The penitentiary agricultural colony where Franco redeemed homosexuals
EDITORIAL GAYLES.TV.- This is not the right place for thoughtful historical studies, but from time to time it is worth retrieving bits of our most recent history before they are forgotten. Because the problem with the story is that, in addition to the winners always, the passage of time tends to deform the facts, sometimes even the denial and when those who were eyewitnesses die, there is a risk that atrocious infamies will fall in the most absolute forgetfulness.
Just a month ago a deputy of Republican Esquerra, Mr. Gabriel Rufián In a speech at the congress of the deputies, he recriminated that entire neighborhoods continued to be named after the General Yagüe, sadly known by the bad name of the "Butcher of Badajoz". His was responsible for the rapes, amputations and death of 4.000 civilians locked up in the Badajoz bullring. He himself acknowledged the facts claiming that his column could not continue advancing with that burden of civilians and that if he left them alive they would proclaim the Republic again. Well now it turns out that Yagüe's daughter denies the historical facts, referring to them as "the myth of Badajoz", a lie. Let Mrs. Yagüe go to Badajoz and ask, to see what they tell her.
That's why it's important to know the story and learn from it, so you do not have to live it again. And today we want to talk about a damn place in the collective memory of homosexuals for decades: the Agricultural Penitentiary Colony of Tefía on the island of Fuerteventura, a sad symbol of the bitterness with which the Franco regime persecuted and condemned homosexuality for decades. The center was supposedly conceived as a place of “rehabilitation through healthy work discipline” for those convicted of the "Law of Vagrants and Maleantes", ruffians, pimps, vagrants and social misfits of all kinds, but above all homosexuals.
Tephia was built on the wasteland of an old airport, a stony desert without water or a trace of the minimum conditions for life where dozens of men were subjected to beatings, insults, constant humiliation and forced labor for years. Loading water from the well, digging trenches, chopping stones in quarries, raising walls and all under the inclement sun of the island. To the inhuman treatment was added the absolute lack of the minimum essential food, men who arrived with health came out having lost 40 kilos or more. According to the testimony of Octavio García, an old prisoner: "the worst was food, rooted sweet potatoes, rice with weevil, small bread for the whole day. I saw men there coming in with 87 kilos and staying in 45. " Octavio himself refers, "I have seen there the most appalling beatings on the poor prisoners ... and the only reason to be arrested was to be a queer".
The Agricultural Colony of Tefía closed the 21 of July of 1966 silencing behind its walls histories of cruelty, sexual abuses and exploitation of men whose main crime was the affectation in their way of expressing themselves. The terrible testimony of Octavio, serves as an example of the treatment that the prisoners in Tefía received and is included in the novel of Sosa Machín "Trip to the Center of Infamy". Although the past should not slow us down, we must not forget that our current freedoms are founded on the suffering and sacrifice of the generations that have preceded us.
Source: eldiario.es
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