Who was Antoni Bestard? The interrogator who was sentenced to death after the coup d'état
The City Council will hold an act of recognition and reparation on Wednesday in memory of this prominent anarchist militant
PalmaThe Inca City Council will hold this Wednesday, August 26, an institutional event to recognize and repair the memory of Antoni Bestard Seguí, one of the most prominent figures of Inca anarchism and a victim of Francoist repression. The event will take place at 7 p.m. at Carrer de Sant Antoni, 23.
Bestard, born in Inca in 1891, developed an intense union and political career linked to anarchism and the CNT. After working at the Can Xilles factory, he became a shoemaker and joined the La Justicia union, which he ended up presiding over on several occasions. He actively participated in the workers' struggles and in the anarchist press of Mallorca.
According to the biography collected in The Invisibles. Dictionary of libertarian militants, organizations and unions of the Balearic Islands and published on the specialized portal Fideus.com, throughout the Second Republic he remained active within anarchism in Inca. Notable are the large number of articles he published in the anarchist press and the numerous rallies he led.
In 1914, for example, he participated in several events in Palma alongside prominent CNT militants such as Baltasar Carcero, Cosme Salvà and Jaume Bauzà, as well as socialists Simó Fullana and Llorenç Bisbal. In August 1919 he participated in more rallies in Inca. Another curious episode in his career was the criticism he made in the summer of 1920 of the celebration of a bullfight in Inca.
His political and union activity placed him in the crosshairs of repression after the coup d'état of 1936. On December 14, 1938, he was subjected to a court-martial at the School of Arts and Crafts of the City of Mallorca. Accused of adherence to rebellion, the court sentenced him to death.
Despite there still being reasons to hope for a possible pardon – the Christmas holidays were approaching, the fall of Catalonia seemed imminent, and the end of the Civil War was beginning to be glimpsed – there was finally no clemency.
On August 26, 1939, at seven in the morning, Antoni Bestard was executed in the apse of the Palma cemetery. He was 47 years old and married.
Now, 87 years after his execution, the Inca City Council is recovering his figure with an act of memory and reparation. The Council wishes to vindicate Bestard's trajectory and at the same time pay homage to all the people repressed during the Civil War and the dictatorship.