Amid the clatter of studs and the shouts of encouragement, the players of Racing Santander filed out of the home dressing room and into the tunnel to face their opponents. All of them, that was, except two. The broad-shouldered centre-forward Aitor Aguirre and the winger Sergio Manzanera lingered furtively.
“We said that if we could do something to damage this military regime, we should,” recalls Aguirre on the terrace of the restaurant he ran for many years after his retirement. “But it had to be subtle, or they wouldn’t let us out on the field. So, we slipped into the toilets with a pair of bootlaces. I tied one onto Sergio, and he tied one onto me, so they looked like armbands.”
They swiftly rejoined their teammates, leaving an empty changing room behind. A very different scene would greet them on their return at half-time – the narrow corridors packed with armed police after their protest had been noted and repercussions began. Judicial proceedings, death threats and public condemnation soon followed. Yet the experience would only serve to forge an emerging friendship into a lifelong bond.
By 1975, Francisco Franco’s failing health and the regime’s deepening vulnerability had encouraged a swell of civil unrest. With Spain increasingly isolated internationally, authorities became ever more reactive in their attempts to suppress dissent. That August, Franco signed a decree that hastily enshrined new anti-terror powers, compelling military courts to impose death penalties for attacks on state officials. Applied retrospectively, the laws led to four tribunals in which 11 members of ETA and the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP) were convicted of murder and condemned to death.
The sentences sparked an international outcry with demonstrations besieging Spanish embassies, Pope Paul VI calling for clemency, and Nicolás Franco urging his younger brother to show mercy. But a Franco-led cabinet meeting confirmed five of the sentences. The regime’s only concession to foreign pressure was to abandon its preferred method of execution – the garrotte.
On the morning of Saturday 27 September 1975 five men were executed – the final time the death penalty was used in Spain. Àngel Otaegui, in Burgos at 8.30am, followed by fellow ETA member Juan Paredes Manot in Barcelona at 8.35am. In Madrid, Ramón Garcia Sanz faced the firing squad at 9.20am, followed by José Luis Sánchez Bravo at 9.40am. Finally, José Humberto Baena was shot dead at 10.15am.
That night, the Racing players gathered at the Hotel Rhin on Santander’s seafront ahead of their match against Elche the following day. Sharing a room were Aguirre, a Basque raised amid the repression of his region’s language and identity, and Manzanera, from a Republican family in Valencia whose father had been vindictively stripped of his job as a postmaster due to his beliefs. They took their news from the Radio España Independiente, a station founded by the exiled Spanish Communist Party to broadcast unfiltered to Spaniards at home and abroad.
“When we heard the details of the executions, my heart was pounding,” remembers Manzanera. “We had to do something. I don’t know which of us suggested wearing black armbands, but that’s what we agreed.”
The following afternoon, the plan was quietly put into action. After crouching together, armbands visible, alongside their teammates for a pre-match photo, it was business as usual in the first half, with Manzanera crossing for Aguirre to head Racing ahead. It seemed the gesture had gone unnoticed. But on their return to the dressing rooms, the tunnel was stuffed with the grey uniforms of the feared Policía Armada.
“There they were,” says Aguirre, “there must have been about 20 officers there, maybe more.” The pair were given an ultimatum: take off the armbands or be arrested immediately. “Sergio and I agreed we had already achieved what we wanted. This would be in all the newspapers the next day.”
After a delay to the second half as rumours swirled around the ground, the pair were allowed to take the field. Elche found an equaliser, but Aguirre settled the game with a late winner.
Ordered to report to the police station the following morning, the two were interrogated in different rooms and had distinct experiences. Aguirre was met with immediate hostility on account of his Basque identity, while officers found Manzanera’s motives harder to fathom and questioned him with a puzzled politeness. In the afternoon, they were taken to court, where prosecutors motioned for a custodial sentence of five years and a day. Manzanera recalls the nervous wait: “We were sitting outside. Then the club’s lawyer came out and told us that since there was no public disturbance – no objects thrown onto the field, no assaults or anything – the judge had decided to impose a very large fine. But we could go home.”
Though home offered little sanctuary in a city that traditionally leaned to the right. There were confrontations in the street, their mail was tampered with and danger escalated alarmingly when a convention of the far-right paramilitary group, the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey (Warriors of Christ the King), sentenced them to death.
“We had to live cautiously, checking under our cars to see if they’d planted a bomb or something,” says Aguirre. “I had two small children. My wife had to leave and take them to her mother’s in Sestao”. Manzanera remembers the sleepless nights: “I lived alone in a top-floor apartment. Every night I would listen to the elevator coming up in the early hours of the morning. I kept a shotgun next to the bed.”
Some relief came when the trembling voice of prime minister Carlos Arias Navarro announced Franco’s death on 20 November. After almost four decades of dictatorial stranglehold, Spain began its precarious transition to democracy.
Fifty years on, despite the hundreds of miles that separate them, a connection between Aguirre and Manzanera endures, born from that humble act in a changing room one Sunday afternoon in a very different Spain. “It gives me great satisfaction to know that I’ve contributed my tiny grain of sand to democracy, to trying to change something,” Manzanera reflects.
“I’m almost certain I’d do it again,” says Aguirre. “It was an important milestone. A significant moment in my life, and I’ll carry that with me until they take me to the cemetery.”
Once Upon a Time in La Liga is published by Pitch Publishing and available here.
