Day of memory, recognition and reparation in the depths of Fuerteventura. This Friday, the Government of Spain declared the former Tefía Agricultural Penitentiary Colony, in the arid center of the Canary island of Fuerteventura. This space, dedicated to LGTBIQ+ people, housed between 1954 and 1966 a forced labor camp for homosexual people during the dictatorship, through which around 100 inmates passed, living in inhumane conditions.
The event has also served to pay tribute to the victims of the retaliation on the islands and in Spain, and to recognize the struggle of the LGTBI+ collective. “Being born in freedom is no guarantee of dying in freedom,” the Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, warned in his speech.
This fight has been personalized in ten winners, who during the event received statements of Recognition and Reparation to victims and prominent people of the LGTBI+ movement. “They are no longer undocumented people,” Torres assured them.
“Thank you for resisting”
The president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, also addressed the honorees, thanking them for their “perseverance,” and dedicated a few words to the younger generations. “Freedom is not a gift but a daily achievement.” And he has sentenced. “For too many years this isolated arid territory was the scene of punishment for people whose only crime was to love, live and think in a way that the regime did not admit.”
(died 2018), held in Tefía from 1956 to 1957; Juan Curbelo Oramas (died 2004), the first person to speak publicly in 2001 about his imprisonment in Tefía in 2001; Empar Pineda, a reference for feminism and lesbian activism in Spain; hymn author Liberatewhich marked a milestone in the visibility of the gay movement in 1979; the former Carmelite priest Antonio Roig, finalist for the Planeta Prize in 1977 for All parks are not a paradiseexpelled from the order for defending the rights of the group; Marcela Rodríguez, who led the first pride demonstration that was organized in the Canary Islands in June 1978; Montserrat González, president of the Gran Canaria LGTBIQ+ Gamá collective; the ; the Majorero collective (from Fuerteventura) Altihay, which has been defending the dignity, equality, rights, social participation and visibility of LGTBIQ+ people for more than 24 years; as well as the deputy and lawyer Pedro Zerolo (died in 2015), who was key in the defense and approval of equal marriage and one of the main promoters of the reform of the Civil Code approved in 2005.
The Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínez, and the president of the Island Council, Lola García, also participated in the event.
The Tefía Agricultural Penitentiary Colony was one of the facilities provided for in the Vagrants and Criminals Law of 1933, intended for the rehabilitation of people who had “criminal tendencies.” In 1954, the Franco regime added to the catalog of categories established in the law, such as those of habitual vagrants, ruffians, pimps, professional beggars or drunkards and habitual drug addicts – among others – homosexuals who, from that year on, could be declared in a “dangerous condition” and subjected to the security measures established in that law.
This rule was applied as an instrument of repression and social and political control, the latter use that the Franco regime gave to the law without complexes until its repeal and its replacement by the Social Dangerous Law of 1970. The facilities where the agricultural colony was located had been an airport that was abandoned at that time. The Tefía Agricultural Colony opened in 1954 and remained open until 1966.
