Salvador Puig Antich

Salvador Puig Antich
Undated photo of Salvador Puig Antich
Active region(s)	Spain
Ideology	Anarchism
Status	Executed, 2 March 1974

Salvador Puig Antich (Catalan pronunciation: [səɫβəˈðo ˈpudʒ ənˈtik]; 30 May 1948 – 2 March 1974) was an anarchist, born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain and active during the 1960s. A member of the Iberian Liberation Movement (Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación) (MIL), he was executed by the Francoist regime after being tried by a military tribunal and found guilty of the death of a Guardia Civil (Spanish gendarme). His execution was very unpopular; the Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies made a series of lithographs called "Assassins" and displayed them in the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in honour of Puig Antich's memory. The Groupes d'action révolutionnaire internationalistes (GARI) were formed after his death.

A child of a middle-class working family, Salvador was the third of six siblings. His father, Joaquim Puig, had been a militant in Acció Catalana, a Catalan political movement, during the times of the Second Spanish Republic. After being exiled in France in a refugee camp in Argelès-sur-Mer, he was condemned to death upon his return to Spain but then reprieved.

Salvador began studying in the religious school La Salle Bonanova until he was expelled for indiscipline, after that he studied as a boarder with the Salesians in Mataró. From the age of 16, Salvador combined office work with night studies at the Maragall Institute, where he made friends with Xavier Garriga and the Solé Sugranyes brothers (Oriol and Ignasi), who would be future comrades of him in the Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación (MIL), an anarchist group fighting against the Franco regime and capitalism.