User Reviews

This lengthy documentary film is really worth watching. If you fully support the death penalty you'll probably enjoy the three executioners' casual discussion about their trade and some of the people they garroted. If you abhor the death penalty you'll probably feel sick at listening to them and learning the most gruesome facts about their trade and the sadism involved in an execution by that medieval and barbaric way of taking a person's life.

I personally have mixed feelings. I would support the death penalty in cases of terrorism as we have nowadays courtesy of Islamic radicalism. But kill them by a firing squad or with a single gunshot to the head. It is certainly quicker and certainly more merciful than their own method of beheading people like chickens, the bastards.

One of the facts I learnt while watching this film is that the garrote was not a Spanish invention as I previously believed but it was already being used -in a basic manner, that is a rope with a wooden stick acting as the turning instrument- as far back as ancient times by different cultures all over the world. But it was in Spain, 200 years ago, when the King issued an official decree by which he declared the garrote as the one and only means of execution on civil death penalty cases in his entire realm. While other countries chose different ways of killing (the guillotine in France, hanging in England and so), the garrote became from then on the exclusive Spanish form of execution, and remained so until 1978, believe or not. It makes my hair stand up. I was just five years old when this medieval, backwards and sadistic way of killing a human being was at last tossed into the trash bin. Up to that date, if any murderer in my country had been sentenced to death by a court they would have been viciously garroted. That the last case happened in 1974, while Franco was still alive -naturally. His successor as head of state, the former King Juan Carlos I, never signed a death sentence, he was against it. Still, it took a long time and a slow evolution into a democratic state and the creation of a constitution before the Spanish government finally abolished the death penalty in civil cases. When I did my national service in 1993 there still was the death penalty for military subjects in case of desertion in wartime. But it was execution by a firing squad. Nowadays that has been abolished too.

But we must come back to this film...

It is very interesting as it functions as a socio-cultural document on the history of Spain from the end of the Civil War in 1939 throughout the entire Franco dictatorship. Franco restored the death penalty that had been abolished by the Republic between 1931 and 1936, and he himself as the head of state signed all and each one of the death sentences that were carried out between April 1939 up to his death in November 1975. On a very few occasions (you can count them with the fingers of one hand, really) he commuted the sentence and let the criminal live to do life imprisonment instead, as it was the case of the petty robber El Lute in 1965. He was accused of shooting a little girl in a Madrid street, but it was proved, much later, that El Lute was unarmed at that time and it was an agent of Franco's secret police instead who actually fired the shot while chasing El Lute in a crowded street. After Franco's death and the restoration of democracy in Spain El Lute was pardoned and released, and he is now a free man. His popularity reached such pinnacles to the extreme that in the late 70's the British pop group Boney M composed a ballad singing his misfortunes and legendary status.

So this film takes us up on a journey of thirty years in Spain's criminal history, recalling some of the most infamous cases of that period: the semi-retard mechanic who killed his boss' wife to rob her so that he could afford to marry his sweetheart, the two old sisters butchered in Seville and as a result of which three petty pickpockets ended up in the garrote screaming their innocence to the end -and we now know they indeed didn't commit the crime-, the "compassionate" arsenic poisoner of Valencia, and the most notorious of all, Jarabo, the psychotic American gangster type-like who in pure film noir style went on a revenge killing in Madrid one weekend in 1958, and remains to this day the most calculating, cold-blooded, ruthless, remorseless, charming, intelligent and fascinating killer in Spanish crime history. He was garroted in 1959 and took him twenty long minutes of indescribable agony to die because of his hard-muscled neck and the fact that the executioner was drunk, as they usually were while carrying such a gruesome task.

It also tells the story of the youngest person garroted in that period: a seventeen-year-old beggar who killed his female partner in a moment of fury during a heated argument over a few pesetas they had collected. He panicked the moment he saw the garrote that was to put him to death, he tried to escape but was grabbed and strapped to the chair while crying and begging for his life, and then a quick twist of the lever by the executioner crushed his neck and silenced him forever. It left me cold. Dearest executioner: How could you kill a child? A very crude film, but so real. Definitely a must-see.