Josep Lluís Facerías

Josep Lluis Facerías (born January 6, 1920 in Barcelona ; † August 30, 1957 ibid) was a Spanish anarchist , syndicalist and resistance fighter . He was one of the best-known representatives of the anti- Francoist guerrillas in the 1940s and 1950s.

Life

At the age of 16, Facerías joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL) in Barcelona . During the Spanish Civil War he fought in Aragón, first in the Ascaso column and later in the Army of the Republic . While the Republican army was already in retreat, he was captured in early 1939. During the same period he lost his partner and his daughter, who was just a few months old. Both died while trying to reach French exile when planes of the Condor Legion attacked a refugee line.

Facerías was imprisoned in various Francoist labor camps. There he was in contact with the clandestine structures of the CNT. After he was last used as a driver in a parole battalion, he was released in late 1945. After his release, he joined the CNT's Culture and Media Syndicate in Barcelona and took on a mandate as Secretary for Defense in the regional committee of the illegalized Catalan FIJL. At the same time he works as a waiter and cashier in a restaurant at the foot of the Tibidabo .

After Facerías was re-imprisoned in 1946, he came to believe that armed struggle was the quickest way to fund the CNT and the families of the detained activists. He founded the guerrilla Partida de maquis de Facerías . Their first action was a raid on the headquarters of the Hispano-Olivetti factory. Together with the group around Francesc Sabaté , she launched an offensive in 1949 on the occasion of Francisco Franco's visit to Barcelona. In the course of this, there were a number of attacks on representatives of Franquism and on consulates of countries that were in favor of rehabilitating Spain and joining the United Nations .

At the end of the 1940s, most of the libertarian guerrilla groups in Spain were smashed and the Western powers came to terms with the Franco regime in the context of the beginning of the Cold War . The Movimiento Libertario Español (MLE) then ended the armed struggle. Facerías did not follow this line. After numerous libertarian activists lost their lives in various of his operations, large parts of the libertarian movement distanced themselves from him.

Memorial plaque in the Plaza de las Madres de Mayo in the Nou Barris district .

Facerías lived in Italy from 1952 as the pressure of repression grew stronger and stronger in Spain. In the mid-1950s he considered giving up armed struggle and withdrawing to Brazil. Before he could realize these plans, however, he died in the hail of police bullets during another expedition to Barcelona. At the place of his death today a plaque with the following inscription in Catalan commemorates him:

Josep Lluís Facerias. Libertarian activist. Died in this location on August 30, 1957 at 10:45 am in an ambush of the dictatorship.

literature

• Miguel Ìñiguez: Esbozo de una Enciclopedia histórica del anarquismo español . FAL, Madrid 2001, p. 210. ISBN 84-86864-45-3 .
• Antonio Téllez Solá : Facerías Guerrilla urbana (1939-1957). La lucha antifranquista del Movimiento Libertario en España y en el exilio. Virus editorial, Barcelona 2004. ISBN 84-96044-44-0 .

Web links

• Facerías, memoria de un guerillero libertario . In: El Periódico de Catalunya , August 31, 2012 (Spanish).
• La muerte de un anarquista . In: El País , 23 August 2007 (Spanish).