Joan Busquets i Vergés in the Yeserías Prison Hospital, Madrid (1965)

Joan Busquets i Vergés in the Yeserías Prison Hospital, Madrid (1965)

Stuart Christie: 'One good thing that came out of my time in Yeserías was a lifelong friendship with Juan Busquets Verges (pictured above in his hospital bed in Yeserías). Busquets had fought originally with the Pyrenean rural action group of Marcelino Massana Bancells, ‘Pancho’, but then joined forces with the urban guerrilla group of José ‘Pepe’ Sabaté, the eldest of the three legendary Sabaté brothers. Manuel Sabaté, the youngest of the brothers, had been arrested with the twenty-one year old Busquets in a police ambush in October 1949.
Busquets was one of the fortunate few to have their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. A few years before we met he had been involved in an escape attempt from the prison of San Miguel de los Reyes with another anarchist, the writer and historian Juan Gómez Casas and a gypsy who had had it on his toes as soon as he was over the wall — without waiting to help the others — leaving Busquets a hanging target on the wall.
Busquets dropped thirty feet to the ground, breaking his leg in the process. He crawled to a ditch where he remained in agony, slipping in and out of consciousness until the guards found him the next morning. They battered him mercilessly around the face and hands with their rifle butts until he was senseless, breaking his nose and the bones of his hands as well as his leg, then kept him in solitary confinement without medical treatment for two months.'

Stuart Christie

1965