photo at the top of this entry, lifted from a book about the international anarchist get-togethers in Barcelona in 1993. As luck would have it, the photo also shows Marianne from the CIRA in Lausanne. It is now 33 years since that snapshot was taken but Víctor is perfectly recognizable. It is the only photo I have of him and this at a time when everything gets photographed. Such is life, right?

What else? These last few years have been a hive of activity. Trying to follow the trail of clandestine histories is no easy undertaking. We never expected to turn up so many people who were involved; not only that, but fresh stories keep on popping up, once we said that we had no room for any more. We had to forget about full stops and let a semi-colon lead us into the collation of more information. In fact, I will acknowledge that my bombarding of Ru and Víctor alike with the masses of information I was unearthing created issues for our already being swamped by a backlog of work. We had our ups and downs, as one always does in any project requiring a lot of attention and extending over time.  We used every database we could, initially to discover unknown individuals, finding out what deeds they had had a hand in and then comparing and contrasting heaps of information that was quite often incorrect, sometimes slanted and sometimes phoney. In short, a real pain. And more time might have been needed. We will have reproduced some of those mistakes, but I can let you in on this: we have put a lot of time into trying to avoid that.

Another plan that Víctor had had in mind was to launch a web page or blog, on which we might post all this information; it would be open for the inclusion of additional information posted either by ourselves or anyone else willing to help out. Unfortunately, that plan has been shelved for now. Right now, Ru and I have plenty on our plates as the book will now need translating into Spanish and redesigning and, unless the people at FAL handle this, all the work will fall on our shoulders. So, what with presentations and other work, it does not look like we are going to be bored. 

That much is certain. Our first book launches will be in Tolva (Huesca) as part of the XXI ofensiva contra el oblit (21st Drive against Forgetfulness) on the morning of Sunday, 28 June, and then, on 10 July at the [Ateneu] Enciclopèdic in Barcelona, as part of the celebrations to mark the 90th anniversary of the social revolution. We’ll see you there.

That is about it for today. If all goes well, I will post another entry at the end of the month, having missed one while away on my travels.  It is looking as if it will be another entry on anarchists in the resistance in France, as I have come up with a further 100 names. Or, as my friends from Barrio Canino keep hinting at me, a piece about Cerrada’s treasurer, José Villanueva. We shall see.

This article is dedicated to Víctor García Matarrodona. 

El Salto, 1 June 2026 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/guia-del-maquis-llibertari-catalunya-39-63-una-llegada-una-despedida 

Image: Víctor, one of the three pillars of EquipMemoria who died at the end of April 2026, just before the book went to press. The photo shows him during the international conference in Barcelona in 1993 (he’s third from the right). Source: Imanol

The publisher’s cover notes for the Guide read:

Equip Memòria

This book has been drafted by a team made up of libertarian individuals. Over and above acronyms and tendencies, we have worked hard to press on with the remembrance of the anti-Francoist libertarian maquis in Catalonia. It is our firm belief that History is ours and that it is our stories that we should insist on telling.  So that neither the stories nor the people be forgotten. Thus – faced with the silence from the major media, the indifference of all the institutions, the concealment of those responsible for the repression and the forgetting of time – we have dared to carry out this endeavour at historical collation. Not with any thought of bringing a cycle to an end, but simply to lay some solid groundwork on the basis of which others may feel free to speak freely about what so many people have kept silent.

Comrades, History belongs to us.

Comrades, this book is yours. 

Guide to the Libertarian Maquis in Catalonia, 1939-1963

The entry into Barcelona on 26 January 1939 of Francoist troops under the command of General Juan Yagüe signalled a military take-over of Catalonia and was to hasten the defeat of the Republic which had been on its last legs since the defeat on the Ebro and the collapse of the El Segre front. The war was lost and the revolution was still unfinished. But the libertarian organizations were not ready to give up. So, beginning on that very same day, the CNT, the FAI and the FIJL embarked upon a two-pronged process of resistance: one mounted from exile in France plus another mounted from underground in the interior. In spite of everything, that resistance was never to be single-minded nor unified. From when the youngsters of the UJA organized in Santa Coloma de Gramanet in February 1939 through to Ramón Vila Capdevila’s death in Castellnou de Bages in August 1963, the libertarian guerrilla campaign in Catalonia was to adopt many forms and would have hundreds of protagonists, men and women, from all parts determined to somehow keep up the fight against Francoism and dictatorship. And so, in the midst of a brutal repression that was to require them to risk their lives on a daily basis, they trekked through Catalonia’s mountains on the run from the Civil Guard or survived on the streets of Barcelona, dodging the Francoist police. This book represents a small effort on our part to pay tribute to all of the – thus far – nameless individuals who managed to keep genuine opposition to Spanish fascist rule going by force of arms and withstand the arrests, torture, councils of war, imprisonment, executions in the Campo de la Bota and extra-judicial murders in the form of a bullet in the head fired by Francoist forces of order.

THE TIME-LINE
A 140-page chronology, covering 24 years, day by day, of the libertarians’ anti-Francoist guerrilla war in Catalonia.

THE BIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE
360 pages setting out upwards of five hundred biographies of the men and women who were the protagonists in that struggle.

COURT LISTINGS
20 pages introducing the prosecutorial consequences:
155 councils of war
3,000 years handed down as sentences
110 death penalties
91 executions

STATISTICAL GUIDE
30 pages of statistical analysis of the main identifying features of the libertarian guerrilla campaign 

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.