THE LAST EXECUTION BY GARROTE IN HISTORY: The last words that echo through the millennia of the handsome young Salvador Puig Antich before his death for freedom (CONTENT WARNING: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF THE EXECUTION)

THE LAST CRY FOR FREEDOM! Salvador Puig Antich, the handsome Catalan anarchist who died in the garrote and entered legend

March 2, 1974. Barcelona Model Prison. 9:40 in the morning. The most beautiful and brave young man who ever set foot on a scaffold sat in the chair of death.

He was 25 years old, with messy black hair, green eyes that hypnotized half of Barcelona and a smile that not even Francoism could erase.

Salvador Puig Antich, the last man executed with a vile garrote in the entire history of Spain, looked into the face of the executioner and uttered his immortal words: “I die innocent… but long live freedom!”

And freedom, forty-eight years later, still echoes with his name!

The handsome boy who robbed banks for love of the people

Salvador was no ordinary criminal. He was a Greek god with ideals. Tall, athletic, always wearing tight jeans and T-shirts that showed off the muscles that drove the militants of the Iberian Liberation Movement (MIL) crazy.

They say that the girls from the libertarian athenaeums fought over going to distribute leaflets with him. And he, with that deep voice and that fiery look, only spoke about one thing: overthrowing Franco’s dictatorship.

With his companions he robbed banks (revolutionary expropriations, he called them!) to print pamphlets, pay for strikes and help working-class families. They printed thousands of banned books in a clandestine printing press. Salvador was the brain, the heart and, let’s face it, also the pretty face of the group.

Photos from those years show him laughing, cigarette in mouth, with a tragic beauty that would fill magazine covers today.

The day everything went wrong: bullets, blood and a dead 23-year-old police officer

September 25, 1973. Girona Street in Barcelona. Salvador and his companions fall into a routine control by the Political-Social Brigade. Suddenly, gunshots. The young police officer Francisco Anguas Barragán, 23 years old, married and with a small daughter, is fatally shot.

Salvador is wounded by four shots: one in the jaw that almost took off half his face.

The police torture him for days. They break his fingers, burn him with cigarettes, put his head in buckets of dirty water. But Salvador doesn’t betray anyone. Not a word. Only blood and silence.

The farce trial that horrified Europe

December 1973. Court martial. Two and a half hours. No clear evidence, no reliable witnesses, no doubts: death! Pope Paul VI personally calls Franco. German Chancellor Willy Brandt pleads for mercy. In Rome, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, hundreds of thousands shout his name.

Even Sartre himself signs letters. But Franco, with his voice like a whistle and his heart of stone, responds: “Let them kill him.”

The morning of the garrote: this is how the last condemned man died

9:20 a.m. They take him out of the cell. He is barefoot, wearing jeans and a white shirt. He rejects the priest: “I don’t need anyone to absolve me from fighting for freedom.” He sits on the wooden chair. They put the iron collar on his neck.

Behind, the executioner (an official who was forced with the threat of prison) begins to turn the crank.

First the neck cracks. Then the dry sound of vertebrae snapping. Witnesses say that Salvador gritted his teeth, looked straight ahead and did not scream. Just a slight moan as the fourth turn broke his spine. At 9:42 he was already dead.

His face, even after agony, was still incredibly beautiful. The coroner wrote in the minutes: “Manly beauty preserved.”

They say that the executioner cried in his house all night. Years later he confessed: “I will never forget those green eyes asking me to stop… but if I refused, they would shoot me.”

The legacy of the boy who never gave up

A year later, in 1975, Spain abolished the garrota forever. In 1978 the death penalty disappeared. And although Franco died warm in his bed, Salvador Puig Antich became an eternal symbol of the resistance.

Today, in Barcelona, ​​20-year-old boys and girls wear t-shirts with his face. There are giant murals in Gràcia and Raval. His sister Merçona is still fighting to have the sentence annulled.

And every March 2, hundreds of people leave red and black carnations at the door of the old Model.

Because Salvador was not only the last to be executed with a garrote. He was the most handsome. The bravest. And the one who, with his death, helped kill the dictatorship.

Salvador Puig Antich present!And as long as there is someone left who shouts “Long live freedom!”, their voice will continue to resonate from that cursed patio of La Modelo.