Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary by Antonio Tellez [Book review]

Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary by Antonio Tellez. Cienfuegos Press, 83,A, Haverstock Hill, London NW3 £2.35

The past ten years have seen a particularly interesting development on the political-social scene: the various forms of urban guerrilla groups have introduced an entirely new element into the struggle against oppression, or rather have done so on an international scale for the first time. From Ulster to South America, from the Middle East to Los Angeles, from Japan to Germany, different types of urban guerrilla groups have organized and operated for a variety of purposes.

But I believe it to be appropriate that the first modern example of urban guerrilla warfare was directed at what is now the oldest continuing fascist regime in the world, Franco’s Spain, and that it was carried out by anarchists.

The recently published book Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary by Antonio Tellez is the only book so far written on the subject of the life and career of El Quico, Francisco Sabate Llopart, the most outstandingly successful of the many anarchists who carried on the armed struggle against the Franco regime after the formal conclusion of the Spanish Civil War.

When he was eventually killed by the Spanish police in January 1960 he had been active as an anarchist militant for just under thirty years, and carried on an almost continuous armed struggle against fascism for 25 years of this period, the only significant gap being the duration of the second world war when he worked with the French Resistance. Sabate’s activity was twofold. He carried out a number of highly daring armed robberies in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona, with the express purpose of raising funds to finance the resistance movement which was carrying on the struggle against Franco, and to give financial support to those of its activists who were imprisoned by the regime in its intermittent outbursts of bloody repression against opponents. He also undertook the distribution in the Spanish interior of anti-Franco propaganda, a project which is about as dangerous in Spain as an armed robbery is in this country.

For myself the most absorbing part of the book was the narrative of Sabate’s raids into Spain either for purposes of propaganda or expropriation. The insights given into his audacity and determination frequently amazed me. Two examples:- During an official visit by Franco to Northern Spain, Sabate took a taxi and told the driver he was a government official from the Ministry of Information and used a home-made mortar, from the taxi, to scatter anti-Franco leaflets all over the area. On his last trip onto Spain, surrounded with four comrades in a deserted farmhouse and wounded in the neck and the leg, he escaped under cover of darkness by crawling through the lines of over a hundred armed and highly trained men.

The book also contains interesting material on the relationship between Sabate and his fellow advocates of a continuing armed resistance to the fascist regime, and the more passive, accommodating and bureaucratised leadership of the official CNT in exile.

The two major failings of this book can both be excused. It does not give a very good time-perspective of Sabate’s career, partly because the author concentrates on the most dramatic parts of his, Sabate’s, activity and does not relate the events sequentially to what is happening in the world beyond the area of the Spanish-French border, and partly no doubt because Sabate was killed less than a decade and a half ago and the events of his life remain too close for such an assessment to be expected.

Also some of the individuals who worked and fought with Sabate have not been named, clearly because they are still alive and many of them live in Spain and to name them would be to expose them to needless danger.

The book is exquisitely produced and the translation, done by Stuart Christie while on remand in Brixton awaiting trial, is a good one, clear and simple. A highly recommended book, though it neither is nor claims to be the definitive work on its subject. We may have to wait for the re-establishment of libertarian communism in Spain and its spreading throughout the Iberian Peninsula before that is possible. In the meantime this book is indispensable.

Pete Miller

Libertarian Education 16 [1974] https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-12060