ONE of Spain’s great opponents of General Francisco Franco, Simón Sánchez Montero spent many of the Caudillo’s 36 years of military dictatorship in prison.

He was born into a peasant family in the Manchegan village of Nuño Gómez and joined the traditional immigration route from countryside to city when he moved to Madrid at the age of 12. His family was involved in politics and from an early age he was active in republican trade unions. He trained as both baker and tailor.

At the outbreak of the civil war he fought with the bakers’ battalion in the defence of Madrid. By the time the Spanish capital had fallen to the nationalists, Sánchez had been a member of the Spanish Communist Party for three years. For the last year of the war he taught political theory in a party school in O’Donnell Street.

He was smuggled out of Madrid and travelled clandestinely to Seville, from where he continued to be involved in the underground resistance to Franco’s regime.

Returning to Madrid in 1944 he was eventually arrested and imprisoned. He served seven years and shortly after his release, rather than renouncing his struggle, was elected to the Communist Party’s central committee. It was not long before he moved up to the executive committee.

He began making secret trips to France to communicate with exiled opponents, sometimes using the pseudonym Ángel Medina. In 1959 he was rearrested and condemned to a second seven-year prison term.

After his release in 1966 Sánchez spent more of his time under arrest than at liberty. His comrades fondly recall an occasion when, during one particularly brutal interrogation he turned to his tormentors and said in his quiet, measured voice: “How can I be a Communist? It’s very simple: I fight so that in the future nobody can do to you what you are now doing to me.”

He was elected to the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, in the country’s first post-Franco free elections in 1977. Representing Madrid, he was re-elected in 1979 but lost his seat in 1982 when the Communist Party vote collapsed. He remained an active party member until 1991 when he resigned, moving nearer to the ruling Socialists by joining the Initiatives Foundation.

He wrote three political works before publishing, in 1997, a memoir called Camino de Libertad (Road to Freedom). He is survived by his wife, Carmen.

Simón Sánchez Montero, communist activist and politician, was born on July 31, 1915. He died on March 30, 2006, aged 90.