The double murder of Guillem Agulló

Guillem Agulló was an 18-year-old Valencian nationalist, anti-fascist, and independentist who was murdered by a gang of Nazis in April 1993 in Montanejos (Alt Millars). His only crime was being known for his ideas by his murderer, Pedro Cuevas. Cuevas stabbed him in the heart. Death was almost instantaneous. The murderer and his gang left the scene singing the Cara al sol. This detail is important because, in the subsequent trial, a witness was forced to sing the well-known fascist anthem, theoretically to prove that it identified him correctly. It is just one of the many surreal elements present in the whole affair.And it is that the crime against Agulló opened the doors to an unspeakable process that masked the facts, excused the assassins and criminalized the Valencian nationalist and anti-fascist movement. All this is what the professor, writer and musician Rafa Xambó has been patiently investigating the professor, writer and musician Rafa Xambó for four long years. The result of this research is The murder of Guillem: lies, fascists and robes, a huge volume of more than 400 pages, with dense lettering, which explains how the Montanejos crime was treated in the precarious and colonized Valencian media ecosystem and what the judicial outcome of all this was.This volume is the culmination of a series of initiatives of different types that have kept the case hot over the last decades. I am talking about the novel Guillem, by Núria Cadenes (Amsterdam Llibres, 2020) or the film La mort de Guillem, by Carlos Marqués-Marcet (2020). This latter title was broadcast by the televisions of Catalonia, Valencian Country, and the Balearic Islands, and achieved figures of more than 600,000 viewers in total.Xambó, however, does not fictionalize. His has been a work of newspaper archives and of looking closely at the judicial summary. His conclusions are unassailable: after the crime, the main local newspaper, Las Provincias, launched a brutal campaign to excuse the assassins, attributing it all to a “youth brawl” (sic). The other media outlets (including Canal 9) also played an incomplete and unprofessional role, but the newspaper from the capital city took the prize.The end of a convulsive transition in the Valencian Country

For those who do not know the history of Las Provincias, it will be necessary to explain that the newspaper founded in 1866 by Teodor Llorente (patriarch of the Valencian Renaixença) was the main agent, since 1979, for the promotion of anti-Catalanism in Valencia and the criminalization of nationalism. Agulló's episode, in reality, was the cherry on a rotten cake that had been poisoning Valencian society for twenty years. At its head, the sadly famous María Consuelo Reyna.In reality, the stab in the heart against Guillem Agulló represents, in a way, the end of the convulsive Transition in the Valencian Country. A period of unpunished crimes (the bombings of Joan Fuster and other intellectuals, aggressions against democratic authorities...) which Xambó takes care to recall so that we are not at all surprised by the ridiculous conviction of Pedro Cuevas with which the trial that took place in Castelló de la Plana was settled.As a sardonic epilogue to this story, it will be necessary to note what Pedro Cuevas did – the kid who claims he killed Agulló for esoteric, juvenile, and testosteronic reasons – after serving the four years in prison to which he was sentenced. He immediately joined the FAS (Antisystem Front) and was implicated in Operation Panzer. In this raid, the Civil Guard dismantled a neo-Nazi cell with weapons and propaganda that was dedicated to the hunt for anti-fascists and immigrants.This is how history is written, undoubtedly...