Caracremada: on the trails of guerilla warfare against Franco’s regime

To retrace the footsteps of an anarchist who often acted alone, crossing the Pyrenees to give safe passage to guerrilla groups and sabotage the infrastructure of Franco’s dictatorship, is no easy task. What is more, the traces of many anarchist and anarcho-syndacalist comrades, who lost their lives in the fight against Franco’s army, were only partially and purposefully documented by “their own comrades”. These exiles remained more or less comfortably protected under the wings of French republican legality. Although incomplete and drawn from somewhat contradictory sources, we will try here to reconstruct the path of Ramón Vila Capdevila, known as Caracremada—a comrade who, for decades, fought following his own path, in good company or alone, sowing chaos in the enemy’s ranks, throwing grains of sand into their gears, tirelessly attacking their energy and
transport infrastructures.