Thursday, October 25, 2012

Sabaté - Guerilla Extraordinaire

I just finished reading "Sabaté - Guerilla Extraordinaire", a poorly written, but most fascinating account on Francisco Sabaté.

Franceso Sabaté Llopart (1915 - 1960), also known as "El Quico", was a Catalan anarchist involved in the resistance against the Nationalist regime of Francisco Franco.
 At the age of 10 Sabaté left his clerical school and by the age of 17, he had joined the anarchist action group Los Novatos ("The rookies.
This group was involved in insurrections against the government of the Second Spanish Republic in late 1933 and fought against the army's coup attempt at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936.
During the Civil War, Sabaté fought on the Aragon front with the CNT-FAI's "Young Eagles Column". When this division was forcibly assigned a Stalinist commissar who crushed the free initiative of the column, Sabaté and two of his comrades shot him dead and deserted to Barcelona where they carried out many missions on behalf of the FAI against the Stalinist authorities.

In France during World War II, he spent time in concentration camps and fought with the Maquis resistance against the Vichy regime.
After the end of the War, Sabaté returned to Spain to carry on insurgent activities against Francoist Spain.
He was often described as having been the regime's "Public Enemy Number One". In 1960, at the age of 45, he was killed in Sant Celoni by the Somaten (a Catalan paramilitary organisation, then mainly formed of Francoist fascists) and the Civil Guard, along with four companions.

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