Quico Sabaté, maquis to the end

The anarchist Francesc Sabaté Llopart, alias ‘el Quico’, maximum exponent of the Maquis guerrilla in Catalonia, was born in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. His fight against Franco earned him the label of régimen Public Enemy number one of the regime ’

1956 is the last year in which the maquis carried out major actions in Barcelona, ​​all starring the group of Francisco Sabaté Llopart, El Quico. The anarchist guerrilla, born in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, on March 30, 1915, had been since the end of World War II fighting against the Franco regime. On horseback between France - where he lived in Mas Casenove, in the term of Coustouges, less than a kilometer from the border line - and Barcelona, ​​the main scene of his actions. His presence in Barcelona was intermittent, because in 1949 and 1957 he was detained by the French gendarmerie after fleeing Barcelona due to police pressure. Accused of possession of arms, he had short sentences and long confinements in cities far from the Pyrenees. After serving sentences or escaping exile, he returned to action, increasingly alone, more isolated, without the support of the libertarian organizations in exile. Clinging to a desperate fight, to a personal fatalism mixed with the thirst for revenge for the death of two of his brothers at the hands of the police and the justice of the dictatorship.  His last stage of presence in Barcelona was the 1955-56 biennium. His first successful forays were far between 1945 and 1949, when the activity of the different groups of the Catalan maquis became a major problem for the Franco regime, also harassed from the international sphere. 1949 was a decisive year. On January 26, the Sabaté group docked the Banco Hispano Colonial de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat; On February 26, at the door of the Condal cinema, they killed the inspector Oswaldo Blanco, who surprised them during an appointment. A few days later, on March 2, along with his brother Josep and the group from Los Maños, they attacked the official car of the chief commissioner of the Social Brigade, Eduardo Quintela, on Marina street, between Mallorca and Provence, but the commissioner was not traveling. that day in the vehicle. It was occupied by the secretary of the head of the Youth Front, Manuel Piñol and the sports delegate of the same organization, José Tella, who was injured. The driver and Piñol died. On May 15, they placed bombs at the consulates of Peru (Muntaner 273) and Brazil (Rambla de Catalunya 88), while the Facerías group did so at the Bolivian consulate (Girona 148). The three countries had voted in favor of the recognition of Spain by the UN. In June Sabaté returned to France, where he was detained and imprisoned for a year. There, in prison, he learned of the annihilation of the libertarian resistance in Barcelona between the summer of that year and the early 1950s. Dozens of cadres of the libertarian movement were arrested and many members of the maquis were eliminated, both in confrontations with the police and shot. at the Camp de la Bota. Among them, his two brothers, Josep, the eldest, killed by the police on October 17, 1949, and Manuel, the youngest, shot on February 24, 1950 after a Council of War.

Memorial plaques on a street in Sant Celoni

Quico Sabaté returned to Barcelona in April 1955, after spending five years in France. Accompanied by four other comrades whom he had convinced to continue the fight, they dedicated themselves to editing and distributing the newspaper El combat –three issues until October–, and robbing banks (they called it expropriations), such as the one from May 6 to Banco de Vizcaya office on Calle Mallorca, where they obtained more than half a million pesetas.

On September 29 he carried out one of his most spectacular actions. On the occasion of General Franco's visit to Barcelona, ​​he looked for a taxi with an opening in the roof, managed to deceive the taxi driver with the excuse that it was Francoist propaganda and, thanks to a kind of artisan bazoka, manufactured by him, he flooded leaflets downtown. Taxis were the transport system that Sabaté used in many of his actions, including some robberies, leaving one of his comrades next to the taxi driver, with the vehicle running, in front of the door of the bank itself.
On March 21, 1956, Quico and another companion were recognized by Inspector José Félix Gómez, who followed them to Montjuïc, but Sabaté, with his characteristic recklessness, confronted and shot him. The death of the veteran policeman returned Quico's photo to the pages of the newspapers. The police mistakenly identified Sabaté's companion with José Luis Facerías, another of the historic leaders of the urban maquis in Barcelona in the 1940s and 1950s. That year Facerías was in Italy, when he returned clandestinely to Catalonia on August 17, 1957 accompanied of a Murcian anarchist and another Italian, with the purpose of killing a traitor, but he was shot down by the police in an ambush, after the denunciation of one of his fellow detainees, at the junction between Paseo Verdún and Pi i Molist street at Nou Barris. After the inspector's death, Sabaté had to sneak into his French refuge. He returned again in November with two new colleagues to perform the last of his shocking actions. On December 22, taking advantage of the extra Christmas payment, they carried out a robbery at the company Covers and Roofs on Lincoln Street. Sabaté, with his characteristic mettle and audacity, not caring about the considerable number of people who were in the offices, arrived at the cashier and took almost a million pesetas of loot. In the following days, the police tightened the fence, managed to arrest one of his colleagues, and Sabaté had to remain hidden in an apartment for more than a month. Finally, on February 19, 1957 he arrived at his Mas Casenove. There he would again be detained by the gendarmes. They sentenced him to eight months in prison and five months of confinement in Dijon.

The body of Quico Sabaté after being killed in Sant Celoni

He did not comply, on December 17, 1959 he entered Catalan territory for the last time. Irreducible, reckless, but also unconscious and unable to analyze the change in Spanish society. Accompanied by four young companions, the youngest was twice his age, whom he dragged into a company doomed to failure. Without reliable support networks or organic coverage, the collaboration of the French gendarmerie and the Civil Guard did the rest. Detected on January 3 at Mas Clarà, near Girona, only Sabater managed to escape the siege after killing Lieutenant Francisco Fuentes. His four companions were shot mercilessly. Slightly wounded in the thigh, buttock and neck, pursued by dozens of Civil Guards, he starred in a legendary escape in a last attempt to reach Barcelona. He crossed the Ter river, seized control of two trains, threatened the drivers, and tried unsuccessfully to find medical help in Sant Celoni. Located by two members of the somatén and a local police officer, Quico Sabaté was shot by the somatén Abel Rocha after a brief shooting. It was January 5, 1960. Public enemy number one died, the myth was born.