In 1973, Basilio Martín Patino made a remarkable underground documentary, Dearest Executioners, about the three state officials responsible for the strangling of prisoners sentenced to death (with the infamous garrote, the Spanish answer to the guillotine). By paying the three men for their interviews (and their silence), Patino was able to penetrate the mentality and the practices of the dictatorship, three years before the death of Franco.